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There are two basic parts to Boswell's book on homosexuality and tolerance: 1) that Christian society was not always and inevitable intolerant of homosexuality; and 2) that the shift to intolerance can be localized to a particular historic period and related to other significant cultural and political shifts during that period. Perhaps the present day is an opportunity for understanding just how a conjunction of unrelated forces can combine to create apparently illogical shifts in popular thinking. Or at least apparent shifts in popular thinking. How, in the space of only a few decades, could a culture shift from an apparent trend towards embracing diversity, plurality, and not just tolerance but understanding and acceptance, to an apparent reversal of all those things? And not just in terms of sexuality and gender, but with respect to ethnicity, religion, immigration status, and so on?

Two factors come to my mind (and this is not a product of deep long-term thought, but just passing thoughts as I write up this introduction on the spur of the moment). The first is that the superficial trends that we identify as "popular culture" as often a matter of whose voices are being heard and promoted. Who feels comfortable talking about their attitudes and acting on them? It doesn't necessarily take any significant shift in the opinions of individual people for the public performance of those opinions to change drastically. If, in the 13th century, there were changes in who felt authorized to have opinions on homosexuality, and whose opinions were promulgated and elevated by the church and state authorities, then the long-term effects needn't require a sea change on an individual level, only a passive assumption that those "thought leaders" must be valid because they were the ones whose opinions you were now encountering everywhere.

The second factor that comes to my mind is the age-old question of cui bono? Who benefits from such a shift from tolerance to intolerance? In the contemporary political climate, the answer to that is far from obvious. And those who are truly benefitting are deeply invested in making sure their interests are kept hidden. Under Boswell's theory of a critical shift in tolerance, not only regarding sexuality, but regarding religious plurality and other social diversities, it seems like a key to understanding the when and why would be to examine those questions of who benefitted from the rise of more narrow and rigid controls on individual behavior. But as in the current day, such questions are complicated and the indviduals whose actions created the shift may themselves not have been consciously aware of the forces at work.

Touching back to the always-present question of how such things relate to the writing of queer historical fiction, we can ask how shifts in tolerance would have been experienced and understood by the queer people living through them. Would the change have been gradual enough to be imperceptible during an individual life? Some of Boswell's biographic examples are of men who appear to have enjoyed intense intimate same-sex relationships freely during their own lifetimes, but whose lives were later revised to be held up for condemnation. Or might someone spend part of their life considering a same-sex relationship to be a joyous and positive force, only to see the world shift around them and feel that joy slip away? What might be the experience of a man in the church hierarchy who was part of that earlier world of homosocial and homoerotic bonds who finds himself pressured to support philosophical changes that condemn what he felt in his heart to be pure and good? Does he resist? Does he fall to self-doubt? Does he turn to a type of closeting? (I'm using male pronouns here despite my blog's focus on women because the experiences and lives that Boswell explores are male and women would experience the before and after in entirely different ways.)

While I grumble about Boswell's blythe indifference to how his study really speaks only to male lives, the underlying philosophical questions can be generalized, even if the specifics of experience may not. How does the public performance of tolerance or intolerance toward women's same-sex relationships relate to individual experience? Can we untangle the difference between whose voices are heard in the public (and historic) record, as opposed to what the everyday experiences of individual people were? When we see shifts in that public record, do they reflect actual changes in popular (and individual) opinion or do they reflect the strategic needs and goals of the Powers That Be (which aren't always the nominal civic and religious powers)?

If Boswell's work sometimes feels flawed due to his emotional goals (i.e., "proving" that Christianity need not be hostile to homosexuality), we should acknowledge that we, as writers of historical fiction, have similarly skewed emotional goals. We similarly want to take the basic observable facts and documents of the past and understand them in a way that allows us to create an emotional truth that we can feel at home in. This is, perhaps, more forgivable in a novelist than a historian, but it has been historians who were driven by the emotional goal of a "usable history" that have brought many of htose observable facts and documents to light in a way that give us the necessary understanding and access for making our own histories.

In this section of Boswell's study of shifting attitudes toward (male) homosexuality under Christianity, he explores the question of "why should sexual behavior come in for judgment at all?" as well as the specific trains of thought that were used to support condemnation of homosexuality specifically. He points out that it wasn't a foregone conclusion that Christianity would take this path, and that some of the background set-up for the rise of intolerance was demographic and political rather than philosophical. This shouldn't come as a surprise. Prejudice and persecution are still being used as political tools to justify state (or majority) authority over people's personal lives. When you examine the long history of the rhetoric of sexual intolerance, it becomes clear that the largest scriptural bludgeons that have been used over the ages were brought into the debate after the fact. The story of Sodom was not--when you trace its uses--always and specifically about variant sexuality. Nor did the passages in Leviticus hold any special and universal scope over people's everyday actions until cherry-picked for the purpose. Boswell betrays one of his weaknesses in the work he puts into arguing the theological non-validity of anti-gay arguments. As has also been pointed out with regard to Brooten's work on female same-sex relations in the same timeframe, there is a desperate air of begging to be welcomed into the fold. Of thinking that if you only pointed out the logical errors of the last two millennia, then the institution of Christianity would suddenly cave and say, "Oh dear, you're absolutely right! We should never have persecuted you! How can we make things right?" One can either be a historian or one can be a theologian, but it is awkward to try to be both at the same time.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 41c - Things I Loved in 2019 - transcript

(Originally aired 2019/12/21 - listen here)

Calendars are arbitrary things, and yet it’s hard not to get caught up in the urge to summarize what we’ve done, what we’ve consumed, what we’ve loved when that arbitrary reference point in the Earth’s solar circumnavigation arrives.

For a number of years, I’ve done a year-end round-up on my blog titled “What Hath She Wrote” to remind myself that I’ve actually accomplished something. The title is, of course, a word-play on the famous Biblical line used to test the first Morse Code message transmitted by telegraph in 1844: “What Hath God Wrought.” I like hiding bits of word-play in titles. Have you recognized that the episode category “On the Shelf” is a take-off on the slang term for an unmarried woman common in Regency Romances?

But I digress. I do that a lot.

As I say, I’ve taken to doing a year-end round-up of my writing and blogging (and podcasting), but today’s show is something different. It’s a discussion of what I loved from the content of what I’ve been writing and blogging and podcasting about, sticking to material with historic and lesbian-relevant themes. Last year I did a combined top ten of fiction, non-fiction, and movies, but this time let’s separate them out.

This isn’t a list about things that came out in 2019, it’s a list of things I consumed in 2019, because that’s how I organize my life. Only one of the non-fiction books I picked was published this calendar year. Sometimes my non-fiction favorites are decades old by the time I read them. I’m never up-to-date with my fiction reading. And as an author who has twice had a novel published in November, I consider it totally unfair to do year-end round-ups that disadvantage books that people don’t even know exist at the time they’re deciding what was “best.”

Fiction

It’s always tough to pick just five novels for a list of what I enjoyed, but here’s my best shot. I’ve organized them by the order in which I reviewed them on my blog.

First up is Life Mask by Emma Donoghue. This is a strongly biographical novel about 18th century sculptor Anne Damer, whose real life story hints very strongly at same-sex romance in her life. Donoghue has coaxed those hints and embers into a satisfying, if very slow-moving, depiction of what Damer’s interior life might have been like. This is definitely much more of a historic saga than a romance novel, though, so don’t go into it expecting sex and drama. There is a vast amount of 18th century British politics. I love this sort of thing, but it’s a specialized taste.

That said, I’m also a sucker for a specific type of vibrant throat-grabbing prose that plunges you into the middle of a story and holds your head under until you come up gasping for breath at the end. I had no clue that I was going to get that sort of experience from Benny Lawrence’s The Ghost and the Machine. It’s a difficult, hard-hitting story of abuse and psychological manipulation, set in an era when it was possible to imagine a chess-playing automaton but still far from possible to actually construct one. The historicity of the setting was gripping which was one of the aspects of the book that startled me, because none of Lawrence’s other books give a clue to this side of her writing.

The field of f/f historical fiction is unfortunately dominated by white voices and white viewpoints, even in cases where more diverse settings and characters are depicted. So I’m delighted to include two books among my favorites that avoid that problem. Two Wings to Fly Away by Penny Mickelbury tells an inter-racial love story embedded in a mystery-thriller set in Philadelphia just on the cusp of the American Civil War. The era and setting is depicted in fascinating detail. And although some details of the characters’ attitudes toward sexuality felt a bit too 20th century, the characters themselves pulled me in and made for a satisfying read.

This year saw a small blossoming of f/f historicals from authors who have already gained a mainstream reputation writing other types of romantic couples. Of those, the one that most grabbed my heart was Olivia Waite’s A Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics. This Regency romance braids in not only the challenges of pursuing a same-sex romance in an era that didn’t recognize them as having equal weight to straight marriages, but also the frustrations of being a female scientist at a time when people were all too willing to attribute or appropriate your work to the nearest man working in the field. Although, come to think of it, that still happens regularly. There’s a lovely plot twist at the end with regard to that aspect. But even more, I loved how deftly Waite developed a plausible romantic arc that was true both to the era and to the tropes of the genre.

Another blossoming trend these days, is the proliferation of queer characters in mainstream fantasy and science fiction. And when this trend meets the popular sub-genre of historic fantasy, there are some truly exciting books being produced. Malaysian author Zen Cho burst onto the scene with her Regency fantasy Sorcerer to the Crown, centering the presence and role of people from all the far-flung parts of the 19th century British empire. In the second, and more or less independent, book in this series, The True Queen, we have a Malaysian heroine traveling to England to rescue her sister and falling in love with a young woman studying magic along the way. But it’s a far more complex story than that, involving the politics of dragons, deep betrayals in the realm of Faerie, and trying to navigate unfamiliar social structures, while still preserving the comedy-of-manners core of the Regency novel.

Just like I did last year, I’m going to break my rules by adding an extra book at the end that doesn’t fit the historic theme. Once again, it’s an entry in Claire O’Dell’s Janet Watson series, envisioning Holmes and Watson as queer black women in a near-future dystopia that is frighteningly believable. The Hound of Justice is a story of trust, terror, and regaining self-confidence when everything you know might end up being a lie.

Non-Fiction

For non-fiction, I chose five titles from the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog to feature. This far into the project, there’s a lot of repetition in the publications I’m reading and summarizing. There are valid reasons for that repetition. Some of the historic people or concepts that are most relevant to female same-sex history involve a lot of nuance that can be analyzed in multiple contexts. Or they are exceptional examples of some particular topic. Or they may be the only example of some particular aspect of gender or sexuality.

So rather than picking my favorites based purely on the excellence of the research or writing--though that comes into it as well--I’ve chosen favorites that present something new and different.

Two of my favorites focus strongly on the margins of gender categories, and how competing understandings of gender shed light on attitudes towards same-sex relationships. If a culture is arguing over how to define differences between the sexes, that becomes highly relevant to whether a relationship involves two people of the same sex.

Kathleen Brown’s article “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” examines the conflicting testimony around a charge of sexual misconduct in the early American colonies. The most likely understanding is that Thomas or Thomsine Hall was intersex. They were assigned a female gender at birth, but early in adulthood began situationally presenting alternately as male or female. When asked which category they belonged to, Hall replied “both.” This put the law court into a quandary whether Hall’s erotic relationship with a woman constituted the crime of fornication or of impersonating a man. In the legal arguments and testimony, two different models of gender were presented. In the model that might be labeled “performative gender”, you are how you behave. Part of this model was the belief that gendered performance was a symptom of underlying gender identity. If someone felt driven to wear male clothing and pursue male occupations and to desire women, then that was evidence that they were a man. The problem was: Hall alternated between male and female performance and felt no need to choose. The second model argued that anatomy was the ultimate determiner of true sex. But Hall’s ambiguous anatomy raised the question of where to draw the line. The detailed documentation of Hall’s life and the questions around their status is unusual, but Hall’s situation most likely was not. And Hall’s story suggests innumerable lives that might have been lived more quietly and invisibly in history, cheerfully contradicting the binaries and norms that western society was determined to enforce.

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Another publication that shows how gender categories shed light on understandings of identity and sexuality is “The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe” by Cary J. Nederman and Jacqui True. The term “hermaphrodite” is currently considered offensive when applied to intersex people, but the use of this term in the middle ages was more complex and covered a range of concepts that today would be considered unrelated. Medieval use of the term covered any situation where a person combined aspects that were considered to belong to different sexes or different genders. Thus, although physiologically intersex people might be categorized as “hermaphrodites”, so would people we today would consider homosexual, or gender transgressive, or simply out of step with gendered personality traits and habits. Due to the misogynistic nature of western society, calling a woman a hermaphrodite might even be considered praise if she displayed positive traits that were categorized as masculine. In the context of the 12th century’s “renaissance” of scientific and philosophical thought, questions of the nature of gender were explored within the idea of the hermaphrodite. Did hermaphrodites represent the expected ambiguous middle ground on a single polar scale of gender with male at one end and female at the other? Did they represent a portentious failure of nature to produce a clearly gendered individual? Or did they represent a third category, apart from male and female but partaking of both? For those who think questions about the nature of identity and competing models of gender are a modern phenomenon, this is an excellent survey of the wide range of thought present in the middle ages.

Not all of my favorite history publications have involved analysis and theory. One of the most fascinating genres in medieval European literature for thinking about gender and f/f sexuality are the gender-disguise romances. The Romance of Silence was published in a scholarly edition with English translation back in 1999. But the primary text of my favorite, Yde and Olive was only published in a bilingual edition last year, translated and edited by Mounawar Abbouchi. This is a medieval adaptation of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe, very loosely speaking. It has the one character living in disguise as a man for reasons involving her father, and the other falling in love with her and holding to that love even when her secret was revealed. In both, the same-sex romance is revolved by the magical transformation of the first character into a man. But in both cases, this resolution clashes with modern understandings of identity whether interpreted as a lesbian story or a transgender story, while simultaneously having attractions for both audiences. Yde doesn’t put on men’s clothing and take up a man’s life because she identifies as male, but rather because it is a way to be safe as a woman alone in the world. But having done so--following the medieval principle that you are what you present to the world--she becomes the ideal of chivalric masculinity. And the miraculous transformation is not for the positive purpose of aligning body with identity, but for the negative purpose of avoiding the fatal consequences of engaging in a same-sex marriage. There are three versions of this story, all with different resolutions. In one, there is no transformation and the two lovers end up married to each other’s fathers instead, which...sorry, no. Just no. But I’m glad to finally have an accessible version of the primary text. Now I just need a bilingual edition of L’Escoufle, my second favorite medieval romance with women in love, though it doesn’t have any cross-dressing in it.

My fourth favorite non-fiction book this year doesn’t directly address sexuality, but it does speak to some of the stumbling blocks writers face when writing f/f historical romances. This is Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages by Kate Kelsey Staples, which analyzes gender differences in what daughters inherited when compared to sons, primarily in middle class families in London. Writers of historical fiction sometimes go through contortions to give their heroines economic independence and the social standing to live a life independent of heterosexual marriage. But as studies like this one show, women’s situations in the past were varied and often involved far more opportunity than modern stereotypes assume. My rule of thumb has become, “If you can’t find data on women in same-sex relationships, look to the single women.” And in many times and places, inheritance laws and customs gave women the freedom to support themselves in an unmarried life.

My fifth pick brings a couple of different lessons. This is Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890-1918, edited by Lizzie Ehrenhalt and Tilly Laskey. It’s interesting to compare this collection of personal and revealing correspondence to the diaries of Anne Lister, earlier in the 19th century. The women lived in rather different eras and circumstance. Lister was a member of the English gentry, living in the Georgian era, frank about her sexuality in the privacy of her coded diaries, but moving through a woman-centered society that both enabled and disguised her romantic relationships with other women. If we had only her public records and not her private coded diary, it would be difficult to prove anything about her sexuality--as it is for so very many women in similar circumstances. Rose and Evangeline were Americans, living in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, moving through fairly high society due to wealth--both inherited and self-earned--and family connections. (Rose served as White House hostess for her brother, President Grover Cleveland.) Their correspondence is steeped in romantic sentimentalism, but is also woven through with the sensual physicality of their relationship and the conflicts Rose had over Evangeline’s marriage. What do I find interesting to compare and contrast? In both cases, these women were not unique. Their lives and loves followed paths shared by many of their contemporaries. They weren’t “special” in experiencing same-sex romance. What is special is that detailed documentation of their lives survived the years and the looming threat of erasure, in both cases due to a certain amount of chance and luck. Rose and Evangeline’s love was not unique or unusual. If you dig through the correspondence of other women of a similar era, you will find that intensely romantic relationships between women were normal and common. And if we had similar private records preserved from Anne Lister’s contemporaries, I am utterly confident that we’d find many of them similarly “loved, and only loved the fairer sex.”

As with fiction, I’m claiming a bonus item for my non-fiction Top Five. This is a brief article from a series of studies of the Oxford English Dictionary--considered the definitive historical dictionary of the English language--tracing the deliberate erasure of vocabulary and word usage around the topic of lesbianism in the compiling of the dictionary. So many historians struggling to discuss the context of same-sex relations have fallen into the trap of assuming that if the OED doesn’t have a word or a meaning for a word, then it didn’t exist. Thus we have text after text asserting that the very idea of lesbianism only arose in the 19th century, because how could we have a concept for something without having words for it? The study of history--whether the history of sexuality or the history of words--is never neutral.

Visual Media

There haven’t been enough movies and tv shows with historic f/f content to put together a top five favorites, but the ones we did have...wow!

I loved the irreverence and meta-commentary of Wild Nights with Emily, telling the story not only of Emily Dickinson’s romantic relationship with her sister-in-law, but also telling the story of how their passionate feelings for each other were deliberately erased from the historic record. Although details of her life were fictionalized, rearranged, or simply turned into metaphor, the movie did an excellent job of focusing on essential aspects of the poet’s life and legacy.

And, of course, 2019 was the year that brought us Gentleman Jack, the ongoing series about the early 19th century lesbian Anne Lister and her quest to establish a marriage-like partnership with neighbor and fellow landowner Ann Walker. I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate how mind-blowing it is that such a series has been created, with such amazing production values and writing. There are many stories of women loving women throughout history that could make equally amazing tv shows. Let’s hope that Gentleman Jack is successful enough to convince the powers that be to support them.

I’m still planning to do an Anne Lister show--perhaps several of them--at some point. I need to figure out what my special contribution can be, because the pod-world is full of people gushing over the show. I’ve been following a really fun podcast titled Shibden After Dark that combines complete fangirl squee with expert analysis of the technical production aspects of the show. And if any film or tv producers out there want ideas for which queer woman in history to tackle next, I have a very long list of suggestions.

Show Notes

I talk about the novels, non-fiction, and visual media relevant to queer women in history that I enjoyed in 2019

Novels

• Life Mask by Emma Donoghue
• The Ghost and the Machine by Benny Lawrence
• Two Wings to Fly Away by Penny Mickelbury
• A Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite
• The True Queen by Zen Cho
• Bonus non-historical book: The Hounds of Justice by Claire O’Dell

Non-Fiction

• Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.
• Nederman, Cary J. and Jacqui True. 1996. “The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:4: 497-517.
• Abbouchi, Mounawar. 2018. “Yde and Olive” in Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, vol 8.
• Staples, Kate Kelsey. 2011. Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages. Brill, Leiden. ISBN 978-9004203112
• Ehrenhalt, Lizzie and Tilly Laskey (eds). 2019. Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890-1918. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul. ISBN 978-1-68134-129-3
• Bonus non-fiction item: Examining the OED - Case Study: Terms for Lesbian(ism) - http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/content/view/435/485/index.html accessed 2019/04/28

Visual Media

• Wild Nights with Emily
• Gentleman Jack

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 136 (previously 41b) - The Highwaywoman Special (Reprise)

(Originally aired 2017/09/30, this airing 2019/12/14 - listen here)

To give myself something resembling an end of year holiday, instead of a new interview, I’m reprising this show on highwaywoman songs and stories. It originally aired on September 30, 2017. I thought it might make a nice lead-in to next week’s show on Vikings. [Note: I rearranged the episodes after recording and the Viking show is two weeks after this one.]

* * *

[First two verses of “The Highwayman” by Alfred J. Noyes, music by Phil Ochs, pronouns adjusted]

Outlaws have been a staple of popular stories as far back as recorded literature. Specific types of outlaw arise out of the society of the times. Laws restricting the hunting of game created poachers. The age of merchant ships crossing the seas spawned pirates. The concentration of cash in banks gave rise to bank robbers. And the establishment of regular coaching routes to carry passengers and commerce on fixed schedules were the temptation that gave rise to highwaymen.

In England, the great era of mythic highwaymen began around the 17th century and continued into the early 19th. The majority of real life highwaymen were male, of course. But a few highwaywomen made their way into song and story and the pages of history as well. Some examples in literature may have simply been an opportunity to turn gender tropes on their head, but throughout early modern history, there have been many women who found the economic temptations of male professions sufficient to trade skirts for trousers.

Not all depictions of literary highwaywomen were particularly feminist in spirit, though. The earliest known highwaywoman ballad, “The Female Highway Hector” from the 17th century, is more of a cautionary tale. After a long series of successful robberies against various stereotyped victims, she tries to rob a “real” highwayman and is defeated and sexually assaulted.

Here’s the beginning of the ballad. The original broadsheet suggests singing it to a tune called “The Rant” and I’ve used a tune with that name that is believed to be the one that was originally used.

The Female Highway Hector

You gallants of every station
Give ear to a frollicksome song
The like was ne’er seen in this nation
‘Twas done by a female so young.

She bought her a mare and a bridle
A saddle and pistols also
She resolved she would not be idle
So upon the pad she did go.

She clothed herself in great splendor
For breeches and sword she had on
Her body appear’d very slender
She show’d like a pretty young man.

And then like a padder so witty
She mounted with speed on her mare
She left all her friends in the city
And steered her course towards the Ware.

We’ll leave her story there, as the rest of the ballad is not edifying.

Real life highwaywomen--those for which we have solid evidence--were rarely romantic figures. But then, neither were most male highwaymen.

Legal records of prosecutions of women for this crime seem to have been rare, though not unheard of. Joan Bracey was hanged in Nottingham in the later 17th century for highway robbery, as was Ann Meders, hanged at Tyburn. Both met their ends at a relatively young age, not surprisingly. Both began their careers in partnership with male companions, as did Nan Hereford, who managed to carry on the profession for six years after her husband was hanged before meeting her own end.

Legend is more likely to view highwaymen--and women--as romantic figures. The early years of the profession corresponded with the political struggles in England between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads during the English Civil War and the dashing cavalier turned highwayman was a staple of popular culture.

Katherine Ferrers was a 17th century Englishwoman whom legend holds to have been the “Wicked Lady”, a notorious female highwayman. Katherine became an heiress at age six, during a period when her family was swept up in conflicts between the Royalist supporters of King Charles I and the forces of Parliament. Katherine’s family were Royalists and financial difficulties related to this state inspired them to marry Katherine off at age 14, after which most of her inherited property was sold off. She died at age 26, shortly after the return of King Charles II to the throne. For the last couple years of her life, her husband had been in prison for participating in an uprising. This much is fact.

Legend holds that--like a number of impoverished Royalists--she turned her hand to highway robbery to support herself during her husband’s imprisonment. Legend further holds that, after being shot during a robbery she died of her wounds, being discovered wearing men’s clothing. In this case, legend is unlikely to hold any truth. There are no mentions of Katherine’s supposed exploits in any of the sensational histories of famous highwaymen published in the 18th century. The first mention of her supposed exploits seems to be in the mid 19th century, but the image of a beautiful and daring woman taking to the highway has been irresistible to authors and filmmakers, and The Wicked Lady has been the subject of several novels and films, as well as inspiring ghost stories associated with her residence.

Within the context of this podcast, it must be admitted that--like most legends and ballads of cross-dressing women, the tales of female highwaymen from the 17th and 18th centuries remain steadfastly heterosexual. One notable exception is Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, a real woman living around 1600 who was notorious for dressing in men’s clothes and rumored to be sexually interested in both men and women. Contemporary records portrayed Moll Cutpurse as a thief, a fence, and a pimp but an early 18th century writer who produced a history of famous highwaymen, decided she also needed to be given a brief fictional career of highway robbery.

A much more cheerful (though still solidly heterosexual) story is told in a ballad titled “Sovay” or “The Female Highwayman” which was collected in the late 19th century, at a time when highwaymen had long since disappeared. This one is worth performing in full as it introduces a motif particularly popular in modern female highwayman fiction.

Sovay, or The Female Highwayman

Sovay, Sovay, all on a day,
She dressed herself in man's array,
With a sword and pistol all by her side,
To meet her true love
To meet her true love away did ride.

She met her true love all on the plain,
And when she saw him she bid him stand,
'Stand and deliver, kind sir,' she said,
Or else this moment
Or else this moment I’ll shoot you dead.'

Oh, when she'd robbed him of all his store,
She says, 'Kind sir, there is one thing more,
A diamond ring which I know you have,
Deliver that,
Deliver that, your sweet life to save.'

'That diamond ring a token is,
That ring I’ll keep, my life I’ll lose;'
She being tender hearted just like a dove,
She rode away
She rode away from her own true love.

Next morning in the garden green,
O like true lovers they were seen;
He saw his watch hanging by her clothes,
Which made him flush
Which made him flush like a red rose.

'What makes you flush at so silly a thing,
I fain would have had your diamond ring,
‘And if you had given me the ring,’ she said,
I’d have pulled the trigger
I’d have pulled the trigger, I’d have shot you dead.’

In the oldest version of the ballad, Sovay only tells her love that demanding the ring was a test, but I rather like the stronger version that I performed. But remember this trope of stealing a love token, because it’s going to come up again.

The era of the rise of highwaymen was also an era when popular media was fascinated with gender disguises and the possibility of accidental homoerotic encounters with women disguised as men. Denise Walen’s extensive study of female cross-dressing in early modern drama doesn’t seem to include any examples where the disguised woman has a homoerotic encounter while acting as a highwayman, but it’s exactly the sort of plot one might find in that context.

Lesbian historical romance, on the other hand, has latched on to the motif of the cross-dressing female highwayman as an excellent way to combine swashbuckling, gender play, and the possibility of accidentally falling in love with a woman who was forbidden to you both by gender and profession.

Within this sub-genre, the motif of the stolen trinket that provides an excuse for further contact almost seems a requirement. In fact, we can lay out a formula for the standard lesbian highwaywoman romance: a respectable young woman (though one with a yearning for something beyond her foreseeable fate on the marriage market) is one of the victims of a highwayman’s robbery, protesting the loss of a piece of jewelry that has deep sentimental meaning. The highwayman, in a change of heart, returns the jewelry prompting (or encouraging) an inexplicable attraction between the two, and the highwayman is (eventually) revealed to be a woman who took to an outlaw life due to a tragic backstory. They, of course, fall in love, struggle with the personal, social, and legal barriers to their relationship, and eventually work their way through to a happy ending.

Here are five stories about female highwaymen finding love and redemption in the arms of another woman.

* * *

Rebeccah and the Highwayman by Barbara Davies (Bedazzled Ink, 2008)

I loved the solid historic grounding in Barbara Davies’ Rebeccah and the Highwayman. At the beginning of the 18th century, in the time of Queen Anne, Rebeccah Dutton has a series of encounters with the mysterious highwayman Blue-Eyed Nick, but the secret that “Nick” is actually a woman proves dangerous as both women are drawn together again and again.

The meaningful keepsake in this story is Rebeccah’s family signet ring, which she is allowed to keep in the initial encounter. They are reunited when Kate--in the guise of Blue-Eyed Nick--is wounded in the course of rescuing Rebeccah, who must then conceal the highwaywoman during her recovery. Kate has a brush with the gallows, but we know it will come off well--after all, this isn’t a Sarah Waters novel! I particularly liked the novel’s use of the relationship between Queen Anne and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (who is conveniently Rebeccah’s distant cousin) to convey understandings and attitudes towards women’s romantic relationships at the time. The story is solidly written with only occasional historical info-dumps. Kate’s eventual change of profession was delightfully true to the times. Unlike several of the books discussed in this show, the erotic content draws the curtain after passionate kissing, though more is clearly implied. This is an excellent book for those who want both good writing and good history.

The Locket and the Flintlock by Rebecca S Buck (Bold Strokes Books, 2012)

Rebecca S. Buck’s The Locket and the Flintlock takes a Regency era setting and draws on the motifs of that genre as well as the standard highwayman tropes of a stolen sentimental keepsake (as one might guess from the title) and a highwaywoman with a tragic backstory, a heart of gold, and a drive for social and economic justice. A few days after her dead mother’s locket has been taken during a daring highway robbery, Lucia Foxe recognizes the thieves riding past from her bedroom window and sets out after them, bareback on her favorite mare, to retrieve the keepsake in the middle of the night. And there lies one of the major flaws of this work: almost all the characters do something important that breaks my willingness to believe in the story. But if you can overlook plot holes and inconsistencies, it’s a rollicking adventure with a lot of angsty self-examination and the level of steaminess one tends to expect from a Bold Strokes book.

Daring and Decorum by Lawrence Hogue (Supposed Crimes, 2017)

Except for one issue, which I’ll get to in a moment, I loved Lawrence Hogue’s Daring and Decorum. Set in 18th century England, Elizabeth Collington longs for something beyond the life of a respectable vicar’s daughter. Then one day she encounters a highwayman who steals her mother’s necklace...and a kiss. The encounter stirs feelings that must be kept secret, and an even greater secret is that the highwayman is a woman. The book’s strength is its solid worldbuilding and the deliberation with which it builds the relationship between the two female protagonists, making both their attraction and the obstacles to it believable and solidly grounded in the social history of the times. Unlike many stories that plunge the women directly into a relationship, Daring and Decorum provides a realistic pacing for the relationship, though this may cause some readers to find it slow. I loved Hogue’s writing. He has a solid grasp of the flavor of early 19th century novels without resulting in any stilted awkwardness of language. The one thing that got the book off on the wrong foot for me was a mild sexual assault in the opening scene. Nothing more than groping, but I’m not fond of the message that women will, of course, get turned on by assault as long as it’s by the person who ends up being the love interest. It wasn’t enough to put me off the book entirely, but I think the story could have worked just as well with a different opening.

The Mask of the Highwaywoman by Niamh Murphy

In The Mask of the Highwaywoman by Niamh Murphy, Evelyn Thackeray is traveling to visit friends in advance of her upcoming marriage to a business associate of her widowed father when a band of highwaymen--and one highwaywoman--stops the coach she’s traveling in. Robbed of her money and a locket that Evelyn risked the anger of the highwaymen to try to keep, she’s now stranded penniless in a village. She offers to work at an inn in exchange for a room for the night...and then Bess, the highwaywoman, climbs through her window there, out of the darkness.

The story uses the standard collection of highwaywoman tropes: the soft-hearted thief, the keepsake stolen and then returned as an excuse to meet again, the sudden inexplicable attraction to an outlaw. And it tries to add in a layer of off-balance, constantly shifting loyalties and triple-crosses, but never quite sticks the landing in terms of believability. The plot consists of a non-stop sequence of chases, kidnappings, and escapes, punctuated by emotional confrontations and betrayals. I found it hard to sympathize with either Evelyn or Bess, and the question of how a highwaywoman successfully retires from a life of crime felt glossed over a bit too easily. But if non-stop action is your thing, check it out.

Behind the Mask by Kim Larabee (Alyson Books, 1989 out of print)

What is a single young woman in the Regency era to do if she must support a household? In Kim Larabee’s Behind the Mask, as an alternative to setting one’s cap for a handsome man with a title or a fortune, our hero Maddie Elverton turns to highway robbery. But her double life threatens to unravel when she encounters Allie Sifton, at first as a victim of her robbery, and then as a partner in her secret. There is a theft and return of jewelry, though not of the usual sentimental keepsake.

This story is largely a light-hearted romp, filled with exquisite writing, and leavened by a small amount of peril from the dogged pursuit by Lt. Bridgewater, who has set his sights on taking the highwayman in hand. Larabee is mistress of the language and conventions of the Regency romance, and turns the usual tropes of the genre on their head to bring Allie and Maddie together for their happily ever after. I highly recommend this book if you can find a copy, however unfortunately it is out of print.

* * *

There are plenty of ideas left to tackle in the female highwayman genre. England isn’t the only possible setting and the field is wide open for a plot that starts out with something other than the theft of a sentimental keepsake.

I’ll take what may be unfair advantage to note that I included a brief highway robbery scene in my novelette “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer”, set in the late 17th century where the crime is planned to cover up the retrieval of sensitive state documents. There is, of course, also a damsel in distress to rescue. There’s a link to the free story in the show notes.

Whether your heroines meet over the theft of a sentimental locket or rob Roundheads in support of King Charles, whether they run off together to enjoy their life of crime or eventually settle down in the guise of lady companions, it’s hard to beat a highwaywoman for swashbuckling adventure!

[Final verse of “The Highwayman” by Noyes & Ochs]

Show Notes

This is a reprise of my first “fifth week special” episode, when I have to come up with something outside my 4-topic rotation. Today we have a multi-media look at female highwaymen in history, song, and story, including five lesbian highwaywoman romances.

In this episode we talk about:

• The historic era of the highwaymen
• Ballads featuring female highwaymen (you get to hear me sing!)
• Women in history who went “on the pad” as they say, or who were rumored to have done so
• The most popular formula for lesbian highwaywoman novels
• Five lesbian highwaywoman romances, plus one bonus highway robbery incident

The various persons and works discussed or presented in this podcast (in order of appearance) are as follows. Some historic references may apply to more than one person.

• “The Highwayman” (excerpt, lyrics by Alfred Noyes music by Phil Ochs, performed by Heather Rose Jones)
  • “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes, 1906
  • Phil Ochs performing his interpretation, originally released on I Ain’t Marching Anymore, 1965
• “The Female Highway Hector”, 1683-1703 (excerpt, anonymous broadside ballad, sung to the tune “The Rant”, performed by Heather Rose Jones)
  • Facsimile of the original broadside ballad
  • The Rant, collected by William Chappell in 1858
• Historic highwaywomen Joan Bracey, Ann Meders, Nan Hereford
  • “Women of the Road” by Isabelle Goddard
• Rumored highwaywomen Katherine Ferrers (“The Wicked Lady”) and Mary Frith (Moll Cutpurse)
  • “The Wicked Lady” movie
  • “The female highwayman, or the blighted lily: A drama in three acts” play
  • “Female Highwaymen” by Stephen Basdeo, 2015
• “Sovay, or The Female Highwayman” (full text, traditional ballad, music traditional?, performed by Heather Rose Jones)
  • Oldest version of the lyrics, collected by Rev. S. Baring-Gould in 1890
  • A popular later variant, with the most popular tune can be found at the Mudcat Cafe folk music site
• For cross-dressing motifs in literature in general:
  • Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3

Novels with Highwaywoman Romances

• Rebeccah and the Highwayman by Barbara Davies (Bedazzled Ink, 2008)
• The Locket and the Flintlock by Rebecca S Buck (Bold Strokes Books, 2012)
• Daring and Decorum by Lawrence Hogue (Supposed Crimes, 2017)
• The Mask of the Highwaywoman by Niamh Murphy (self-published, 2017)
• Behind the Mask by Kim Larabee (Alyson Books, 1989 out of print)
• “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer” by Heather Rose Jones (self-published, 2016)

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)