Summary

The novel opens with the collective narrator asserting that “we were going to be Sappho” (7), the ancient Greek poet whose work—focusing on love and desire between women—survives only in fragments. In 1885, Cordula Poletti is born in Italy; she refuses to adhere to the expectations of young girls. As an adolescent, Cordula reads poetry and eventually changes her name to Lina. The narrator describes X, an unnamed Italian lesbian who was placed in an asylum as punishment for her sexuality. Lina soon “outpaced her classmates in classical subjects” (12) and begins to wear high-buttoned, masculine boots. She studies poetry at a university in Bologna, where she is one of very few women.

As a young girl, Rina Faccio helps her father with the accounting in his factory. Rina’s mother throws herself out of a window. One day, a man who works in the...