Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal checks out “Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet,” a new book by Philip Freeman.

Can the life of a woman be reconstructed through fragments of poetry—some of them no more than a single word—that she left behind?

That is what classics professor Philip Freeman aims to do in “Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet” his new book about “one of the greatest poets of antiquity, if not of all time.”

We know precious little about this elusive poetess. We know that Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 B.C. And we know that she wrote love poems, many of them addressed to women, that still burn thousands of years later.

But everything else about the life of this remarkable writer is shrouded in mystery. Was she married? Did she have children? Perhaps most significantly for many modern readers: Was she a lesbian in the modern sense of the word?

Mr. Freeman tries to answer these questions by drawing, yes, on her scraps of poetry, but also on the Iliad, the Odyssey, tombstones, medical texts—anything that illuminates the lives of women in the ancient world.

He concludes that yes, she was probably married, only because, as he writes, “the single life was simply not a viable option, especially for a woman in the ancient world.” There is stronger evidence that she was a mother. An ancient biography of Sappho preserved on papyrus from 200 AD references her daughter, Cleis, a name that also appears in two of her poems. But it’s possible that Cleis was perhaps her lover. Knowing precious little about the social context of Sappho’s world, it’s impossible to know for sure.

What we can know and savor is her poetry, and Mr. Freeman has produced translations of all of her surviving poems and fragments here, including this, from her celebrated Fragment 31:

“When I look at you even for a moment I can no longer speak.” she writes.

“My tongue fails and a subtle fire races beneath my skin, I see nothing with my eyes, and my ears hum. Sweat pours from me and a trembling seizes my whole body. I am greener than grass and it seems I am a little short of dying.”

Of this there is no question: Sappho knew what it meant to love.