I hope that some of the listeners to the podcast have been intrigued enough by the quick synopsis it gave of Charity and Sylvia's lives to follow up with the more extensive summary presented here in the blog--or even to track down a copy of the book for the full story. I don't often coordinate the blog and podcast quite this closely, but it's often the case that I'll do a run of articles on a theme in preparation for working up a podcast.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 317 – Charity and Sylvia - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/06/21 - listen here)
I can still write, record, edit, and post a podcast from scratch today, right? (Or I can finish up on Sunday, like I so often do.) You'd think that in my leisurely retirement I'd no longer find myself pushing podcast deadlines, but there's still so much on my schedule! And--I confess--today I meant to get right to work on it, but I've been hyperfocusing on a different research/writing project (on the history of the "Best Related Work" Hugo category) and have been having a hard time pulling out of that to work on anything else. This is a known failure mode for me.
In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate?
I started some comments to put in this blog section of the post, then realized they fit better into the "Introduction" part of the publication record. So I'm left with nothing of substance to say here. Some day I should post a blog showing the underlying data structure of the Project so that this sort of thing makes sense to readers. (Assuming anyone cares.)
Cleve's biography of Charity and Sylvia takes an approach that both makes the book more readable and requires the audience to read critically. In order to fill in the background and the silences of their lives, we get a lot of general historical details that help make sense of the decisions and actions of their families. But in order to try to contextualize their emotional lives, we also get a lot of interpolation from other lives.
I'm blogging a new book starting today, which will probably run for about ten days worth of posts.
Sometimes I envision a broad-scope historical understanding of the dynamics of gender and sexuality as being like a collage of scraps of colored paper. Each individual book or article has a specific take on the question, and they don't always align with each other, but as each is pasted in place, a larger picture develops that is independent of the precise nature of each piece of paper. And--of course--I must never lose sight of the fact that the person pasting them in place (that is, me) has a vision for the overall work that affects how the collage is put together.
How much do general social anxieties around demographics and sexuality interact with each other? I've seen a number of historians connect early 19th century concerns about falling birthrates with increasingly controlling attitudes towards non-procreative sex. But is there cause and effect? We could look around today's America and ask "is the nativist anxiety about white birthrates tied in any way to surges of hostility against marginalized genders and sexualities?
Psychoanalyzing the fiction of earlier ages has been a popular, if often misguided sport. In particular, when characters' intimate friendships are analyzed from contemporary angles, while ignoring the context when the work was written, we find out more about the literary critic's mind than the minds of the author or the characters.
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