Abstract
Abstract: This essay examines a trans literary history within nineteenth-century British reception of Sappho. Preceding and complicating the sexological language of inversion, Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) inaugurated an indexical relation between Sapphism and gender variance, which came to entail a complex practice of intertextual signaling and allusion organized around Sappho's poetry. This practice of trans Sapphism, which persists in Swinburne's later writings, was taken up later in the Victorian period by writers like Walter Pater, Michael Field, and Vernon Lee, becoming a signature for a literary subculture invested in exposing the tenuous conditions of gender through trans possibilities.