“Aurel hoped that women writers would disobey the laws that bound men’s books. It was time for women to take language for themselves, Aurel said, even one word at a time, to take their own names and become. To become even one word.” 

After Sappho is a collection of reimagined lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as they battle for liberation, justice and control over their own lives. It is interesting and informative but lacking soul. At some point, it started to read like a research paper. Disappointing.