(Originally aired 2020/12/19 - listen here)
(Transcript pending)
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
(Originally aired 2020/12/12 - listen here)
(Transcript pending)
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
(Originally aired 2020/12/05 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for December 2020.
Some article I read -- I no longer remember which one, but it isn't important -- tried to claim that pre-20th century female couples inevitably involved an age difference and therefore followed the classical model of an older mentor and a younger "beloved". It seems to me that this is a case of finding what you're looking for, because even when a couple are very close in age--for example, fellow students at a boarding school--it may happen that one is seen as the older, more experienced figure and the other as the follower.
There's an entire book on the Benson family that I should probably add to the blog to-do list at some point. She seems like a fascinating person, though the interpersonal relations within the Benson family are not exactly a pinnacle of functionality. Still, to think that someone who came into a marriage so disadvantaged in terms of social power (I mean, her husband arranged to train her up to be his future wife when she was only 11 years old!) was able to come to a no-fucks-to-give point where she renegotiated the entire basis of their marriage and relationship. That's quite a story.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 186 - Poetry about Love between Women from the 18th Century - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/11/28- listen here)
When Romancelandia became more generally aware that Georgia voter activist Stacey Abrams was also romance author Selena Montgomery, they took her and her cause to their heart big-time. Thus was born "Romancing the Runoff", a fund-raising project to support various organizations in the state of Georgia working on voter registration, turnout, and education. While putting together a fund-raising auction with all manner of fascinating book-related stuff, they raised nearly $100,000 in direct donations.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 185 - Sapphic Historical Fantasy in Asian Settings - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/11/21 - listen here)
I hadn't quite intended to take a vacation from the blog, but the stress of the US elections and their aftermath was more distracting than I'd anticipated and I gave myself a pass. And then, this past Sunday when I was planning to get the nose back on the grindstone...I ended up in the hospotal instead with a pulmonary embolism (i.e., blot clots in the lungs). I'm ok and following treatment, but it was, shall we say, disruptive to my schedule?
As I emphasized repeatedly in my podcast about Charlotte Cushman, the community of women discussed in this chapter deserved to have an entire historical mini-series created around them. There are so many personalities, so much drama, you could easily fill several seasons of tv. If you're writing sapphic historical fiction in the Victorian era you need to know about this milieu, if only so you are aware of the range of possible lives for those willing to do the work of slipping through the blind spots of society.
