Synopses & Reviews
In
Sappho and the Virgin Mary, Ruth Vanita engages these central icons of Western cultural mythology to rethink the concept of literary ancestry. Uncovering layers of love between women in works by male and female authors from the Romantic to the postcolonial, she demonstrates that lesbian connections have long animated the Western literary imagination.
Tracing threads of a nurturing, feminized ungendering from Shelley and Austen through Wilde and Woolf, discovering the dissolution of patriarchal families and the emergence of alternative families in Forster and Vikram Seth, Vanita offers a provocative new vision of the literary family tree. Sappho and the Virgin Mary also reveals how gender segregation in mainstream criticism has effectively excluded the notion of Sapphic ancestry in Western literature.
In her graceful synthesis of centuries of literature, criticism, and cultural mythology, Vanita emphasizes agency rather than victimization decisively shifting the critical focus away from dominant views of women's marginalization in English literature.
Review
"Vanita's historically sensitive and theoretically informed book traces the embedded course of same-sex desire and knowledge in the interwoven literary and religious legacies of Sapphic and Marian traditions. Sappho and the Virgin Mary makes an important and timely contribution to queer literary and cultural history." Lowell Gallagher, author of Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance