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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 228 - The Spirits of Cabassus by Ursula Whitcher - transcript

(Originally aired 2022/04/30 - listen here)

There are several things that caught my interest about Ursula Whitcher’s story “The Spirits of Cabassus” in addition to the beautiful writing. One is the way that she picked up several threads of actual history to braid together into a story. The love spell – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “obsession spell” – that underlies the haunting is inspired by surviving magical inscriptions from Egypt that try to compel a return of affection. Two such inscriptions are clearly cast by a woman on a female object of desire. Ursula also drew in a thread from a passing reference to same-sex desire between female pilgrims on the Byzantine pilgrimage trail. Ursula will talk more about her inspirations in an interview in the next podcast episode. The other item that caught my interest was the handling of disability—not as a central theme of the story, but simply as one more facet of the main character that has shaped her life and will shape her choices.

This story is set in 4th century Cappadocia in what is modern-day Turkey. It was an era when Christianity had become well-established but was only beginning to evolve familiar forms and practices. Devotion often centered around specific communities and charismatic leaders. A network of pilgrimage sites had evolved across the ancient world with the side effect of encouraging travel and communication among ordinary people. Among other effects, it provided an approved context in which women could travel and see the world—all for a spiritual purpose, of course.

Our author for this episode, Ursula Whitcher, is a mathematician, writer, and editor whose work can be found in places including Cossmass Infinities, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the American Mathematical Society's Feature Column. I’m delighted and very proud that Ursula’s sale of “The Spirits of Cabassus” to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast became part of her qualifications to join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.

Ursula can be found on twitter as @superyarn, or through her website http://yarntheory.net.

The narrator for today’s story is your host, that is, me.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

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The Spirits of Cabassus

By Ursula Whitcher

Read by Heather Rose Jones

Prisca’s journey from Ancyra to Cabassus was one long fog of mud and cinnamon. Her hips and thighs ached from balancing on donkey-back and the spring damp crept inside her boots. Her brother alternated between praising the virgins of Cabassus for their sanctity and enumerating their family connections: “Holy Eunomia was mother to a bishop, have you not realized? And cousin to a senator as well.”

Prisca had read the bishop’s letters about the shrine the virgins tended and, stranger and more miraculous, the community they created, where senators’ cousins and wandering beggars lived alike in dignity. She nodded, softly at first, then vigorously enough to make the movement legible beneath her traveling shawl. The pain inside her temples pierced deeper, twisting like a cobbler’s awl, and the roadside fell into shadow.

“We’ll be there soon,” her brother said. But he grimaced at Prisca clutching her saddle horn and pushed his mount forward. He left a cloud of resin and hot spices, the scented oils he had smeared to take away the stink of mule-sweat. Behind Prisca, his servant grumbled and coughed.

They reached the virgins’ house in late evening, when true dusk layered over the clouds in Prisca’s vision. She was vaguely aware of two women, one tall and stern, one round-shouldered and wide-eyed. They were dressed alike, in plain dresses and dark, mannish cloaks.

Prisca’s brother began an oration of gratitude for hospitality. Her headache flared with each gesture, like a lantern-flame in the wind, if her skull was a wick. Prisca tried to focus on her feet, the clamminess of her boots, the pressure of cold stone—anything to keep from swaying. Voices echoed and throbbed. At last, through some wisdom she could not discern, the holy virgins made her brother stop talking.

Prisca found herself trailing the stooping woman into a room hung with a simple linen curtain. She managed to say, “Please convey my thanks to the holy widow Eunomia.” 

The woman’s smile flashed, sharp as a well-honed knife. “Sleep, little sister. Sleep, and thank God, if you will.”

Prisca collapsed upon the narrow, rug-covered cot. It smelled a little like damp sheep, but there were none of the layers of rose-oil and travelers’ sweat that soaked into wayhouse beds. She did not think her headache would let her escape, but whether by divine providence or sheer exhaustion, she slept deep.

In the morning, Prisca’s headache was gone. She lay for a moment not crediting it, keeping her eyes closed, for fear light would reveal the shimmer of pain in abeyance. Instead she found slanting sunbeams and a phantasmic garden. The room’s walls were painted with vines and flowers, leaping fish and drooping bunches of grapes, all shaded so cleverly they seemed to spring out from the walls—but there was none of the damply green smell of a garden, only cold stone and that memory of a sheep. The room was huge, even divided by the curtain, more appropriate for the master or mistress of an estate than for one solitary guest. Prisca peeked to the other side and saw a bed like hers, empty, with a rough rug folded at the feet.

Her traveling bag was by the door. Prisca did her best to make herself presentable, pinning up her hair and shaking out her tunic, marveling all the while at the lightness of moving without pain. She whispered thanks for the continuing small miracle and went out into the courtyard.

The tall woman from the night before stood by the fountain. In the sunlight her face looked mottled pink, in the way that happens to very fair people. Her hair still showed some blonde, though most of it was cloud-white. “Come!” she told Prisca. “Let us make some bread.”

Prisca blinked with all the perspicacity of a newly awakened kitten. She had never made bread; it was not one of the duties of a well-born woman. But the surprising thing was not the task, which must be a part of the virgins’ ascetic practice, but the confidence with which the woman assigned it to her. There was no solicitude, no dampened cloths or snappish comparisons, simply a calm assumption that Prisca was capable of the work placed before her. She had never dared to pray for such a grace.

But as Prisca hesitated, the woman’s brow furrowed. “Your brother thinks this is a convenient place for women who have not found husbands. That is not what we are. We are making something new.”

Prisca had hoped that proximity to holiness would change her somehow, making the trials of existence easier to bear. She had failed to imagine what else she might do, besides survive. She dipped her head. “I fear I am still disoriented from the journey. Forgive me. You make a place where all people share in work alike—holy Eunomia?”

The woman’s smile was swift and cutting. It accentuated the deep lines in her face. “My name is Balsamea.”

She was named for balsam, that sweet and precious resin. It was a name for a prized possession. A name for a slave. But in that cutting smile, Prisca saw also a flash in the lamplight, the night before. The wide-eyed woman who showed Prisca to her room must have been Eunomia. And that trick of resemblance, the knife-edge smiles—the women must be sisters. Not in the sense of the virgins’ community, nor in the legal sense, but in the literal sense of children born to a man who owned many slaves.

It was easy to speak in the abstract of beggars praying side by side with senators’ cousins. It might be easy, in some ways, to be an unknown beggar: Prisca was learning that strangers meant new beginnings. But to be Balsamea, to grow up in the midst of family who denied her, to make herself a sister in faith instead of unacknowledged blood—this was a transformation as grand as the Eucharist.

“I would be honored by your instruction, holy Balsamea. Because truly, I have no idea where to begin.”

The woman’s laugh was kinder, now. “I suggest washing your hands.”

The bread they made was rough. It took stirring and pounding and a rest beside the fire. In the days that followed, Prisca’s arms ached and her hair filled with kitchen smoke. Her jaw grew strong from chewing. She learned the names of the other holy virgins and the rhythms of their days: the time spent spinning or sorting stones from lentils, the time spent standing with hands outstretched to God.

The weeks and months had rhythms too. On Sundays, they pressed into the dark church. On holy days, they went to the cemetery and remembered the martyrs of Cabassus, tipping communion wine into their graves and listening to the thrumming call of doves. When Prisca walked from the church into the glare of afternoon, she felt a pressure in her head like heavy thumbs. But otherwise, her headache stayed away.

At first, Prisca checked behind the curtain in her bedroom every morning, admiring the other half of the mural and wondering when another visitor would arrive. As the summer wore on, she stopped looking, content with the sisters she had already gained. But with the first rain of autumn, Prisca slipped back to her room to find a shawl. She heard, rising and falling with the drum of raindrops on the roof, a keening voice.

A woman was sprawled upon the other bed. She had pulled the pins out of her hair and scattered them by the window, so her dark curls spilled around her like a thundercloud. She was not classically beautiful—her eyebrows slashed up rather than forming a graceful arch, her nose was tilted, her cheeks displayed no blush, her mouth skewed wide—yet she was striking. More striking, perhaps, because in watching emotion flow across her face, one had the feeling of unique discovery.

In Prisca, that discovery was mixed with pain. Half of it was sympathetic, for the woman’s mobile face suggested agony of a sort Prisca had often felt and rarely dared display. The other half was bleak anticipation. There was a second cloud around the woman, a kind of darkened mist, clinging about her shoulders like her hair.

That rippling vision meant a headache looming. Prisca walked softly to her own bed and lay down. Sometimes, if she was very still, the pain passed quickly.

In this case, though she lay for an hour, fighting the urge to toss and turn at every sob from behind the curtain, the headache never arrived.

The woman’s name was Taesis. She came from Egypt. She had visited the hermits in the desert and the cities of Palestine in search of healing. At meals, the other virgins crowded about her, greedy for accounts of sacred places. Taesis’ face was stretched by pain, but she raised herself up like a queen among her maidens and told stories. She had been in Jerusalem before Easter. She walked among the graves on the Mount of Olives on Good Friday—“I could see the whole city scattered before me, like dice from my brother’s cup”—and followed a procession into the city, walking toward the climbing sun. Prisca struggled to find tasks that would prevent her from staring at the shadow wrapped around Taesis’ shoulders.

On the third or fourth evening, as they lay on either side of the curtain in the dark, Taesis asked, “Have I offended you?”

“Not at all!” Prisca said, too brightly.

There was a sigh and a soft thud. Taesis must be sitting up, attempting to stare through the curtain. “I know I am a temporary marvel. If there is some friendship I’ve disrupted, some long-planned meditation I’ve disturbed—tell me, and I will try to make it right.”

Prisca’s face burned. She was not used to being observed, but Taesis would be—there was no way to ignore that fluid loveliness. The mist that clung to Taesis was probably some trick of Prisca’s mind, the headache only partly in abeyance, but speaking of it would sound arrogant, as if Prisca thought herself some sort of prophet.

She offered up a different kind of guilt: “I have found healing in this place, and you have not. It isn’t fair.” And it might, in a way, be Prisca’s fault. Had not her brother written letters near and far, bragging of Prisca’s blessing in recovery as if he had created the miracle himself? Perhaps that had drawn Taesis on a long and fruitless journey.

Taesis’ laugh held the murmur of the turtledoves. “Nothing is fair! Will you bear the burdens of the whole world by yourself?”

Prisca huffed her own laugh, startled. She did sound arrogant, by that description, yet Taesis’ tone had been kind. In apology, she asked, “May I have a tale of your journey?”

“Because you missed the best parts?” But Taesis softened her teasing by continuing, “I will tell you the true best thing, though I fear there is not much in it of holiness. I took passage from Alexandria to Jerusalem on one of the great grain ships. I slept beneath a tarp on the deck, and the cat that ate the ship’s mice slept at my feet. I stood at the prow in the mornings, feeling the wind blow against my face. I thought it would blow the thorns away from me, leave all that in the past, with the crying of the gulls.”

“But it didn’t.”

“It didn’t. But the pain is always better when I am going somewhere new. What of you? How was your journey here?”

“Too ordinary to speak of.”

“Try me. Did your donkey bite?”

“Never. Except—” Except it had bitten Prisca’s brother once, while he was trying to recollect a quotation of Plutarch, and he had nearly dropped a saddle-bag in the mud. Prisca found herself telling the story, which somehow led into the childhood game where her brother portrayed a martyr and she was all the lions. “We should have found a cat like your ship-friend, for realism.”

“I hope you had better friends than your brother and stray cats!”

Prisca, by and large, had not. She felt as if that might be changing—but this was an illusion born of Taesis’ charm. The other woman would be off to the next holy site soon enough, no matter how much fun it was to trade stories of the impossibleness of brothers.

All the next day, Prisca tried not to wonder when Taesis would go. But the only question she had to puzzle at instead was the nature of the cloud that wrapped around her. If it was not a headache, might it be a demon? Was it heresy for Prisca to believe she might see such a thing? At other times, she had noticed shimmering lights, but those had always proved the headache’s harbingers.

At last, Prisca decided that the foolishness of dwelling on her worries was outweighed by the foolishness of ignoring the wisdom all around her. She took her tale to Balsamea, who said wryly, “This sounds like an enthusiasm, not a stormcloud.”

Prisca blushed ungracefully—she was sure her nose was reddest—and explained again about her headaches and the visual distortions they brought with them.

“And your headaches come from smoke?”

“They have followed me ever since I grew into a woman. I don’t know where they come from.”

“They come from smoke. I’ve seen it when you step inside the church and the purifying resin wafts your way. You look toward the altar joyfully, but your face grows tight.”

“But I’ve been breathing kitchen smoke since my first morning here.”

“Well, then we’ll ask the priest to burn bread instead of myrrh, next Easter.” Balsamea punctuated her joke by slamming dough into the table.

Prisca burned a loaf in earnest, while pondering Balsamea’s suggestion. If wafting incense kindled her headaches, then the cloud around Taesis must be something else. But perhaps the source of her headaches was the smell of incense, and not the literal smoke?

Prisca had a little pot of oil scented with lilies, myrrh, and saffron. She had not anointed herself since coming to Cabassus: the holy virgins were not given to primping after baths. She uncorked it carefully, and breathed deep. The sweetness was bewildering, almost unreal, though cut through with the green hum of myrrh.

Pain crept up gradually, beginning with an uneasiness in the stomach and an unwillingness to stoop over desks or walk quickly. Lights did not shimmer, though any light seemed too bright, and soon Prisca found herself lying on her bed again, cursing her own doubt. The headache was simultaneously dull and excruciating: in a few short weeks, Prisca had forgotten how boring it was to do nothing but hurt. She should have trusted Balsamea’s wisdom, and not tried to double-check.

Prisca arose the next day muzzy-headed but determined. She would imitate Odysseus in the legend and stop up the offending organ—in this case, her nose—with wax. If Taesis was wreathed in perfume made visible, blocking the scent should make its shadow disappear.

Shaping wax so that it plugged her nose without falling out or making an unsightly mess was harder than Prisca expected. It took multiple attempts, all the while peering into her little round mirror like a girl awaiting a suitor, before Prisca managed something she was satisfied with, and by then Taesis had gone to join the others at morning prayer. She had to do it all over again that evening. She drew back the curtain cautiously, feeling cool night air on her tongue. Shadows leapt everywhere in the lamplight. The mist around Taesis caught and hold the light, turning almost gold.

Prisca bit her tongue in frustration. The plan had seemed so good.

“Come sit by me,” said Taesis.

Prisca obeyed, resting gingerly at the edge of the bed. When Taesis rested an arm over her shoulders, she jumped, making an ungainly splurting sound in an effort not to snort out the wax.

Taesis straightened. “Prisca, why have you been gazing at me, if you do not wish to embrace in friendship?”

The splurting turned into choking. Prisca had to flee behind her side of the curtain and wipe her face with a handkerchief. At last she returned to Taesis’ side and said, cautious, “There is a kind of cloud around you.”

“Oh! Do you believe it is a demon?”

“But it isn’t—in this holy place—I can’t believe that your own actions—”

The smile dropped from Taesis’ lips. Sitting this close, Prisca could see the starkness in her face, the hollows that the floating mist had smoothed. “Do you not know how desperately I have wished that my enemy had a name and a shape, so I could battle it?”

Prisca clasped Taesis’ hand. In some odd corner of her mind, she was surprised to find her own hand was smaller. “I feared I saw my own pain, instead of your true face.”

“But there is something there, and you can see it? Your insight is greater than every holy man in all Jerusalem.”

“It cannot be a demon, then. One of them would have recognized it.”

“Some other kind of spirit, perhaps? Oh, I wish I knew its name.”

“Perhaps...” Prisca had tried once, shamefully, to cast a spell to take away her headache. It had failed, and she had shuddered at her own foolishness, but she still remembered what she had learned. “I memorized the names of angels, once. Perhaps if we called upon them?”

Hope swept across Taesis’ face like branching lightning.

Prisca and Taesis prepared their ritual in the Cabassus cemetery, because it was the holiest place that they could go. They said prayers on behalf of the martyrs first. Then Prisca arranged three lines of clay lamps, lifting up their wicks and filling them with sweet oil. Her fingers felt thick. She was terrified she would spill oil on the ground, but when she glanced at Taesis she saw a face intent, confident. Confident in her.

Prisca made a triangle of vowels, those powerful sounds that gave a soul to every word, beginning with alpha and expanding—a, ae, aeê—until she reached omega. On the page, those letters had looked like so many pebbles. Now they gathered momentum, so as her chant continued, Prisca felt less and less like a child scattering rocks, and more like an avalanche, rushing downhill.

At the final recitation of omega, she lit the last wick, enclosing Taesis in a triangle of flame. Prisca took a deep breath and called upon the heavenly host: “Saot Sabaoth!” Then, holding her hands open, she issued a command: “Reveal yourself! Reveal yourself! Reveal yourself!”

The flames leapt. Taesis’ features fell into ordinary shadow, and shame swept over Prisca, leaving heat between her breasts and in the hinges of her knees. How had she dared to set herself up as a magician? Was she so starved for any word of kindness?

But when Prisca looked up, a second woman stood beside Taesis, on the ground between the candles. She was shorter and rounder than Prisca, the kind of woman who wore her strophium wide for comfort. Her hair was formed into many braids, clinging tight to her head, and her tunic was kilted up around her knees. Her eyes must have been brown in life, but they burned now like banked embers. She raised her chin to stare at Prisca, revealing harsh bruises in the hollows of her throat.

Those were thumbprints. The woman had been murdered.

Prisca looked at Taesis for one long, agonizing moment, but her eyes were wide with wonder, not with guilt.

Very well, then. It was Prisca’s task to understand the ghost that she had summoned. The spirit’s awful death must have forced restlessness upon her, so that she could not sleep between death and the resurrection. Perhaps the curse had transferred. “What is your name?”

“I am Mesiesis, daughter of Tapollos.” The ghost spoke Greek with a thick accent, blurring her alphas and omegas together. Acquaintance with Taesis made it easier to decipher.

“I am Prisca, daughter of Petrus.”

Mesiesis smiled, revealing flame between her teeth. “The other one was not nearly so polite.”

“What other one?” Prisca asked, heart sinking.

“Why, the first person who burned incense and set commands upon me.”

“Tell me,” Prisca said, with the false gentleness used by every doctor who had ever tried to heal her, “what commands you have been given.”

The ghost turned her eyes toward the sky, remembering, and recited, “Give me advantage over Taesis, whom Nilogenia bore. Burn her, set her on fire, inflame her in liver, heart, and spirit. Torment her body night and day, and force her to rush forth from every place and every house, burning, until she comes again to me with love.”

“It’s real,” said Taesis softly, cupping her hands above a candle flame. “I did not think the fire could be real.”

“Do you know what man might have cursed you?” Prisca asked.

Even before she saw her friend’s bitter smile, she knew that it was hopeless. Anyone and everyone would love Taesis.

“What will you give to me,” Mesiesis asked, “if I tell you the name?”

What would a ghost want? Prayers? Revenge? It was probably a sin to bargain with her—but that was arrogance. The greatest sin against Mesiesis happened before she was laid in the ground.

Perhaps Prisca was approaching this the wrong way. What was it like to be a ghost? To haunt a place, unseen and unacknowledged? It must be rather like being sick, the crushing unavoidable boredom. Mesiesis might have been dead for longer than Prisca had been alive.

Could Prisca offer distraction? “I will read to you, tales of the saints and histories of far-off places, so even if you do not sleep, you may still dream.”

Mesiesis blinked, and then narrowed her eyes, considering. “Would you teach me to read?”

How did one give a lesson to a ghost? She could not shift a stylus or hold a scroll open. Prisca envisioned herself muttering letters, with all the repetitiveness of prayer, and none of the glory. But how selfish would it be not to try? “I will do my best.”

The ghost regarded Prisca for a long moment, and then nodded. “It is a bargain. I was commanded by Anastasia, born of Syra.”

Taesis keened, raising her face to the sky and flailing her arms, loud enough to wake the martyrs. Mesiesis tried in vain to hold her.

“Don’t!” cried Prisca. “You’ll light your dress on fire!”

Taesis subsided in a weird giggling lump. Prisca wanted to go to her, but she was afraid to cross the lines of lamps. Mesiesis sat cross-legged and patted Taesis’ shoulder, or the air above it.

“Who is Anastasia?” Prisca asked, once Taesis seemed calmer. This set off another round of keening, but at last she learned the tale.

Anastasia had once been Taesis’ friend. “I know—at least, I hope—you find me beautiful. But Anastasia seemed to have every blessing of God upon her. She could embroider a bird that seemed ready to leap from the cloth, and sing like that bird’s song.” Their parents had neighboring estates, and the girls were in and out of each others’ houses from nearly the time that they could walk. “Once we reached womanhood, our friendship turned to love. We used to cling to each other and ask whether our souls could fuse.”

Mesiesis rolled her eyes and pointed to her tunic, which partly overlapped with Taesis’ knee.

“But you fell out?” asked Prisca.

“She married my brother.”

“Oh.”

“Our fathers were so proud of themselves. They were neighbors. My brother loved her almost as much as I did. Maybe because I did.”

“So you went to Jerusalem?”

“I went first to Alexandria. I stayed with a cousin. I made so many friends. Anastasia told me that nothing had to change—she would love me forever—but I could not. I loved my brother. At first she wrote me teasing letters. She drew pictures of falcons.”

“And then?”

“And then the claws sank into my heart”—Mesiesis looked abashed—”and I began my journey.”

“But you can write to her now, can you not? Your suffering—she cannot let it last, if she still loves you.”

“I hope that would have been true. Anastasia’s life had been so blessed, she treated pain like something out of legend.”

Beside her, silent, Mesiesis mouthed, “Very large estate.”

“But why not now?” Prisca insisted.

Taesis took a long, shuddering breath, her keening exhausted. “I had a letter from my brother when I was in Tripolis. Anastasia died while bearing his son.”

Prisca longed to hold her. But if she broke the line of flames, Mesiesis might disappear, and she still had questions. “These curses, they are often anchored by a tablet or a scroll. Perhaps, if we went to Mesiesis’ grave, we might destroy it.”

Mesiesis drew herself up, eyes burning like the sun, tunic caught in an invisible stormwind. “You cannot! You must not!”

“Why not?” asked Prisca, forcing herself to calm.

“I lived my whole life in the same mud town, and then decades of death underneath the mud in the same town, and now you want to send me back? I am not a broken pot, that you can frown at and toss in the trash heap!”

Prisca’s fine words about the joys of reading had been discarded, the moment she saw a solution to the puzzle. She was abashed.

“I see,” Taesis said slowly, “why the pain lifted when I traveled to a new place.”

“I sent you rushing forth the first time by command,” confessed Mesiesis. “But the second time, that was for joy.”

“So if I continue to travel, you will lift your torments? Or tease me in gentler ways than with claws of fire?”

“Your friend must teach me to read, first.”

“She could come with us.”

Taesis’ face was wreathed in smiles now, forgotten tear-tracks glittering like starlight. Prisca felt long slow warmth, like the sun. She could go forth, invited for herself and not out of obligation, with her dear friend and a curious, stubborn ghost. She could see the towers of Constantinople and the churches of Jerusalem.

Prisca imagined standing at the prow of a ship, as Taesis had described it. She had to guess what the ocean might be like: a great flat expanse, perhaps, like a river multiplied, reflecting the brightness of the sky. It was easier to envision her companions. Taesis’ hand would curl around hers, pressing each finger as if remembering a song played on the lyre. Mesiesis—Mesiesis would soar like a bird. Every evening Prisca would make a record, describing the places they had visited and the holy people they had met, to share with her friends here in Cabassus.

But even in imagination, the sunlight on the water hurt. Travel meant the rose-oil and dirt of wayhouses, and the long slow grind of her headache returning. Prisca contemplated stuffing her nose with wax every morning and evening, the way other women arranged their hair. Eventually, she supposed, it would become routine.

But that was not the rhythm Prisca wanted for her life. She loved the feeling of flour between her fingers and the careful planning for each holy day, the gleam of Balsamea’s smiles at a precise observation. She did not want to leave the holy virgins and the community they made. She wanted to teach others how it worked. She was growing into this place.

In truth, Prisca thought, she might not have known how to listen to Mesiesis, had she not first learned how to hear Balsamea. “Cabassus is my home.”

Taesis sighed—but only temporarily. “Still, I can visit! And write letters. Perhaps Mesiesis might even consent to haunt you with a message?”

Mesiesis grinned. “You are learned women. You can invent a spell.”

Prisca wanted, in this moment, to find something much simpler. She picked her way gingerly between the lamps, until she was at the center of the triangle, holding Taesis close. She felt a strange hot breeze around and inside her.

They were, of a surety, making something new.

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Show Notes

This quarter’s fiction episode presents “The Spirits of Cabassus” by Ursula Whitcher, narrated by Heather Rose Jones.

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 Ursula Whitcher Online

• Website: yarntheory.net
• Twitter: @superyarn

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 227 – Charlotte Charke - transcript

(Originally aired 2022/04/16 - listen here)

It is, perhaps, an odd coincidence that there are two prominent actors of the English-speaking stage named Charlotte whose lives are of interest to the topic of queer history. You’ve probably heard me go on at length about 19th century American actor Charlotte Cushman and the complex community of feminists, performers, and sculptors that she was enmeshed in and supported. But today I want to talk about another Charlotte on the stage, 18th century English actor Charlotte Charke.

I think we can say with confidence that Charlotte Charke was queer, but it’s less possible to sort out with any certainty how to describe her gender and sexuality. Charlotte Charke’s life and career raises issues of the multiple functions that cross-dressing had in the 18th century, and the ways it was interpreted by its various audiences. We see the ways that gender presentation interact with economic factors, and the fluidity with which some people moved within the gender spectrum. And we see how difficult it is to try to apply modern sexuality categories in a context where people engaged with gender identity in different ways than we’re used to. Finally, there is the challenge of interpreting the evidence—even first person evidence—in a context where candid truth was a ways down the list of functions that the narrative was meant to fulfil.

Charke left us an autobiography that—while written for public consumption and therefore of questionable reliability—offers some evidence for what we might consider today a transmasculine identity. But Charke also begins by stating that her narrative is “the product of a female pen.” On that basis, I’m going to feel free to identify Charke with female pronouns in this podcast by default, while using male pronouns in contexts when Charke is choosing a masculine presentation. In so doing, I’m not committing to any particular interpretation, but rather emphasizing the complexities of identification. My alternation in reference is not meant to confuse or to misrepresent, but to acknowledge not only the ambiguity of the evidence, but the potential fluidity of Charke’s identity.

Charlotte Charke was born in 1713, the twelfth and last child of actor-playwright Colley Cibber and his wife, actress and musician Katherine Shore. As was not unusual in that era, most of her siblings had died in infancy, and Charlotte came along fairly late at a time when her mother had hoped to be done with children. From a combination of factors, she was left much to her own devices as a child, and in addition to a rather classical education at a girls school, she was attracted to male-coded hobbies and activities such as shooting, horse racing, science, gardening, and medicine.

But the family as a whole revolved around the theater, and it was perhaps inevitable that she would enter the family business. Her father, Colley Cibber, was the manager of the Drury Lane theater, a prolific writer and adapter of plays, and best known for his comic parts. In the later part of his life, he was named poet laureate of the United Kingdom, somewhat to the dismay and ridicule of contemporary poets such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips who felt it was a political appointment.

The social politics of the theater community of the time were prominent influences in Charlotte’s life. Charlotte’s marriage at age 16 to musician Richard Charke was short-lived due to Charlotte’s conclusion that Richard was far more interested in being Cibber’s son-in-law than her husband. But marriage gave Charlotte entrance to an acting career—something less acceptable for an unmarried woman. Her stage career was briefly interrupted by pregnancy and the birth of her daughter Catherine within the first year of her marriage. When she returned to the stage, Charlotte began specializing largely though not exclusively in breeches roles---male parts played by a woman.

While the English theater of the 16th and early 17th centuries was characterized by the female roles being played by young men, later in the 17th century it became acceptable for women to appear on stage to play female roles and men cross-dressing to play female roles fell out of favor except as broad comedy. But the pendulum kept swinging and by the early 18th century it was common for women to cross-dress to play male roles. While part of the appeal was the erotic attraction for male audiences of seeing a female performer’s limbs revealed in male clothing, the dynamics were more complicated than that. As hinted at in Charke’s writings and in the general reception of “breeches roles”, female audiences were also open to enjoying the erotic delights of appreciating the female form within the socially licensed context of a male role. In the mid-18th century, a writer noted male and female audience members might debate over whether a particular performer was “the finest woman or the prettiest fellow.” As we’ll see, this dynamic played out for Charke off-stage as well. And despite Charke’s position that the women who were attracted to her male presentation were ignorant of her assigned sex, this may be simply a convenient trope to deflect the accusation of being an “improper object” of desire. Charke was not the only female actor of the time who cross-dressed offstage, on occasion, as well as on. In Charke’s own writing, we may be seeing some of the careful negotiation of how such behavior was understood and made—if not entirely acceptable—then at least not directly challenging to heterosexual norms.

In the next half-dozen years after her debut, Charlotte’s professional life was tumultuous. Her father sold his interest in the Drury Lane Theatre and without that connection, Charlotte’s somewhat boisterous personal life and tendency to quarrel with theatre managers made it difficult for her to find steady work. Her estranged husband fled debts by leaving the country and died shortly after. So at age 24, Charlotte Charke was a widow, a single mother, and a largely unemployed actor. It was also around this time that Charke began to adopt a male presentation regularly off the stage as well as on-stage.

In her autobiography (which, it should be noted, was written and published largely to raise money and so may be suspected of playing to public tastes and opinions to some extent) Charke suggests that her transmasculine interests began at an early age. She was given an education “such indeed as might have been sufficient for a Son instead of a Daughter” and suggested that she disdained needlework. She recounts dressing up to mimic her father at age four, putting on his breeches, waistcoat, wig, and hat—which was taken as an amusing entertainment by her family. As noted before, she recounts her love for masculine-coded pursuits such as horses, hunting, and medicine.

These broad interests and her willingness to take up occupations normally restricted to men served her in good stead when acting roles dried up when she left the Drury Lane Theatre. After a brief stint running a traveling puppet theater, sold to pay off medical bills, she was reduced to begging for donations from friends and was imprisoned for debt, her bail being paid—according to her autobiography—by a consortium of coffee-house keepers and prostitutes from the Covent Garden neighborhood that was theatre central in London.

The circumstances of her arrest, as recounted in her autobiography, provide a vivid example of her gender-crossing. She explains that her accuser identified her “by Dint of a very handsome lac'd Hat I had on, being then, for some substantial Reasons, EN CAVALIER; which was so well described, the Bailiff had no great Trouble in finding me.” (“En cavalier”—that is, as a cavalier—was an expression for cross-dressing women at the time.) Charke immediately set to the complicated business of finding someone willing to stand as bail, but was stymied by the need to also cover the original debt. “I had not been there Half an Hour, before I was surrounded with all the Ladies who kept Coffee-Houses in and about the Garden, each offering Money for my Ransom: But nothing then could be done, without the Debt and Costs; which, though there was, I believe, about a dozen or fourteen Ladies present, they were not able to raise. As far as their Finances extended, they made an Offer of 'em; and would have given Notes jointly or separately, for the Relief of poor Sir Charles, as they were pleased to stile me.”

There were many more economic opportunities for a man than a woman, and Charke’s interest in cross-dressing became something of a profession at several periods in her life, taking up the identity of Charles Brown, which gave him access to a succession of jobs he could not have had as a woman: pastry cook, sausage-maker, farmer, grocer, even valet to the Earl of Anglesey.

Charke recounts close brushes with romantic entanglements as Mr. Brown, though (in the autobiography) presenting them as amusing and embarrassing misconstruals. Here is one episode.

“Notwithstanding my Distresses, the Want of Cloaths was not amongst the Number. I appeared as Mr. Brown, …in a very genteel Manner; and, not making the least Discovery of my Sex by my Behaviour, ever endeavouring to keep up to the well-bred Gentlemen, I became, as I may most properly term it, the unhappy Object of Love in a young Lady, whose Fortune was beyond all earthly Power to deprive her of, had it been possible for me to have been, what she designed me, nothing less than her Husband. She was an Orphan Heiress, and under Age; but so near it, that, at the Expiration of eight Months, her Guardian resigned his Trust, and I might have been at once possessed of the Lady, and forty thousand Pounds in the Bank of England: Besides Effects in the Indies, that were worth about twenty Thousand more.”

The matter went farther than Charke was willing to risk and, having been maneuvered into a private conversation with the lady:

“With much Difficulty, I mustered up Courage sufficient to open a Discourse, by which I began to make a Discovery of my Name and Family, which struck the poor Creature into Astonishment; but how much greater was her Surprize, when I positively assured her that I was actually the youngest Daughter of Mr. Cibber, and not the Person she conceived me! She was absolutely struck speechless for some little Time; but, when she regained the Power of Utterance, entreated me not to urge a Falshood of that Nature, which she looked upon only as an Evasion, occasioned, she supposed, through a Dislike of her Person: Adding, that her Maid had plainly told her I was no Stranger to her miserable Fate, as she was pleased to term it; and, indeed, as I really thought it.

I still insisted on the Truth of my Assertion; and desired her to consider, whether 'twas likely an indigent young Fellow must not have thought it an unbounded Happiness, to possess at once so agreeable a Lady and immense a Fortune, both which many a Nobleman in this Kingdom would have thought it worth while to take Pains to atchieve.”

Charke may well have been playing up the woman’s interest and confidence that Mr. Brown was an acceptable prospective suitor. It’s something of a trope in gender-crossing narratives of this era for the transmasculine figure to be depicted as quite attractive to women, while disclaiming anything more than a hypothetical desire on his side.

On another occasion, Mr. Brown approached a woman who had known Charlotte as a child (and was aware of his dual identity) for assistance in finding work. “The Woman herself knew who I was, but her Husband was an entire Stranger, to whom she introduced me as a young Gentleman of a decay'd Fortune; and, after apoligizing for Half an Hour, proposed to her Spouse to get me the Waiter's Place, which was just vacant, at one Mrs. Dorr's, who formerly kept the King's-Head, at Mary-la-Bonne.”

Brown gave such good service in this job, and was so personable, that Mrs. Dorr let it be known, through a maid-servant, that she would welcome a romantic advance from her new employee. Mr. Brown returned the polite disclaimer that he had no intention of re-marrying, to avoid the risk of giving his daughter a step-mother. (Much of Charke’s financial difficulties were compounded by the need to support a child.) But yet further complications arose.

“In the Interim Somebody happened to come, who hinted that I was a Woman; upon which, Madam, to my great Surprize, attacked me with insolently presuming to say she was in Love with me, which I assured her I never had the least Conception of. No, truly; I believe, said she, I should hardly be 'namour'd WITH ONE OF MY OWN Sect: Upon which I burst into a Laugh, and took the Liberty to ask her, if she understood what she said? This threw the offended Fair into an absolute Rage, and our Controversy lasted for some Time; but, in the End, I brought in Vindication of my own Innocence, the Maid to Disgrace, who had uncalled for trumped up so ridiculous a Story.

Mrs. Dorr still remained incredulous, in regard to my being a Female; and though she afterwards paid me a Visit, with my worthy Friend (at my House in Drury-Lane) who brought my unsuccessful Letter back from my Father, she was not to be convinced, I happening that Day to be in the Male-Habit, on Account of playing a Part for a poor Man, and obliged to find my own Cloaths.

She told me, she wished she had known me better when I lived with her, she would, on no Terms, have parted with her Man Charles.”

Mr. Brown’s repeated insistence that he had no romantic interest in the women who were attracted to him must be considered in the context of publication. This was an autobiography being created to explain and redeem Charke’s career and reputation. Romantic adventures involving the sort of mistaken identity that also featured in comic drama on the stage would further this goal. Admissions of what could only be perceived as unnatural desire would not have benefitted Charke’s purpose.

During this period, Charke sometimes had stints with acting companies, either in London or on the road. She wrote and produced plays of her own, and worked as a puppeteer and prompter. Sometimes Charke worked as Charles Brown, sometimes as Charlotte Charke, and there is some evidence that even as Brown, Charke might be perceived as a cross-dressing woman rather than as a man. On other occasions, Charke admits to using the Mr. Brown alias to dodge creditors she had gathered as Charlotte Charke.

A common theme of gender-crossing narratives is the advantage to the transmasculine figure of having his gender identity confirmed by the presence of a female partner. For an extended period during Charles Brown’s itinerant career, he was accompanied by a woman identified in the autobiography only as Mrs. Brown. The chronology of the narrative is uncertain enough that it isn’t clear whether Charles Brown took his name from that of Mrs. Brown, or whether the woman referred to as Mrs. Brown took her name from Charles. And, if so, it isn’t clear that Mrs. Brown was using that name in contexts when accompanying Charlotte Charke—Charke had been acting under both names at various times when Mrs. Brown makes her first appearance by name. But it’s clear that the existence of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, presenting as a married couple, was not purely a fiction in support of Charles Brown’s existence.

The two were part of a touring company of actors and we have our first clear discussion of Mrs. Brown while they are in Gloucestershire. In introducing her, Charke notes, “I happened to be taken violently ill with a nervous Fever and Lowness of Spirits, that continued upon me for upwards of three Years, before I was able to get the better of it. ” She is assisted in various ways by, “my Friend, the goodnatured Gentlewoman … to whom I am most infinitely and sincerely obliged for her tender Care in nursing me in three Years Illness, without repining at her Fatigue, which was uninterrupted, and naturally fixes on me a lasting grateful Sense of the Favour.”

We hear of several adventures the two experience while traveling together as Mr. and Mrs. Brown: barely escaping being defrauded by some thieves who befriended them, Mr. Brown’s hapless venture into setting up as a pastry chef and farmer in Chepstow. Mrs. Brown rescued them from that debacle by means of a convenient legacy from an aunt in Oxfordshire. That stop-gap, too, soon ran out and Mr. Brown lamented, “the Winter growing fast upon us, we had no Prospect before us, but of dying by Inches with Cold and Hunger; and, what aggravated my own Distress, was having unfortunately drawn in my Friend to be a melancholly Partaker of my Sufferings. This Reflection naturally rouzed me into an honourable Spirit of Resolution, not to let her perish through my unhappy and mistaken Conduct, which I meant all for the best, though it unfortunately proved otherwise.”

The support was not all one-sided, and when Mr. Brown comes into a minor windfall, he records that he chose to “consign it all to the Use of one, to whom I should have thought, on this Occasion, if every Shilling had been a Guinea, I had made but a reasonable Acknowledgement, after having immers'd her in Difficulties which nothing but real Friendship and a tender Regard to my Health (which, through repeated Grievances, was much impaired) could have made her blindly inconsistent with her own Interest to give into, and so patiently endure.”

But only a couple pages later, Mr. Brown “was obliged to strip my Friend of the ownly decent Gown she had, and pledged it to pay [a debt]”

Mrs. Brown slips out of the narrative at that point and the story shifts to a discussion of Charke’s now-married daughter and the tribulations of another acting troupe they appear to be collectively involved in, with Charke once more going through the world as a woman.

It is probably not possible to be certain of how Charke viewed her endeavors as Mr. Brown. Now returned to the stage as Charlotte Charke, she recounts the following:

“Before I conclude the Account of my Bath Expedition, I cannot avoid taking Notice of a malicious Aspersion, thrown and fixed on me as a Reason for leaving it; which was, That I designed to forsake my Sex again, and that I positively was seen in the Street in Breeches. This I solemnly avow to be an impertinent Falshood, which was brought to London and spread itself, much to my Disadvantage, in my own Family; where I was informed it was delivered to them as a Reality, by an Actress that came to Town, soon after I quitted Bath. I guess at the Person, but, as I know her to be half mad, must neither wonder or be angry at her Folly; yet, as she has sometimes Reason sufficient to distinguish between Truth and Falshood, am surprized she should meanly have recourse to the latter, to make me appear ridiculous, who never gave her the least Provocation to do me so apparent an Injury.”

No, Charke says, the reason she left Bath at that point was not because she had been seen cross-dressing off the stage, but because she was disgusted with the low quality of the actors she was expected to work beside. If the woman referred to as “my friend” is the same as Mrs. Brown (which appears to be the case) then they were still together at that point. As Charke explains that when the acting company at Bath dissolved “My Friend and I went with another Manager” and continued touring, though the friend reproaches Charke for abandoning what had apparently been a good gig in Bath.

At this point in her life, Charke returned to London and decided to open an “oratorical academy” to train actors, and to focus on writing, including the autobiography that provides many of the more sensational details of her life. And although this final portion of her autobiography has several references to “my friends” there is no mention of “my friend” that can clearly be connected with her references to Mrs. Brown using that term.

I’ve spent so much time quoting the passages involving Mrs. Brown because they are the most strongly suggestive that Charlotte Charke (or Charles Brown, or both) had a long-term mutually supportive and emotionally committed relationship with a woman, and that they presented themselves, at least on some occasions, as a married couple, and that Mrs. Brown clearly was familiar with the entirety of Charke’s life and identities. Was this relationship specifically associated with Charles Brown’s masculine identity? Or were the two facets of Charke’s life independent of each other? Some historians have offered a number of events in support of interpreting Charke as heterosexual and a situational cross-dresser, including her marriage to a man, and a lack of evidence that she shared a bed with Mrs. Brown. But there is a clear double standard here. If a man and woman engaged in the relationship depicted in Charke’s autobiography, few would raise doubts that it was a romantic and sexual one.

Charlotte Charke returned to London and gave up the life of a traveling actor in 1754 when she was 41 years of age. But poverty and a lifetime of medical problems had taken their toll and she died of an illness only 6 years later. With all the questions of accuracy that her autobiography raises, we can be sure that without it we would know far less of the details of her life. And her life was packed full of the sort of queer details that are so often silently erased from history. We’re lucky to know her.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• The decidedly queer life of 18th c English actor Charlotte Charke
• The full text of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke…Written by herself can be found through Google Books
• This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Charlotte Charke

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)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 226 - On the Shelf for April 2022 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2022/03/02 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for April 2022.

News of the Field

Spring is turning my mood around a little. I can look out the window from my home office here and see the apple tree blooming, the mourning doves billing and cooing at the feeder, and the first promise of the apothecary roses framing the herb garden. Soon enough it’ll be a hot California summer, but for the moment everything is green and growing.

I’m suspended in that uneasy place between starting to do pre-pandemic things again, while keeping up a lot of precautions. I have several in-person convention trips planned for this summer, as well as a handful of online events. I love the flexibility and access that online conventions provide, but I’ve really missed the spontaneous person-to-person parts. And trying to do book promotion purely as an online thing just doesn’t have the same thrill as meeting readers face to face. So I’m glad I’ll have a couple of in-person events in the months following my book release this month.

Oh, did you know I have a new book coming out this month? What is the use of having one’s very own book-related podcast if one doesn’t take the opportunity for a little self-promotion? My novella The Language of Roses is being published by Queen of Swords Press, a small publishing house founded by author Catherine Lundoff that specializes in—to quote the website—"swashbuckling tales of derring-do, bold new adventures in time and space, mysterious stories of the occult and arcane and fantastical tales of people and lands far and near.” Queen of Swords has been collecting high praise for its small-but-growing catalog and I’m thrilled to find my work in such company.

The Language of Roses is new take on Beauty and the Beast that asks the question, what happens when an aromantic Beauty collides with an unredeemable Beast? Here’s the cover copy:

A Beauty. A Beast. A Curse. This is not the story you know. Come on a new and magical journey into the heart of a familiar fairytale. Meet Alys, eldest daughter of a merchant, a merchant who foolishly plucks a rose from a briar as he flees from the home of a terrifying fay Beast and his seemingly icy sister. Now Alys must pay the price to save his life and allow the Beast, the once handsome Philippe, to pay court to her. But Alys has never fallen in love with anyone; how can she love a Beast? The fairy Peronelle, waiting in the woods to see the culmination of her curse, is sure that she will fail. Yet, if she does, Philippe’s sister Grace and her beloved Eglantine, trapped in an enchanted briar in the garden, will pay a terrible price. Unless Alys can find another way…

In my highly-biased opinion, I think The Language of Roses may be the best thing I’ve written to date. And though I wouldn’t have chosen to spend three years trying to find the ideal home for it, I’m glad it ended up at Queen of Swords.

What Makes a Historic Fantasy Historic?

One might validly ask if a retold fairy tale is “historic” in the context of this podcast. That’s a question that comes up for a number of fantasy genres. When I’m putting the new book listings together, often I find myself making individual judgments based on how well the frame of the story connects with real-world history. Sometimes the characters and plot of the fairy tale are translated into a realistic story, and then the question is only a matter of what era has been chosen for that translation. Sometimes the author embraces the “fairy” part of fairy tale and uses an entirely fantastical secondary world. When I wrote The Language of Roses I chose to frame it in a realistic depiction of mid-18th century France, intersecting with the realm of faerie, but one as imagined by people of that era.

I sometimes have a harder time deciding whether to include a book if the setting is clearly modeled after a specific historic culture but is clearly indicated as not being that culture. This type of setting can make my judgments more inconsistent, because the degree of familiarity I have with the analog culture can affect whether I perceive the setting as being more invented or as being more borrowed. It’s something I try to stay aware of but I’m sure that on occasion I’ve failed to include books that were just as historically grounded as ones I did include, simply because I didn’t know enough to recognize those historic underpinnings.

There’s one category of cross-time story that I very rarely include, and that’s the “adventures of an immortal character across time.” A lot of “ancient vampire” stories fall in this category. This may simply be a prejudice of mine, but even when this type of story includes scenes set in the past, it rarely reads to me as a story set in history. So if your favorite ancient vampire novel fails to appear in the new book listings, chalk it up to my idiosyncratic prejudices.

Publications on the Blog

The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog spent the month working through the articles in the collection Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson. Only a couple of the papers in this collection specifically address topics related to homoeroticism, but very much like my interest in books on singlewomen, this type of history can be both grounding and inspiring when creating stories about lesbian-like characters in history. Too many historic novels envision their sapphic protagonists in isolation, at best making common cause with a love interest to create a cozy cocoon. But women lived lives rich in interconnections with other women—indeed, for most of history, other women were far more relevant to a woman’s life than any man was, even a possible husband. And those interconnections had plenty of space within them for emotional and romantic bonds. So understanding the feminine matrix of womens’ lives—regardless of sexuality—is essential for composing stories with the rich detail of the past. I’m trying to get through this collection at a relatively fast clip, so I’ve covered half of the 18 articles so far, including one of the two that first caught my eye: Jessica Tvordi’s “Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticisim in As You Like It and Twelfth Night”

Book Shopping!

The one new book that I bought in the last month also focuses on the general subject of women’s lives rather than lesbian-relevant topics in particular. This is the collection The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World, edited by Sabine R. Huebner and Christian Laes. I know that one article touches on evidence for female homosexuality, but as usual there will also be interest in the study of contexts in which women lived outside of heterosexual marriages.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

The new book listings for this month are half late additions from March and half April publications. I’ve decided to implement a new policy that will be invisible to most listeners. In the past, the show notes have linked the new books to their Amazon.com listings, because it’s the simplest way to provide at least one direct link for the book. But given that I’ve long been an agitator against the monopolistic practices of Amazon, I figured it was time to put in the extra effort to put my podcast where my mouth is. So going forward, the show notes will prioritize links directly to the publisher’s website, or to the author’s own website for self-published works. The next choice will be a universal book link page, if the author has set one up and I can find it easily. Third choice, especially for books from major publishers, will be bookshop.org. And only if none of the previous are available will I use the Amazon link. (And, of course, this will be the link for books that are published only through Amazon. Which is really a bad idea for the health of the book ecosystem, but I know why some people choose that route.)

So what are the March books that I haven’t previously listed?

Promises in Pompeii (Ancient Ashes #1) self-published by Violet Morley looks delightfully different from the majority of stories set in classical Rome. As far as I can tell, it only seems to be available from Amazon, so I may have to grit my teeth and buy it there. Here’s the cover copy.

Helvia doesn’t want for anything, but being wealthy can come at a cost. Navigating through her papa’s disinterest and trying to dodge her bully of a brother, Helvia is already learning how lonely life can be—until Octavia comes bursting on the scene, ready to help provide support, laughter, and companionship that Helvia desperately needs. Octavia’s family doesn’t have wealth, but they certainly aren’t short on love. She is taught early to stick up for what is right and work hard for those she cares about. As Helvia and Octavia grow, so does their friendship. Moving from childhood to adulthood while navigating the expectations of women in Ancient Rome, their connection navigates unexpected bumps and turns. Life has a way of shaking up even the most solid foundations. With promises of their future shattered and secrets held tight to the chest, Helvia and Octavia have to ask themselves how their connection can equal a happy ending.

And somehow last month I almost missed a new short historical from Karin Kallmaker: Cowboys and Kisses from Romance and Chocolate Ink, which seems to be Kallmaker’s personal publishing imprint.

Shunned by her family, a girl is sent west on a one-way ticket. Penniless, she takes up the only profession open to her. Years later she encounters a cowboy she can love, and her first taste of pleasure—and happiness. Cowboys, however, are born to wander, and their kisses are as brief as the lives of young women without family or means. Accepting that her days will be numbered too few, Darlin’ escapes into her scribblings for hope. Until she recognizes her own truth and a chance for love in the longing gaze of a townswoman.

Pre-WWII Berlin is a popular setting for queer fiction, including Once in Berlin, self-published by Jo Havens.

It’s 1938 and Europe teeters on the edge of war. In Berlin, life for Mila Nessian – genius mathematician, billionaire and womaniser – is one long party. A spot of rocket science by day, the Third Reich’s prettiest daughters by night. She knows what they whisper behind their hands – that Germany’s most dazzling mind has nothing but a calculator where her heart should be, a sliver of ice instead of soul. She smirks through yet another boring cocktail party and hopes they’re wrong. Cecelia Balfour is dragged to Berlin by her socialite mother – and it’s the last place she wants to be. Cecelia has lost a lover and worries that her heart is too bruised to ever properly love again. To distract her, to maybe get her back in the game, her cousin at MI6 sets up a play: flirt with Mila Nessian, capture her secrets, lure her back to London. Because what Mila is working on could steer the course of the coming war. The Nazis want her brilliance, British Secret Intelligence wants her silence, and Cecelia – once she has laughed with her, slept with her, sipped champagne on a zeppelin with her and lost her heart to her – Cecelia wants her love. Can she win Mila’s trust and save her from the powers that control both their lives?

This next book also uses the second world war as a setting, but in an alternate timeline where evidently Germany has managed to get the upper hand. This is: The Undesirables, self-published by Lumen Reese.

By day, Maren Abernathy is a lovely and helpful telegraph operator, working in the Nazi-occupied town of Marquet in the American Rocky Mountains. At night, she's a secret agent of the revolutionary British Liberties organization. She hates Hitler, but happily salutes a painting of der führer when she receives a promotion to the International Communications department, where she’ll handle coded German intelligence of utmost importance. What she doesn't know is that the promotion she worked so hard to get puts her on a trajectory to unearth a deadly secret; and with all American boys shipped off at age seventeen to serve in the German military, that leaves only the women and Maren's team of those historically wronged by the Nazis to fight back. Her girlfriend Beatrix, a secret Jew from the neighboring mining town of Pine Hills, would be referred to as a 'smart rat' in the Nazi code that Maren transmits. She warns Maren about the town's mayor, who recommended her for the promotion and works closely with her. Sterling Stratus -according to small-town gossip- killed his wife and mangled his son. Andrew Stratus lost a hand, that much is indisputable, but to reveal the Nazi secret, Maren has to get to the heart of the fifteen year old cover-up.

The April books start with Walks with Spirits by Edale Lane from Past and Prologue Press. I am somewhat uneasy about this book, as I am in general when books depicting seriously marginalized cultures are written by people with no personal stake in those cultures. This book is specifically labelled historic fantasy, but it also claims to depict Native American culture, without specifying a particular tribal tradition. With that in mind, here is the cover copy.

Long ago, in an age of mysticism, Walks with Spirits, a two-spirit woman, perceives voices whispering on the wind and they empower her with the gift of calling animals. But who she truly wishes to call to her side is her childhood friend, Laughing Brook. Daughter of a shaman and an herbalist-midwife, Laughing Brook holds a prominent place in her society and bears the responsibilities it entails. She is training to be a healer like her mother, but her most compelling desire is to spend her life with Walks with Spirits. When a misunderstanding crushes their dreams of happiness, both women must learn to face the trials that await them in a land where danger lurks behind every tree and honor means more than life. Will the spirits intervene on their behalf, or are they fated never to manifest their visions of love? Walks with Spirits is a historical fantasy set in an ancient time.

For those who enjoyed Nicola Griffith’s historic novel Hild, there’s a new story set in a somewhat more mythic early Britain. Spear from Tor.com tells the Arthurian tale of Peretur, but a female Peretur.

She left all she knew to find who she could be . . . She grows up in the wild wood, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake drift to her on the spring breeze, scented with promise. And when she hears a traveler speak of Artos, king of Caer Leon, she decides her future lies at his court. So, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and sets out on her bony gelding for Caer Leon. With her stolen hunting spear and mended armour, she is an unlikely hero, not a chosen one, but one who forges her own bright path. Aflame with determination, she begins a journey of magic and mystery, love, lust and fights to death. On her adventures, she will steal the hearts of beautiful women, fight warriors and sorcerers, and make a place to call home.

Something Bright self-published by R. Cooper looks like an ordinary Wild West cross-dressing romance, but since it’s situated in a series of stories with supernatural characters, I expect that not everything is what it seems in the cover copy.

Left on her own at a young age, Batch grew up in logging camps as a rough-and-tumble tomboy in men’s clothing, and kept all her soft and tender impulses carefully hidden. Even her name is a joke to most, and she used to drink to keep herself from minding. But with the area quieting down into orderly farms and civilized towns, complete with stricter notions of propriety, and her mind finally clear and sober, Batch is starting to wonder, and worry, about who she is, and where her place in the world might be. It’s a bit of a shock to encounter Olivia Hooper again in the middle of her worrying. Like Batch, Hooper dresses in pants and does work most women don’t. But Hooper is something special. She wears her hair short and carries herself so confidently that few attempt to argue with her on the matter. She befriends everyone Batch cares about, and tells fantastical stories about true love, and destiny, and the town where she grew up; a place where no one cares how she dresses—or who she might step out with. Hooper talks a lot of nonsense, but Batch is intrigued. Maybe it’s Hooper’s eyes that sometimes, almost, seem to glow, or the way no one can sneak up on her. Or maybe it’s the bold way Hooper declares that she’s in search of a wife, with her fierce gaze fixed right on Batch. The idea is as impossible as Hooper’s mythical hometown. But less than a day under Olivia Hooper’s careful attention and Batch finds herself feeling almost like she’s someone special too, someone delicate and soft and admired for it. As if Hooper’s stories are real, and there is a place for Batch if Batch could only dare to imagine it.

The ultimately unsuccessful Hungarian revolution of the mid-20th century is the setting for This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke from Knopf Books. The book has fantasy elements and is promoted as having queer representation, although it’s hard to tell exactly what that representation is from the cover copy. I’m including it on faith.

In the middle of Budapest, there is a river. Csilla knows the river is magic. During WWII, the river kept her family safe when they needed it most--safe from the Holocaust. But that was before the Communists seized power. Before her parents were murdered by the Soviet police. Before Csilla knew things about her father's legacy that she wishes she could forget. Now Csilla keeps her head down, planning her escape from this country that has never loved her the way she loves it. But her carefully laid plans fall to pieces when her parents are unexpectedly, publicly exonerated. As the protests in other countries spur talk of a larger revolution in Hungary, Csilla must decide if she believes in the promise and magic of her deeply flawed country enough to risk her life to help save it, or if she should let it burn to the ground.

And, of course, the last April book is my own title, The Language of Roses from Queen of Swords Press, discussed previously.

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading in the last month? It wasn’t until I put together this list that it hit how thoroughly I’ve pivoted to audiobooks lately.

I’ve been pretty much binging Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, having listened to books 2 to 4: A Conspiracy in Belgravia, The Hollow of Fear, and The Art of Theft. Completely unexpectedly and rather delightfully, I discovered that The Art of Theft revolves around a sapphic relationship of one of the main side characters. I had no idea I had that in store when I started the series. One of the other books also has a minor sapphic twist to a side plot with an entirely happy ending. So I feel somewhat more vindicated in loving the books this much.

I took in another K.J. Charles m/m Regency, Band Sinister. The plot reminded me a bit of Georgette Heyer’s Venetia—one of my favorites—in how an injury to one of a pair of close siblings pitches the other sibling into forced proximity with a man whose libertine reputation is both well-deserved and utterly sympathetic.

I rounded off the month’s listening with Jae’s Backwards to Oregon. I never have gone back and finished listening to K. Arsenault Rivera’s The Phoenix Empress, and at this point should probably consider it given up on.

I’m also still reading Samantha Rajaram’s The Company Daughters. It’s a hard story—full of angst and tragedy—but I’m eager to know how it all comes out. The main reason I haven’t done as much other reading in text this month is that I’m part of a book club doing a read-through of Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, using the very literal, rather than verse, translation by Guido Waldman. I may put my thoughts on Orlando into a review later. For now, let’s just say that if the Monty Python crew had done a movie version of this book, it would probably need to be a bit tamer and more coherent than the original. But despite Orlando getting to be the title character, the central organizing figure in the adventure is the woman warrior Bradamante. And she isn’t the only female warrior in the text. There are also some surprisingly feminist moments—if brief ones—which make a sharp contrast with the fate of most of the non-martial female characters. The podcast episode I did on women warriors includes some bits from Orlando.

Author Guest

For those who have missed the author interviews on this show, you’ll be happy to know that I have a couple of interviews recorded and another couple scheduled, so I have hopes of getting back to having interviews as a regular feature for On the Shelf. Let me know if there’s an author you’d love to have me try to get on the show!

Show Notes

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

• When is a fairy tale retelling a historic story?
• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Frye, Susan & Karen Robertson (eds). Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-511735-2
• Book Shopping
  • Huebner, Sabine R. & Christian Laes (eds). 2019. The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-47017-9
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • Promises in Pompeii (Ancient Ashes #1) by Violet Morley
  • Cowboys and Kisses by Karin Kallmaker
  • Once in Berlin by Jo Havens
  • The Undesirables by Lumen Reese
  • Walks with Spirits by Edale Lane
  • Spear by Nicola Griffith
  • The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones
  • Something Bright by R. Cooper
  • This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke
• What am I reading?
  • A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2) by Sherry Thomas
  • The Hollow of Fear (Lady Sherlock #3) by Sherry Thomas
  • The Art of Theft (Lady Sherlock #4) by Sherry Thomas
  • Band Sinister by K.J. Charles
  • Backwards to Oregon by Jae
  • Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (trans. Guido Waldman)

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)

Every once in a while, you figure it’s time to read a book because it’s considered by many to be a classic and you want to see what the fuss is about. And besides which, it was on sale at Audible, so I finally checked out Backwards to Oregon by Jae. This is marketed as lesbian historical romance though, like a number of other reviewers, I have significant discomfort with that label. My one-sentence plot-summary might be “novelization of the classical ‘Oregon Trail’ computer game, centering a queer relationship.”

The story is very slow-moving. As in: at the pace of an ox-drawn wagon crossing the prairies slow. I think I figured out that the pacing is aimed at readers who delight in things like 500K coffee-shop AUs of their favorite characters. It isn’t the destination, but the journey. We encounter almost every milestone, obstacle, and disaster that one might find when emigrating west. The research is adequate—though one might quibble over details like how reasonable it is to be enjoying lemonade in the middle of a primitive trek through the Great Plains—and the writing is solid, except for a tendency to repeat descriptions, character thoughts, and reactions over and over again. Which…I’ll get back to.

But I can’t recommend this book. It’s a book that had a fleeting moment of zeitgeist between the time when a queer historical novel became a marketable possibility and when reader expectations around the depiction of gender and sexuality became more nuanced. Because if you listen to what the characters are thinking and saying, this isn’t a lesbian romance, this is the story of a trans man, and of a woman who never actually respects his stated identity or his personal boundaries. A woman who has a (historically accurate) obliviousness to the concept of consent. And a relationship made excruciating by everyone’s refusal to make any attempt at genuine communication.

Luke regularly thinks (and eventually says) that he thinks of himself as a man, he is most comfortable living as a man, and (though he doesn’t use the specific terminology) he has significant dysphoria around anyone, including his partner, viewing him disrobed. This situation is “solved” in the story by Nora wearing him down and insisting on interacting with his body as a female body until he stops protesting. When Nora believed him to be assigned-male, her disregard for his boundaries involved repeatedly trying to initiate an erotic component to their marriage despite Luke’s refusal to do so. Nora, mind you, has her own issues as a former prostitute who entered into the marriage understanding it to be a mutually-beneficial business relationship. She wants a future for herself and her child (soon to be children) away from the brothel; Luke wants a beard and the doubling of land allotted to a married settler versus a single man.

Luke is a gentleman and a great guy, and seems to be the perfect husband for a woman who’s had quite enough of men’s sexual needs for a lifetime. Yet Nora repeatedly mulls over how it isn’t a “real” marriage because they haven’t had sex. (Insert asexual wince here.)

Because of the repetitive structure of the prose, we experience these issues over and over again. We get to hear repeatedly about how and why each of them has trust issues. About how their past trauma informs their present reflexes. About the mistaken ideas each has about the other’s motivations (that overwhelm every bit of actual progress they make along the way). Over and over again. And then – all of a sudden, we get the requisite extended sex scene, a final crisis, a bit of plot-whiplash that comes out of nowhere, and it’s done. And they live happily ever after with their horse ranch in Oregon.

This book needs all the content warnings: domestic violence, cliff-hanging peril, secondary character death, homophobia, the aforementioned trans erasure and violation of personal boundaries, oh and also cartoonish Hollywood-style portrayals of Native Americans. Even with all that, I can see why the book is popular among the people who like it. And back in 2007 when it was first published, the issues around the treatment of gender and sexuality wouldn’t have been quite as out of step with the times. But today all those issues can’t be ignored.