In The Sappho History , Margaret Reynolds traces the story of the reception of Sappho's poetry and her afterlife in literature and art from the mid eighteenth-century to the twentieth-century. For women writers in the Romantic period, she symbolized possibility; for the young Tennyson, she was a private ancestor helping him make his own name as a poet. Richly illustrated throughout, The Sappho History provides a new view of Western culture from the Romantic period to the Modern.