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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 54 (previously 22c) - Book Appreciation with Jeannelle M. Ferreira - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/05/19 - listen here)

Heather Rose Jones: This week, Jeannelle M. Ferreira, author of the lesbian regency romance, The Covert Captain, joins us again to talk about some of her favorite reads that feature queer women in history. Welcome back, Jeannelle.

Jeannelle M. Ferreira: Hi, thank you again for having me. I thought and thought about my favorite historicals and if you love Regency romances, you can't do much better than Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn. It's super, super faithful to the light and sweet Georgette Heyer standards. I just love it so much. I kept harking back to it because, you know? You can do this, you can do a lesbian regency, and people love it. I also like Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue. It was a very germinal work for me because it was the first time that I sort of saw the alternative historical setting. They're short stories, I think every single one has a queer woman and at least a briefly mentioned romance between women. Emma Donoghue is now mostly known for her novel Room I think. Which doesn't have queer content, but I still have her down in my head as one of the best writers of queer historicals. She nails every detail even when it's a fantastic setting.

H: I first encountered her as a writer of history books! Her works on queer women in history, from the historical point of view, are some of my favorites.

J: Oh yeah, she has Passions Between Women and We are Michael Field. Passions Between Women—if you don't have that text and you're at all a queer historian now, you really should. But that's not fiction, I wrote down some fiction. I did my assignment. So, I was really pleased in 2014 when your book came out, Daughter of Mystery, I liked that one. And if you want something completely different, I really like Jae's Backwards to Oregon and its sequel. It is about hot lesbian ranchers, but it's also very very plausible. You have to get to the Old West somehow and that's just fraught with danger and I think someone even gets their period. Someone on the Oregon Trail gets their period while they're passing as a man, I think. Nobody ever goes there, that's awesome. [laughing] It's an awesome duology of books. I think duology is two. Duet? I don't know.

H: Yeah, duology. I think there's even more than that. ‘Cause I think there's a third book that continues on next-generation characters or something. I'm not sure, I haven't read them but you pick up these details.

J: I have the two first ones in actual paper/tree book on my bookshelf and I cherish them. It's not explicit queer content but Rosemary Kirstein's The Steerswoman books to me are some of the most amazing fantasy for queers even if I'm only coding it for queers. And I love it, so I say it's queer.

H: Yeah, they get recommended a lot to me as... Well, it's very peculiar. It has a fantasy flavor but a science fiction underpinning and lots and lots of very strong female relationships. I've got them sitting on my iPad, I haven't gotten around to reading them yet. The to-be-read list is so long.

J: Yeah, my to-be-read list is pretty deep. And I think that she is also working on one of those. Sometimes writing is at the 'please don't tap the glass' stage of process, [Heather laughs] so definitely the three that are out there are good. So, those are my picks.

H: Yay, that sounds like a pretty good shelf to work on. Thank you so much Jeannelle for sharing those books with us, of course I'll include links to all the titles in the show notes.

J: Wonderful, thank you so much.

Show Notes

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.

• Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn
• Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue
• Room by Emma Donoghue (non-queer)
• Passions Between Women by Emma Donoghue (non-fiction)
• We Are Michael Field by Emma Donoghue (biography)
• Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones
• Backwards to Oregon by Jae
• The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein (series)

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Jeannelle M. Ferreira Online

• Website: Jeannelle Writes
• Twitter: @JeannelleWrites

The Matter of Alchemy: Deciphering Medieval Practices

Organizer: Jennifer M. Rampling, Princeton Univ.

Presider: Peter M. Jones, King’s College, Univ. of Cambridge

Reading the Books of the Sages: Byzantine Hermeneutics of Ancient Alchemical Recipes Matteo Martelli, Univ. di Bologna

Byzantine alchemical texts present themselves as in a direct line from ancient sages, such as the 1st c treatise of Democritus containing works such as how to make gold, silver, and gemstones, or how to dye wool purple. Later texts often presented themselves as “rediscovering” or reinventing these techniques, usually accompanied by a citation of the “genealogy” of the text or techniques. Some alchemists such as 11th c Michael Psellus argued for the scientific, not magical, basis of their art, though the focus was still on creating gold. (He also discusses properties of gemstones.) Psellus collected 11 recipes for making gold and ascribed them to Democritus. Many collections of prior works were available to him, as a basis for his own experiments. Psellus was also interested in the making of precious stones and making pearls. E.g. Parisinus gr. 2325 13th c ms on “Deep Tincture of Stones, Emeralds, Rubies and Jacinths from the Book Taken from the Sancta Sanctorum of the Temples”. This work covered issues such as the identification of single ingredients, the interpretation of specific terminology, and discussions of methodological issues. We now look at a specific recipe.

”Take some komaris, which is difficult to find -- Persians and Egyptians give it the name of tálak, others the name of talák -- a half ounce; sulfer, a half ounce; water of untouched sulfur, 18 ounces; dilute the komaris and mix it with mercury; put the substance in a small glass vial and keep it.” The substance “komaris” appears in several different grammatical forms (or perhaps variants) and appears in several recipes. But what is it? Modern scholars point to the root of a plant Comarum palustre. But the Arabic equivalent suggested in the ms is “talc, talcum powder”, suggesting an entirely different substance. Elsewhere, komaron is glossed as “aphroselenon” (moon foam) as a cryptic identifier. The text now looks deeply into what the nature of this substance is. Does it come from multiple substances or is it a single species? Democritus says it is wine dregs and egg white and that you dilute it and rub it on a stone to turn it into a pearl. No specific textual citation for this is given, but it can be narrowed down based on the topic to a now lost volume surviving in Syriac translation. In this Syriac version, “komaris” (from Scythia) is a substance that is put into quicklime, mixed with wine dregs, and then rubbed on the stone you want to turn into a pearl. [Note that the actual nature of komaris is not indicated.] So is komaron the same thing as moon foam, or is it a separate substance that is combined with moon foam for the process? Or is the multiplicity of names and substances simply an accumulation of successive glosses and explanations?

“The Secret of Salt”: Salts and Their Use in Medieval Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Alchemy Gabriele Ferrario, Johns Hopkins Univ.

Interpreting the nature of the substances referenced in alchemical texts is hampered by the use of obscuring alias as well as a different conception of the nature of substances between the writers of the texts and modern chemical theory. Substances such as sulfer and mercury had a symbolic importance that went beyond their chemical substance, and alchemy treated them as creating other substances by means of manipulating the proportions. this paper looks at the category of salts as used in alchemical processes. Despite being less important symbolically, the proper understanding and manipulation of salts was essential to successful alchemical processes. Looking specifically at the writings of Muhammad ibn Zakariya Al-Razi. [Sorry for omitting the diacritics.] Al-Razi is said to have complied his text when reaching the end of his life when he wanted to preserve his knowledge. The contents first cover substances, then equipment, then operations. These operations are described in reference to the primary substances defined and described in the first section. Al-Razi describes 11 salts: weet (kitchen) salt, bitter salt, Andarani salt, Tabarzad salt, Nifti salt, Indian salt, egg salt, alkali salt, urine salt, lime salt, Oak ashes salt. Several of these names refer to the geographic origin but give no indication of the nature. E.g. Andarani salt, which is described as coming from a specific location, but the name is a corruption of a simple description. “Nifti salt” seems to refer to the act of splitting with an axe, suggesting a large crystal structure, but is also called “black salt”. The difficulty alchemists had in obtaining the correct ingredients derives from discontinuity in the knowledge of what these terms referred to. Later interpreters often worked backwards experimentally from the described results to identify which ingredients would produce those effects. In a later Arabic treatise “On alums and salts” we see many brief recipes that follow the same linguistic formulas as Al-Razi, hence the tendency of some translators to ascribe it to him. Latin translations of “On Alums and Salts” appear in the 14-15th centuries, as well as an Italian Hebrew translation from teh 16th century. All these point to the importance and fame of the Arabic text. The Hebrew translation has many translator’s interjections “this means” or “it seems to me” suggesting an experimenter’s commentary attempting to add value to the translation.

So what does this text say about salts? In a long discussion of the nature and varieties of salts, much of the description implies ordinary “kitchen salt”, though varieties are described as Indian, red, lime, bitter, compact, and references to geographic origin. Salt is treated as a purifying agent. The author has been trying to trace references to salt in alchemical fragments in the Cairo geniza. Most of them are recipes that can probably be traced back to translations of Al-Razi.

Getting Blood from the Stone: Alchemy as Decipherment in Medieval England Jennifer M. Rampling

In 1403-4 the alchemical production of precious metals was outlawed in England to prevent adulteration of the money supply. But at this time, an alchemist named Morton set up a workshop at Hatfield Peverel for practical production of precious metals, illustrating the conflict between alchemy as philosophical practice versus alchemy as craft. The unfortunate Morton ended up in court in violation of the aforementioned statue. This paper looks at who English alchemists talked about their ingredients. These included not only chemical substances, but also biological substances as well as salts and alums. The philosophy/craft distinction became manifested in a differential focus on metallic substances versus a broader range of natural ingredients. That is pure Aristotelian philosophy could be expressed in the pure “souls” of metals and their transformations. But this metal-based process was problematic in that it began with precious metals and therefore was expensive [and presumably, less attractive to patrons]. There was also a problem in the long manuscript tradition that included the wider descriptions of biological/natural substances. The philosophical tradition now begins to argue that references to ingredients like “eggs” or “blood” were meant only allegorically or to conceal the truth from the unlearned, and actually referred to the pure metals. The philosophical alchemists might distance themselves from the (illegal) craft-based approach, but the latter continued in popularity, focusing on “cookbook” style recipes with material goals. Getting back to Morton, although he allied himself with the philosophical alchemists, his own experimental writings included the broader non-metallic ingredient set. This is not the only example of conflict between alchemical philosophy and alchemical practice. As in the Pseudo-Ramon Llull Practica Testamenti which begins with a philosophical framing that uses an alphabetic mnemonic for ingredients but then includes not only the metallic mercury, but vitriol azoqueus, saltpeter, which then combine to form a “sticking menstruum”. [We now see the result of the paper author’s own experiments to reproduce some of these recipes.] The obscurity of texts such as this in a real sense drive experimentation, as the words themselves were insufficient for clear identification. This type of “translation” of supposedly allegorical terms, can be seen full circle in “practical” alchemists concluding that references to gold and silver as alchemical ingredients were themselves allegorical rather than literal references. This then drove further experimentation to identify what ingredients those “allegorical metals” were actually referring to. Philosophy might dictate alchemical discourse, but rarely succeeded in limiting practice.

Last year there were a number of fascinating sessions on magic and occultism in the Islamicate medieval world. I’m still gathering up deep background on this topic for future fiction projects, and this one really caught my eye.

Occult Blockbusters of the Islamicate World II: Arabic and Persian

Sponsor: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence; Societas Magica

Organizer: Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Univ. of South Carolina

Presider: Liana Saif, Univ. of Oxford

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s Hidden Secret and Islamic Occult Soteriology Michael Noble, Warburg Institute

Speaking about an early 13th century scholar. His studies included astrological themes and the creation of talismanic objects that synthesized three disciplines of natural philosophy: astrology, medicine, and spiritual discipline? [I missed the third--I’m having a little trouble hearing the speaker]. The practitioner must first establish a balanced spiritual discipline to create a connection with [???] then the following of a number of rituals to establish a connection with the desired astrological entity, then a talisman is created from materials attuned to the particular heavenly bodies being invoked. The completion of the ritual represents perfection of the soul. In theory, this discipline was not tied to any particular theology. Razi was interested in the basis for human psychic connections with the celestial spheres that enabled this process to achieve magical outcomes. This understanding draws on Avicennian philosophy regarding mystical visions. Access to these sorts of visions or abilities can be innate or can be achieved through spiritual training.

A Sorcerer’s Handbook: Al-Sakkaki’s Thirteenth-Century Complete Book Emily Selove, Univ. of Exeter

The speaker suggests a modified title for the book is “The book of the Complete One.” Al-Sakkhaki is better known as a grammarian, but this handbook ties together magical aspects of language to his better known reputation. There are questions about authorship as the book is in Middle Arabic rather than scholarly Arabic, though this could be explained by its nature as an informal handbook. The contents are an assortment of spells to create effects or control supernatural beings, including the summoning of demons. An example is shown of a spell that is functionally a cookbook recipe for a stuffed chicken, but with added requirements: a black chicken and signs included to create the magical effect (I missed the details but something like achieving a desire?).The text includes diagrams for talismanic spells -- such as one to cause hatred between friends. In three manuscripts specific talismanic diagrams are reproduced with extreme faithfulness. [This paper seems to be something of an informal guided tour through the manuscript rather than a specific thesis about it.] We get a digression about how excerpts from these spells are circulating on the internet, evidently describing current folk-magic use. The avoidance of Al-Sakkaki’s magical pursuits when discussing his work, it is suggested, is due to embarrassment about the magical field in general. We now digress into imagery about paradisical banquets in the afterlife and rituals involving cups and beautiful young boys. [I’m losing the thread here.] A discussion of how the omission of Arabic diacritics (the vowel marks -- not sure about the technical term) renders a book of spells difficult to decipher, but may also be to render them “safe” on the page? More on connections between historic magical texts and modern magical practice found in online contexts. [The manuscript sounds fascinating, but I felt the presentation was more in the mode of “look at all this weird medieval stuff”.]

“If you don’t learn alchemy, you’ll learn eloquence”: The Golden Slivers by Ibn Arfa’ Ra’s Nicholas G. Harris, Univ. of Pennsylvania

This is a lengthy poetry collection that was considered both an example of poetic excellence as well as a collection of alchemical wisdom. 43 odes, successively using every letter of the Arabic alphabet as a rhyme letter. The meter is formal, one typically used for epics. Alchemical poetry was an established poetic genre, crossing multiple themes and forms. Commentaries and expansions on the work speak to its reception, and a repeated theme is that even if you fail to learn alchemy from the poem, you will definitely learn eloquence and poetry. In the 14th century, the works of al-Jildaki created a “bottleneck” in the Arabic alchemical tradition, whereby most writing subsequent to him is based on his work., including his commentaries on earlier works such as the one considered here, which Jildaki praised highly. Currently a critical edition of this text is being prepared and will be available soon. We conclude with some questions about the author of the work. He seems to have been mentioned and praised by a number of contemporaries as a preacher and Quranic expert, but his poetic works seem to be mentioned only after his death. (?) But the early 15th century historian Ibn Khaldun, known for his anti-occult opinions, muddies the waters by deriding Ibn Arfa’ Ra’s as an alchemist, while praising him under another name for his religious scholarship, leading to theories that they were two different people.

Kāshifī’s Qasimian Secrets: The Safavid Imperialization of a Timurid Manual of Magic Matthew Melvin-Koushki

We’re concerned here with two of the “blockbusters” of the Islamic magical world in the 15-1th century. With a brief digression on modern political magic movements to bind and block the actions of certain contemporary figures, we come to the topic of what “political magic” means in a medieval context. For example a spell “to remove any ruler you wish.” You inscribe a verse on one side of an object, a picture of the target on the other side, then bury it. But the verse is oddly non-Quranic but is rather anti-Trinitarian in form, using the rejection of Christian theology as the medium of rejecting the ruler. In the relevant historic period, Islamic sovereigns were seeing a unified way to control the world, while scholars sought means for controlling the sovereigns. At the same time, Western cultures turned to the task of rooting out and eliminating occult forces in politics, in contrast to a more aligned east/west approach in previous eras. Another distinction is the shift to printed occult treatises in the west, whereas the Islamic world viewed manuscript as an essential aspect of the social role of books. [A slide lists eight titles which were “blockbusters” of the Islamic magical literary world.] The texts considered here concern numerology and lettrisim (the alphabetic equivalent of numerology). These texts transcended conflicts between Islamic sects, being written by Sufi Sunni authors, but used by Shi’a rulers as the basis for imperial political occultism. [I think we’re going to get more details of Islamic historical political conflict than I’ll be able to follow.] The political nature of these texts include spells to control and influence rulers, controlling the emotions and reactions of kings, and elevating the reputation and influence of the practitioner within the political sphere, with an expectation that the practitioner will be a courtier or member of the bureaucracy.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 53 (previously 22b) - Interview with Jeannelle M. Ferreira - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/05/12 - listen here)

Heather Rose Jones: Today, The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast is excited to host Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Now, you have to know that I'm enormous fan of Regency romances, I think there's only one of Georgette Heyer's books so far that I've failed to track down and buy, and the genre was one of the major inspirations for my own Alpennia series. So, when a friend on Twitter posted a link to Jeannelle's new book, The Covert Captain: Or, a Marriage of Equals, I was on it as fast as the proverbial duck on a junebug. And even before I'd got my hands on the book, I'd signed her up to be a guest on this podcast. Welcome, Jeannelle.

Jeannelle M. Ferreira: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here, this is my first podcast. [laughing]

H: Why don't we begin with you giving a synopsis of the book and talking a little bit about how you came to write it.

J: Okay. The Covert Captain takes place in 1822 when the Napoleonic wars are good and over, and everyone's wondering what to do with their lives. Captain Nathaniel Fleming is a guest at his Major's country house and there he meets the Major's sister, Harriet. So he's got the background of long friendship with the Major that he shared many campaigns with, and he meets this new person. Harriet is 28 and is not really keen on male guests and has some secrets of her own, and some fun hobbies. And so the book is… I would say the first half is Harriet and Captain Nathaniel's romance and then spoiler! The second half of the book is that Nathaniel is actually Nora. Nora has managed to hide her gender through campaign, which is actually pretty plausible… more plausible than you'd think. They fall in love, a big secret is revealed, they do get a happily ever after because it's a Regency romance and that's important.

H: Yes, truth in advertising as it were.

J: Yes, I wrote the book, because at the time I started writing it, which is not the time it was published, there wasn't a lot of female-female historical romance and I just really wanted to read it, so I wrote it.

H: That's how so many books get started. [Jeannelle laughs] Why the Regency in particular?

J: I love Georgette Heyer. I had a very convalescent sort of childhood and early young adulthood, and I read lots and lots of books. I was essentially raised by 19th century England for good or ill. So, I got through all of those. Then also, what's being written as far as het Regency romance, there wasn't any of me. And I didn't get these swashbuckles and these cotillions. I wanted something that my wife and I could read. Yeah, I know the Regency is just a favorite because they're such confections. They're such confections, I wanted one, too.

H: Yep. I was poking around in your Amazon and Goodreads listing and this is not your first book. I turned up two other items that were listed there. One is A Verse from Babylon, which is set in a Jewish community in Lithuania in World War II. That one looks like it has some queer content as well.

J: It really does. I can't avoid queer content, it always turns up when I write. It is the story of the Repertory Theatre Company of the Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust. It is the thing that I have spent the most research time on because these people are not super-fictional. They're fictionalized but they're based on real people and they weren't around to tell their own stories because of course they were murdered. I went to Lithuania when I was younger and did a lot of research there. One of my degrees is actually in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. The book was partly creating the ability for me to act as a psychopomp for some of these people whose stories were never resolved and so in my mind weren't at peace, although that's just me being silly. And partly, I had this degree and I might as well go flex it. [laughs]

H: We should probably make sure that our listeners know that that one, given the setting, is not a happy ending. [chuckles]

J: No. People are still surprised by that, though. And my wife was actually mortally offended, because we were dating when I wrote it, and she read the first draft and she said, "Everybody dies in this book!" And I said, "But I said that in the introduction. Rocks fall, everybody dies." [laughs] Not rocks, Nazis, but say…

H: Yeah. I picked up from your Twitter feed that you are Jewish yourself, that you have this background.

J: I am. Used to be super Jewy and then I found out that I like girls and pants pretty much at the same time in my life in high school. I knew there was something a little bit different about me and I wasn't quite happy with my life the way it was. And then in high school it was pointed out to me that—and this was in the early 90s, so we've come a long way even since then—but it was pointed out to me that you could like girls. And I got very excited and I've had a girlfriend ever since [laughter]. And I like wearing jeans and I like praying in public. So, I'm a much happier person. There's a Jewish expression, 'to be on the derekh,' which means to be on the path. It's used in the sense mostly of religious orthodoxy, but I like to say that I am sort of balancing on an odd little derekh of my own because now I have a wife and a child and a career. It both is and isn't the proper life and the life I had imagined but it is exactly my life and I'm very pleased with it.

H: The other story that I turned up, it looks like it's maybe a short story, a novelette called Dramatis Personae?

J:  It is, it's a novelette. 'Novelette' is the word that the cool kids are using now and I really like it, it used to just be a novella. It is about two mask makers who live in a city that is sort of Chicago and sort of out-of-all Chicago, it's in slightly to the right or left. It's my first foray into speculative fiction because these people make masks, they wear masks. So I was also trying to play a lot with the concept of bodies and gender and who we love, and it was also just a chance for me to get some historical nerdery and across a bunch of eras. One of the mask makers is originally from Elizabethan England and one is from ancient Egypt. It's definitely escapist and I had a great time writing it.

H: When researching historically-set fiction, what are some of the biggest challenges that you found? Let's get back to The Covert Captain. I mean, obviously, anybody writing Regency romances can pick up a lot of the superficial history just from reading the genre, but where did you go to really ground your story in the history for this particular story?

J: For this particular story, I definitely wanted to look at all the places where queer, gay, lesbian, and bisexual people weren't. Transgender is tricky too because everybody sort of was living their own life and sexual mores were very different, and all these people are dead and so you don't want to assign anybody an identity they may not have had, which comes up with Fleming who dresses the man and has a male career. But I think she would think of herself as a lesbian, she's into the girls. So I researched Molly houses and different aspects of the queer community around St James's Park in England—which coincidentally is also near where all the Jewish people lived. In Aldgate. So, you had all these interesting social elements in one place, and I wish I had written down better cited sources but one of them is… The National Trust in the UK has a whole website on queer history and they cite their sources unlike me—bad scholar! There are pages and pages about people's identity and Molly houses and the Ladies of Llangollen. Yes, I had to look up how to say that. I wasn't going to do a podcast with a linguistics expert [Heather laughs] and not say Llangollen properly. It's all there in the ways that we're not there, and I'm actually going to use a weird example. Not weird. I'm going to use an example from my childhood: one of the most English books of all time, Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. There are two tutors in this book, Dr. Jakes and Dr. Smith, and they are both women. And they live together as boarders in a large house in the Cromwell road. It took me until I was about nine having owned this copy and love it to death of this book since I was about four... "Oh, Dr. Jakes and Dr. Smith! I get— Oh. Oh." And so, this was the first time I learned to pick us out of the text even if it wasn't explicitly stated. And that's sort of a direct line for me to Anne Lister, and thankfully Anne Lister's diary has just semi-recently come out translated so I didn't have to learn ancient Greek. So, you got Anne Lister who hung out with the Ladies of Llangollen, which was another reason that it was a Regency. That if I do a second book, they're totally all going to cameo at the most interesting dinner party of all time.

H: Yeah, but it would have to be in Llangollen because they never left. You know?

J: It's true. But they had dogs! There was companionship. I'll get them there somehow.

H: Yeah.

J: I also did a lot of research on early medicine, particularly what was effective about early medicine which was so often in the purview of women essentially, or biology. But there are a lot of tinctures and mixtures and selves and ointments that came directly from women's kitchens but actually work quite well. So for that, I did some research basically in NIH and The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia... and just poked around what people did to feel better and survive in areas where, you know? There were nasty things in the dirt and there were nasty smells in the air that were making you sick, obviously. [laughing]

H: Speaking of medicine, one of the things I really liked how you handled in The Covert Captain—essentially we'll call it PTSD—was the way that the returning soldiers were dealing with the horrors of the war and the things that they had had to do, and the way it would hang over your life and affect your relationships.

J: It's true. They called it nostalgia around the Crimean War. I don't know if they had a name for it when they came back from the Napoleonic Wars but they knew that something was going on. But the thing is, I don't think they cared, except I think that it was very much a badge of manhood as it was probably up through World War One, to just get over yourself and get on. But that didn't really lead to functional relationships, and it led to a lot of drinking and a lot of semi-honourably shooting oneself. I wanted to address it because as confectionary as Regency romances are, you can't bring someone back from a war and have them functionally fall in love with someone. There are a ton of diaries from Waterloo, and I think the ones I looked at most were Paget, who lost his leg. The one who said, "Oh my god, sir, I've lost my leg." And his superior looked across at him and said, "Oh my god, sir, so you have!" Which is sort of the attitude to war injuries in a nutshell that you find in that time period.

H: Yeah.

J: He came home with that leg and I found out that some of his family too were missing hands, and they got on with it. But I was really intrigued by what you bring back from the war.

H:  Yeah. And it's tricky to portray that sort of thing, both in historical context where the modern reader can recognize it and engage with it, but where you aren't bringing those modern attitudes into the story itself. And that leads nicely into the portrayal of sexuality. What were your challenges in creating these characters in a way that both connects with the modern reader and is true to their own time?

J: I really tried hard not to give anybody an identity that I would understand but they wouldn't. Farah Mendelssohn's regency is actually great at this. You have a lot of really intense female friendships because social interaction was so stratified by binary gender at the time. So nobody really thought weirdly of you if you were a female-bodied person kissing your female-bodied friend unless you were married in which case, do it in your boudoir or just not at the ball. I think the biggest challenge was not using terminology or attitudes that I know are mine from my own gender and sexuality research, and also just making it okay that Fleming gets the ladies. Like, Captain Fleming has a girl in every port until she meets Harry and settles down. And I think the tactic I went with was just don't have anybody feel that it's remarkable that this person always has somebody ‘cause they're talented and cute and they're on a horse. [Heather laughs] Horses count for a lot.

H: They do.

J: And with Harry—Harriet—one of my friends came up with this amazing phrase and she said, "I really liked that you pointed out, really subtly, that it wasn't Harry's first time on the merry-go-round. She said it in-print, "It's m a r y mary-go-round." [Heather laughs] And I'm like, "A, you're a sick person and B, that's hilarious." [laughs]

H: I really liked that point. I don't think we're giving away any spoilers to say that of course the two characters end up in a sexual relationship, but there was a point early on where I'm thinking, "Where did Harry learn how to do this?" And then you answered the question, and that really was a nice point.

J: Yeah. People are getting up to stuff all the time. In my first book, people were like, "People are having sex during the Holocaust?" And I'm like, "Well, if I was under duress, I would have a lot of sex." You know? [laughs] It's part escapism and part human nature. And so you've got a soldier who comes back from the war in The Covert Captain who literally can't sleep at night and has a lot of trouble being in her own skin. And as soon as she finds somebody to share a space comfortably with, I think that she is going to try to make that connection.

H: —and then deal with the consequences.

J: Yes, big consequences but they do get dealt with.

H: Have you always been interested in history and historical research? Well, given you mentioned what your academic research was, and so I guess the answer is yes, but talk about your background and just being a history fanatic.

J: Like I said, I was raised by 19th century England and then—whenever you read The Secret Garden, I became aware of the Raj and then sort of had to delve into… You read The Children of Green Knowe and where does Ping come from? Ping is a refugee child. Where do the attitudes about Ping come from and where do Frances Hodgson Burnett's attitudes about the Raj come from? So my childhood reading became my high school and college deep dive into British Empire and colonialism and how everybody was related to everybody over many continents. Then I sort of became passionately interested in the fact that every war is a knock-on from some white guy's decisions in the last war. I just could not put the history down. I ended up with a degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies pretty much up through the creation of modern Israel. Then I sort of tailed off. But also, one of my degrees is in creative writing. I have many superfluous degrees, I'm sorry.

H: [laughs] Well you're talking to somebody who got a bachelor's in zoology and then a PhD in linguistics, so I can understand the scattershot thing.

J: Yeah. And then I was interested in medicine for a hot second there until I realized that my frail physical encasing couldn't handle the rigors. So, history of medicine is also a big deal for me. But no, I just never stopped reading. And the more you read historical fiction, for me, the more I want to understand the underpinnings and the motivations.

H: Yeah. I mean for the Regency setting, there's that whole issue of why is it such a big draw for fiction? What is it about the Regency? And in part, it's several very impressive authors who have popularized it. But what is it about that historic nexus that makes it such a rich setting for stories? And of course that's true of many other times and places as well.

J: For me, I think the Regency is so great because it really depends what you love. You have slightly close to modern cuisine at your parties, you have recognizable clothing it still looks fancy and refined, and you have the beginnings of modern plumbing. [Heather laughs] It's why I think there aren't that many romances—there are some—there aren't that many romances set around the time of the Norman Conquest because—

H: Okay, that's not true because there's an entire genre of Norman-Saxon historic romances, just because of the culture clash thing. [laughs]

J: I hadn't thought of that, I was totally down with the—well, they had toothpicks, but I'm not sure what else they had. [laughter] I was like, "I don't know whether I want to kiss someone in Norman England." So yeah, I think the Regency is the first time it can all come together and literally be tied with a velvet bow. And I think we just can't get enough of that. Plus horses.

H: [laughs] Yeah. I have to say that when I think about writing in lesbian historical romances, I always want to end up with one of the women in a riding habit because…horses, riding habits. There's something about riding habits that is just so incredibly sexy, I have to say.

J: It's so true. And the swords! You know this, you literally have a swordswoman character. And what's better than that? You're going to jump off this horse and defend me with this skill that you learned at great personal physical expense, and it's going to look hot. [Heather laughs] That was slightly shallow. [laughs]

H: We both write historical romance, I think that's the definition of shallow in some ways but hey. So, how about some upcoming projects that you want to let the listeners know about? I hear a rumor that you might be writing in the Regency again.

J: It is true, I am working on the sequel. It is set in 1824 so, Harriet and Nora have been married for a minute. Harriet is now the Lady of Fleming slightly dilapidating manor in Yorkshire which is based on Ridley Castle, which looks like a fascinating pile of stone by the way. They have some changes in their life and right now, they're having their Burns supper and there are some interesting guests at this Burns supper. And I particularly wanted to approach, in the sequel, someone eccentric enough by the standards of those times to be in a relationship with a Jewish woman. And I wanted to address in the sequel some of the realities, but also the fun and pleasant and lovely parts of being a Jewish person in Regency England because we were there, not in great number but we were. I'm also working on a short story about Kit Marlowe where Kit Marlowe just might be a lesbian. Because Kit Marlowe is one of the most irresistible figures in the historic record and basically, the fiction writes itself.

H: How does that work for Kit Marlowe because he was notoriously interested in boys?

J: It's true. This is why the short story is not finished. I don't want to do any discredit to the dashing Kit of the historical record. I haven't quite figured out how to work it but it's one of the things I have in the drawer. Did I say the thing about the World War One flying ace?

H: No, you never mentioned that.

J: These are all short stories. I never learned to write a proper transition, so I work a lot in short stories. I'm working on it though. I want to write a story if I can plausibly get them recruited into the army of a World War One flying ace. And I also want to do lesbian pirates because I feel like lesbian pirates is a high-water benchmark to which I want to aspire as an adult writer.

H: Okay, there's certainly a flourishing sub-genre of lesbian pirates. So Jeannelle, if your fans and readers wanted to find you on social media, where should they look?

J: I'm on Twitter and WordPress at the same handle, @JeannelleWrites. It's @JeannelleWrites on Twitter and jeannellewrites.wordpress.com.

H: Okay, Facebook?

J: I don't have a Facebook author page yet because as you can tell from my backlist, I took several years off to have a kid and parent that kid. So the explosion of social media is still a surprise to me, but I'm working on it [laughs].

H: I noticed from your previous publications that it looks like they're a little bit obscure to find currently.

J: Currently, yes. I'm working on rights management and Kindle editions, and again all the sorts of things that happened in the seven to 10 years I wasn't writing that were kind of a surprise.

H: Okay. Keep us updated when those are more easily accessible for people to track down.

J: Oh, totally. Working on it.

H: I'll add links to all these social media and all of the books that got mentioned in the show to the show notes. Thank you again for joining us at The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.

J: Thank you!

Show Notes

A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.

In this episode we talk about:

• The attractions of the Regency romance
• Jeannelle’s earlier works, especially a novel set in the Vilna ghetto during WWII
• Jewish influences in her writing
• Jeannelle’s background as a student of history
• Sexuality and PTSD in the Regency era
• The National Trust’s website on queer history in the UK
• Finding queer-coded characters in childhood favorite books
• Researching war in Waterloo diaries of British soldiers
• The path through British historical YA fiction that leads to a study of imperial and colonial history
• Horses and swords--it always comes back to horses and swords
• Future projects: more about Nora and Harriet, gender-bending Kit Marlowe, World War I flying aces, and lesbian pirates
• Books mentioned
  • The Covert Captain: Or, A Marriage of Equals by Jeannelle M. Ferreira
  • A Verse from Babylon by Jeannelle M. Ferreira (out of print)
  • Dramatis Personae by Jeannelle M. Ferreira (novelette, out of print)
  • Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Jeannelle M. Ferreira Online

• Website: Jeannelle Writes
• Twitter: @JeannelleWrites