Love-of-One’s-Life Department

Terry Castle

• Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks by Diana Souhami
  Weidenfeld, 224 pp, £18.99, July 2004, ISBN 0 297 64386 X

The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho’s fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think that after two thousand years these girls would be ready to quit the scene, but no, here they come again – a bit leathery from all the centuries of tennis and golf, but still the only game in town. When, you wonder, will someone new turn up? If it’s true – as a famous gay male writer has suggested – that there are really only 500 people in the world and after a while one has slept with most of them, then the sapphic dating pool has got to be even smaller: eight or ten perhaps, 12 or 15 at most. It’s pathetic, really. Trundle through the Gobi Desert, lift a random tent flap: the bearded Mongolian gal inside was once involved with your college girlfriend.