Yopie Prins

In LADIES' GREEK, Yopie Prins illuminates a culture of female classical literacy that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the formation of women’s colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did Victorian women of letters desire to learn ancient Greek, a “dead” language written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they wrote “some Greek upon the margin—lady’s Greek, without the accents.” Yet in the margins of classical scholarship they discovered other ways of knowing, and not knowing, Greek. Mediating between professional philology and the popularization of classics, these passionate amateurs became an important medium for classical transmission.

Combining archival research on the entry of women into Greek studies in Victorian England and America with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy, Prins demonstrates how women turned to this genre to perform a passion for ancient Greek, full of eros and pathos. She focuses on five tragedies—Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae—to analyze a wide range of translational practices by women and to explore the ongoing legacy of Ladies’ Greek. Key figures in this story include Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, Janet Case and Jane Harrison, Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer, and A. Mary F. Robinson and H.D. The book also features numerous illustrations, including photographs of early performances of Greek tragedy at women’s colleges.

The first comparative study of Anglo-American Hellenism, Ladies’ Greek opens up new perspectives in transatlantic Victorian studies and the study of classical reception, translation, and gender.

REVIEWS
"The story of 'ladies' Greek', writes Yopie Prins in this fascinating academic study, goes hand in hand with that of the progress made in women’s education during the second half of the 19th century."
—Francesca Wade, Daily Telegraph

"[A] splendid new study of late 19th- and early 20th-century female translators of ancient Greek tragedy. . . . Prins gives a fascinating account of the importance of Greek tragedy in translation and theatrical production in the colleges of higher education for women that emerged in this period."
—Emily Wilson, Guardian

"[An] excellent new book. . . . [Prins] brings a perspective combination of biographical insight and historical overview."
—John Kerrigan, London Review of Books

"In Yopie Prins' remarkably wide-ranging, even scandalously scholarly work, she has collected a series of vivid tableaux vivant featuring translations and performances of Greek tragedies by 19th- and early 20th-century women, both in Britain and America."
—Mary Townsend, Education & Culture Review

"Prins has a gift for wordplay and turns of phrase . . . that can open up new speculative possibilities as we ask why women were so attracted to learning Greek. . . . [An] important study."
—Elizabeth Helsinger, Modern Philology

"Ladies’ Greek is an exceptional piece of work. Deftly written, insightful and expansive, the book demonstrates Prins’ excellence as a scholar. Prins has produced more than outstanding scholarship, though: her series of encounters with archival materials and the lives and works of past women they represent is both compelling and moving. I will confess that the book took some time to get through, but that is chiefly because I found myself re-reading some of the passages again and again as one might do a great piece of literature. . . . A triumph."
—David Bullen, Classical Review

"A wonderful demonstration of archival research, literary history, and close reading, Ladies’ Greek takes the discipline of classical reception to a new level. Like the subjects she describes, Prins breathes new life into dead papers, her own dazzling writing dancing across the page."
—Jennifer Wallace, Modern Language Quarterly

"Ladies' Greek is remarkable for its sensitive and subtle discussion of the controversial process of translating and performing dramatic texts written in a dead language whose study was at first available only to men."—Helene P. Foley, Barnard College

"Combining revelatory archival work and close literary readings, Ladies' Greek tells a riveting story of desire and insecurity, scholarship and theater, friendship and poetry."—Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge

"Ladies' Greek is the resounding answer to Woolf’s ‘On Not Knowing Greek.’ What was unleashed when women as well as men, on both sides of the Atlantic, came to intimately know their beloved Greek tragedies? Prins recreates the burgeoning culture of translation and re-enactment at women’s colleges, reviving enthusiasms of the forgotten and famous, from A. Mary F. Robinson to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This is a definitive literary history that will influence future scholars, but any reader may binge on it like a beautiful BBC drama."—Alison Booth, University of Virginia

"This original, elegant, and beautifully written book combines deep classical learning and superb transatlantic archival research to produce a wonderful account of Victorian women's intense love affair with ancient Greek. Yopie Prins's classical expertise helps scholars who cannot read Greek toward magnificent new literary interpretations."—Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University

"Ladies' Greek is a highly anticipated, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched book. Its compelling and original conclusion makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Victorian Hellenism."—Laura McClure, University of Wisconsin–Madison

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho’s reception; what we now call “Sappho” is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics.

Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets — male and female, famous and forgotten — who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By “declining” the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. Prins explores the relations between classical philology and Victorian poetics, the tropes of lesbian writing, the aesthetics of meter, and nineteenth-century personifications of the “Poetess.” as current scholarship on Sappho and her afterlife. Offering a history and theory of lyric as a gendered literary form, the book is an exciting and original contribution to Victorian studies, classical studies, comparative literature, and women’s studies.

REVIEWS

"VICTORIAN SAPPHO is one of the most scholarly and imaginative books on Victorian poetry to emerge in the past decade. It places Sappho within the context of Victorian poetics with an assurance arising from a fine grasp of ancient Greek texts, a subtle historical understanding, and above all a capacity to read the formal patterns of Victorian verse and metrics with a virtuosic combination of aesthetic insight and ideological understanding. An altogether innovative book."
--Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London

"Yopie Prins elegantly unravels the complex Victorian reception of Sappho. Notable above all for what it reveals about the theory and practice of translation, her book offers brilliant close readings of the translation, interpretation, imitation, or adaptation of Sappho's notoriously ambiguous and fragmentary poetry."
--Helene Foley, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Few readers of Victorian poetry display Yopie Prins's remarkable erudition, theoretical subtlety, and interpretive acuity. Her brilliant discussion illuminates how and why Sappho took many distinctive lyric shapes in Victorian culture. Further, Prins reveals how a searching, deconstructive critique of lyric can produce an innovative literary history."
--Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles

"An arresting book . . . . Prins's immersion in the Victorian art and literature of Sappho is deep; the sophistication of her approach formidable. The topic of Sappho's 19th-century reception is multifaceted enough to allow for intense meditation on a host of crucial literary-historical issues: the evolution and ideology of women's writing, the problem of translation, the uses of Hellenism, the history of English metrics, the nature of lyric. By any measure this book (Prins's first) is a debut of major ambition and considerable achievement."
--Terry Castle, London Review of Books

Co-edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, THE LYRIC THEORY READER collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Jackson and Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

Reviews

"Through an astute selection of essays and a series of brilliant commentaries on them, Jackson and Prins show that although the way we conceive lyric is a recent invention that embodies a singularly modern and Western set of cultural ideas and values, we uphold lyric as the universal model of what poetry is and should be. Reading The Lyric Theory Reader is an exhilarating experience. In collecting what are arguably the most important modern statements about lyric, it opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on this most enduringly canonical of literary categories, and in that process encourages our most searching reflections on the historical existence of literary forms."
— Michael McKeon, Rutgers University

"A distinct account emerges of the life-history of the conception of the lyric as a genre—from the moment of its recognition as a genre that is said to have always been central, to the New Critical insistence that lyric is available because everyone can overhear it, to the increasing equation of lyric with poetry that occurs as the collapse of the genre system washes over both the novel and the lyric, leaving narrative and poetry in its wake. The Lyric Theory Reader is a worthy counterpart to Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the lyric, in poetry."
— Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago

"Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have done tremendous service to poetics in the nuanced and comprehensive work of constellation and accompanying commentary—providing a model of editorial lucidity, a library in a box, and a ceaselessly generative contradiction which is in the end perhaps itself the strongest argument for the lyric’s eccentric centrality."
— Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis

"The thesis of The Lyric Theory Reader—that the very existence of the genre is more a critical extrapolation than anything solid and real—may seem to be itself a kind of critical conceit, but only because the argument serves the Reader exceptionally well as a cogent frame for taking stock of a diversity of approaches. Accordingly, the Reader would seem especially useful as a primer for up and coming scholars... Overall, the Reader should be considered essential in the formation of a thoughtful scholar of poetry and its criticism."
— Peter Fields - Rocky Mountain Review

Co-edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, DWELLING IN POSSIBILITY cuts across conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplify the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. Most of the contributions are published here for the first time.

"Dwelling in Possibility is a splendid collaboration between poets and critics. Prins and Shreiber have interwoven sophisticated feminist critical essays with poetic meditations on genre and gender; the dialogues they set up are lyrically elegant as well as intellectually exhilarating. This collection not only sets a new standard for feminist theorizing about poetic genres, it performs the pleasures of feminist reading in all their diversity."—Mary Loeffelholz, author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory