Idol Of Lesbos Margo Sullivan Jun 2026

Sharing street food under the flickering gaslights of Les Halles.

"Why do you stay?" a young woman asked her. idol of lesbos margo sullivan

The surviving corpus of Sappho is notoriously fragmentary; of the nine books once attributed to her, only a handful of lyrical fragments survive intact, the rest existing as papyrus scraps or quotations in later authors. This lacuna has fostered an imaginative space wherein later writers project their own desires and anxieties onto the “missing” verses. Sullivan foregrounds this textual opacity, arguing that the very gaps in Sappho’s oeuvre create a “negative space” that queer scholarship has historically filled with yearning and identification. Sharing street food under the flickering gaslights of