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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 76 (previously 27c) - Sappho: The Translations (reprised) - transcript

(Originally aired 2018/10/20 - listen here)

Scheduling gets tricky sometimes, and I found myself putting together the October podcasts without an author guest. Rather than scramble and try to pull someone in at the last minute, I decided instead to reprise the two episodes I did on Sappho back in the first year of the podcast. They’ve been among my most popular shows. It also gives me an excuse to finally get the transcripts for these two episodes posted. Last week, you heard what we know about the historic Sappho and her times, as well as how her story was changed and mythologized across the ages. This week, you’ll hear a tour through translations of Sappho’s most complete works in different eras, as well as poems inspired by the style and sensibility of her poetry. I hope you’ll enjoy these shows, either as a new listener or returning to some favorite episodes.

* * *

One of the bright spots in the history of lesbian desire in history and literature is the ancient Greek poet Sappho. When you think about the erasure of women from history and the even greater erasure of queer sexuality, it’s so amazing that we have an icon like Sappho whose presence and genius were so powerful that they could only be dimmed and distorted and not entirely erased.

I like to try to do some sort of special feature in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to celebrate Pride Month. This time I’ve been covering several books about Sappho from my to-do list, and have bracketed the month with two special podcasts.

The first one was about the historic Sappho and the beginnings of the myths that ancient Greek and Roman writers created about her.

This time we’ll look at the legacy of Sappho from the Middle Ages up through the 19th century. The various images people had of her. How people used her as a symbol. And the way those images affected how her poetry was translated into everyday languages, and how poets used her themes and imagery in their own work.

Sappho lived in the 7th century BC and it’s a testament to her reputation among other classical writers that we know anything about her at all. Early references to her works indicate that her poetry was collected into 8 volumes, representing perhaps 10 thousand lines of verse, of which 650 lines survive. That’s a small fraction, even considering that new fragments of her poetry are still being discovered today. One of the largest modern discoveries was on scraps of papyrus excavated from a rubbish dump in Oxyrhynchus Egypt at the end of the 19th century.

But for much of history before that, the only way that Sappho’s poems survived was when they were quoted by other authors--sometimes only a few words or a line, used to illustrate some point of poetics or grammar, or simply to gain the cachet of quoting the renowned poet. When literature was disseminated only by laboriously writing each copy out by hand, to cease to be re-copied was to be forgotten. And some time around the 6th or 7th century AD, the full collections of Sappho’s work stopped being of interest to copyists, and thus never made the transition from papyrus scrolls to parchment books, except second-hand when quoted by others.

Only one complete poem survives: her Ode to the goddess Aphrodite, where she begs Aphrodite to help her win the love of a woman who spurns her. But another nearly-complete song, known as “Fragment 31”, is the one that most caught the imagination of translators and imitators. The following translations are from Jane McIntosh Snyder’s book Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho and are literal renderings of the original meaning, rather than being works of poetry in themselves. They will serve as a foundation for the other versions I’ll be presenting. In fragment #1, known as the Ode to Aphrodite, Sappho names herself as the speaker and begs the goddess Aphrodite for aid in her romantic disappointment.

#1 Ode to Aphrodite

O immortal Aphrodite of the many-colored throne,
child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I beseech you,
do not overwhelm me in my heart
with anguish and pain, O Mistress

But come hither, if ever at another time
hearing my cries from afar
you heeded them, and leaving the home of your father
came, yoking your golden

Chariot: beautiful, swift sparrows
drew you above the black earth
whirling their wings thick and fast,
from heaven’s ether through mid-air.

Suddenly they had arrived; but you, O Blessed Lady,
with a smile on your immortal face,
asked what I had suffered again and
why I was calling again

And what I was most wanting to happen for me
in my frenzied heart: “Whom again shall I persuade
to come back into friendship with you? Who,
O Sappho, does you injustice?

“For if indeed she flees, soon will she pursue,
and though she receives not your gifts, she will give them,
and if she loves not now, soon she will love,
even against her will.”

Come to me now also, release me from
harsh cares; accomplish as many things as my heart desires
to accomplish; and you yourself
be my fellow soldier.

The second poem, fragment 31, is incomplete at the end, but enough survives that it has been a favorite for translation and imitation, expressing the physical experience of desire and jealousy.

#31 He seems as a god to me

He seems to me to be like the gods
--whatever man sits opposite you
and close by hears you
talking sweetly

And laughing charmingly; which
makes the heart within my breast take flight;
for the instant I look upon you, I cannot anymore
speak one word,

But in silence my tongue is broken, a fine
fire at once runs under my skin,
with my eyes I see not one thing, my ears
buzz,

Cold sweat covers me, trembling
seizes my whole body, I am more moist than grass;
I seem to be little short
of dying...

But all must be ventured...

To understand the context of how Sappho’s poetry was understood and translated, we need to have a sense of how Sappho herself was viewed in later ages.

Classical writers like Ovid and some medieval writers held Sappho up as a model of education and erudition. Giovanni Bocaccio (who is most famous for his Decameron) wrote a celebration of famous (and some infamous) women that included her. And Christine de Pisan includes Sappho among the intellectual women praised in her work The City of Ladies.

In parallel with her reputation as a poet, Sappho was also associated with sex between women, whether as an example of a woman with lesbian desires, or to refute that accusation.

The Italian writer Bartolommeo della Rocca, writing around 1500, uses Sappho as an example of “morally offensive lust” between women.

In the mid 16th century, Italian writer Agnolo Firenzuola, when writing of the love that women could have for each other said, “Some love each other’s beauty in purity and holiness, as the elegant Laudomia Forteguerra loves the most illustrious Margaret of Austria, some lasciviously, as in ancient times Sappho from Lesbos, and in our own times in Rome the great prostitute Cecilia Venetiana. This type of woman by nature spurns marriage and flees from intimate conversation with men.”

Around the same date, the Swiss encyclopedist Theodor Zwinger included a list of Sappho’s female lovers in his entry for “tribades”.

The French aristocratic gossip-monger Brantôme, writing around 1600, was more interested in Sappho as an early proponent of what he called “donna con donna” -- woman with woman--than as a poet. Citing Roman authors he notes, “It is said that Sappho of Lesbos was a very good mistress in this art. Indeed, they say she invented it, and that the ladies of Lesbos have imitated her in this since and continued down to today. As Lucian says, such women are women of Lesbos, who will not tolerate men, but approach other women as men themselves do.”

During the 16th and 17th centuries, an increasing desire to distinguish acceptable forms of romantic attraction between women, versus unacceptably physical forms, led to a divergence between the images of Sappho as romantic poet and Sappho as unnatural deviant. This conflict plays out repeatedly over the following centuries with Sappho’s admirers feeling they needed to de-sexualize her work and life, and her detractors using the example of her fabled sexuality to attack learned women of their own time as inherently deviant.

Both sides used the classical poem “Sappho to Phaon” --now associated with Ovid, but at the time considered to have been written by Sappho herself--as evidence either of her repudiating the love of women, or of the tragic fate of one who had previously dared to embrace it. Translations of this poem appeared somewhat earlier than those of Sappho’s own poetry, as in Thomas Heywood’s 1624 edition.

Some responded to the conflict between the poetic and sexual Sapphos by inventing a second Sappho, to whom the objectionable material could be attributed. Others dealt with the dilemma by interpreting her poems as being written from a fictional masculine point of view. Male poets sometimes used Sappho as an alter ego, expressing their own heterosexual desire for women through her voice.

It is in this context that the renewed interest in Sappho’s poetry (as opposed to her personal life) led to publication, translation, and imitation of her works. Sappho’s poetry itself had previously only accessible to those who could read the original Greek--as well as having access to the older manuscripts that included it. In the mid 16th century, her work began being collected up and published either in the original Greek or with Latin translations.  Perhaps the earliest of these is the 1556 publication by Henri Estienne, which includes poems 1 and 31. Following soon after, were translations into everyday language.  But even before vernacular translations appeared, poets were referencing Sappho’s works and loves in their own poetry.

English poet John Donne, in 1600, wrote an original poem in Sappho’s voice entitled “Sappho to Philaenis” which acknowledges her homoeroticism and treats it positively.

French poet Anne de Rohan was clearly familiar with Sappho’s homoerotic reputation, and in her 1617 poem “On a lady named beloved” makes direct allusion to fragment 31 in a work that is clearly a love poem from one woman to another. She would have had access to Sappho’s works via publications such as those mentioned. You can see the echoes of Sappho’s themes in this English translation of de Rohan’s poem, though it is not a direct counterpart to a specific poem:

Beauty, it would be a great wrong,
If, for your worthy graces,
I had been dealt the lover’s fate;
For anyone but you, my dear Beloved,

All the Olympic torches,
Illuminated in their course,
Are not lovelier ornaments
Than the eyes of my beautiful Beloved.

Cupid, delighted with those eyes,
His right hand armed with an arrow
Shot into my troubled heart
The ardent desire to love my Beloved.

I know not whether they be heavens or gods
Whose power from me is hidden
And compels me, both near and far,
To die so as to love my Beloved.

To see them, they seem like the heavens,
Of azure color are they,
But by their effects they’re like gods,
Forcing me yet to love that Beloved.

For me, then, they’re both heavens and gods,
Because of their hidden power
And luminous appearance,
For I hold nothing dearer than my Beloved.

Anne Dacier’s French edition of Sappho’s work published in 1681 was important for the spread of familiarity with Sappho’s work thoughout Europe. However Dacier considered the homoerotic interpretation of Sappho to be slander, in her edition, Sappho’s fragments are reinterpreted to create a virtual male figure around whom Sappho’s life revolves.

Slightly earlier than Dacier, in 1652, the English translator John Hall included a version of fragment 31 in his edition of the classical Greek poetic manual that it is quoted in. Perhaps it is this context that inspired his choice of poetic meter. Unlike many translations, he retains the final surviving line that shows the incomplete nature of what we have.

Fragment 31 (John Hall)

He that sits next to thee now and hears
Thy charming voice, to me appears
Beauteous as any deity
That rules the sky

How did his pleasing glances dart
Sweet langors to my ravish’d heart
At the first sight though so prevailed
That my voice fail’d

I’m speechles, fev’rish, fires assail
My fainting flesh, my sight doth fail
Whilst to my restless mind my ears
Still hum new fears.

Cold sweats and tremblings so invade
That like a wither’d flower I fade
So that my life being almost lost,
I seem a ghost

Yet since I’m wretched must I dare...

17th century English poet Katherine Phillips was compared to Sappho by her friends. Although the intention may have been simply to praise Phillips’ poetry, the two bodies of work share the characteristic of using the structures and tropes of heterosexual love poetry in contexts where both the lover and beloved are unmistakably female.

Alexander Pope, perhaps best known for his mock-heroic poem “The Rape of the Lock”, turned his translating talents in 1712, not to Sappho’s work itself, but to Ovid’s poem “Sappho to Phaon”. Unlike some other translations of this work, Pope’s  version includes the acknowledgement that Sappho did originally love women--a topic that others had simply glossed over in translating the poem, turning Sappho entirely heterosexual.

The early 18th century English writer and politician Joseph Addison wrote a number of works inspired by classical authors. He wasn’t as proficient in Greek as Anne Dacier had been with her French edition. In 1735, Addison translated a number of Sappho’s works into rather forgettable rhymed couplets, including Fragment 31 “Happy as a god is he”. The first-person voice of the poem, combined with an absence of any specific reference to the person addressed (and the lack of grammatical gender markers in English) mean that little trace of homoerotic sentiment remains.

Fragment 31 (Joseph Addison)

Happy as a God is he,
That fond Youth, who plac’d by thee
Hears and sees thee sweetly gay,
Talk and smile his Soul away.

That it was alarm’d my breast,
And depriv’ed my heart of rest
For in speechless Raptures toss’d
While I gaz’d my voice was lost.

The soft Fire with flowing rein,
Glided swift through ev’ry vein
Darkness o’er my eyelids hung
In my ears faint murmurs rung

Chilling damps my limbs bedew’d
Gentle tremors thrill’d my blood
Life from my pale cheeks retir’d
Breathless, I almost expir’d

Some somewhat more poetic--if less faithful--versions were published by Ambrose Philips in 1748 including the Hymn to Aphrodite (Fragment 1), and Fragment 31. In The first, Philips had changed to gender of Sappho’s beloved to male.

Fragment 1 (Ambrose Philips)

O Venus, beauty of the skies,
To whom a thousand temples rise,
Gayly false in gentle smiles,
Full of love-perplexing wiles, ⁠
O goddess! from my heart remove
The wasting cares and pains of love.

If ever thou hast kindly hear'd
A song in soft distress prefer'd, ⁠
Propitious to my tuneful vow,
O gentle goddess! hear me now.
Descend thou bright, immortal, guest,
In all thy radiant charms confess'd. ⁠

Thou once didst leave almighty Jove,
And all the golden roofs above:
The car thy wanton sparrows drew;
Hov'ring in air they lightly flew; ⁠
As to my bower they wing'd their way,
I saw their quiv'ring pinions play.

The birds dismiss'd (while you remain)
Bore back their empty car again: ⁠
Then you, with looks divinely mild,
In ev'ry heav'nly feature smil'd,
And ask'd, what new complaints I made,
And why I call'd you to my aid? ⁠

What frenzy in my bosom rag'd,
And by what care to be asswag'd?
What gentle youth I would allure,
Whom in my artful toils secure? ⁠
Who does thy tender heart subdue,
Tell me, my Sappho, tell me who?

Tho now he shuns thy longing arms,
He soon shall court thy slighted charms; ⁠
Tho now thy offerings he despise,
He soon to thee shall sacrifice;
Tho now he freez, he soon shall burn,
And be thy victim in his turn. ⁠

Celestial visitant, once more
Thy needful presence I implore!
In pity come and ease my grief,
Bring my distemper'd soul relief: ⁠
Favour thy suppliant's hidden fires, 
And give me all my heart desires.

In Philips’ translation of fragment 31, there is no need to make pronoun changes, but a subtle shift in the emphasis of the poem can make it appear that the speaker’s love-sickness is caused by the man referenced in the first line. Alternately, the absence of an identification for the poem’s speaker leaves one free to imagine it in the male translator’s voice.

Fragment 31 (Ambrose Philips)

Bless’d as the immortal gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee all the while
Softly speak and sweetly smile. ⁠

'Twas this depriv'd my soul of rest,
And rais'd such tumults in my breast;
For while I gaz'd, in transport toss'd,
My breath was gone, my voice was lost. ⁠

My bosom glow'd; the subtle flame
Ran quick through all my vital frame;
O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung,
My ears with hollow murmurs rung. ⁠

In dewy damps my limbs were chill'd,
My blood with gentle horrors thrill'd;
My feeble pulse forgot to play,
I fainted, sunk, and dy'd away. ⁠

Despite the best efforts of these gender-swapped translations, knowledge about Sappho’s work and reputation provided a “conceptual community” for women who loved women in the 18th century. The terms “lesbian” and “sapphic” were coming into common use in a sexual sense, and even superficially innocent references to the poet could be used as a sort of secret password to refer to lesbian desire.

For intellectual and literary women of the time, there was a complication. In addition to her sexual reputation, Sappho stood in for the idea of intellectual and literary women in general. So it sometimes happened that female scholars, even more than male ones, found themselves straining to discount the “taint” of lesbianism for the most famous Lesbian.

Sappho’s mere existence entered into the tension between several framings of same-sex passions. One position othered lesbianism by placing it elsewhere in space or time: in ancient Greece, or in foreign countries. Another view saw lesbianism as a brand new decadent phenomenon. A sort of “kids these days” approach. The classical Sappho could be used to imply lesbianism was something of the past, no longer practiced, and perhaps conceptually divorced from affections between 18th century women. But those educated enough to have access to literature of the previous century, such as John Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis” (1633) or Brantôme’s Lives of Gallant Ladies would find it harder to dismiss lesbianism as a longstanding tradition.

It was during this era that accusations of lesbianism became a regular part of social and political attacks on prominent women. Sappho was a useful symbol to use in such attacks that would carry a weight of symbolism with an economy of reference. An anonymous poet in 1735 wrote a long mock-heroic poem entitled “The Sappho-an” satirically attributing to Sappho the origin of lesbianism in general and certain sexual practices in particular.

In the 19th century, the academic approach to Sappho’s poetry might be summed up by the opinion of Henry Thornton Wharton, whose 1887 edition of Sappho’s work attempted to produce a comprehensive bibliography of published editions starting in the mid-16th century, as well as materials relating to her life. Wharton discusses the passion and skill of Sappho’s poetry, but almost entirely sidesteps the issue of her sexuality, even when citing works that address it. He concludes, “whether the pure think her emotion pure or impure, whether the impure appreciate it rightly, or misinterpret it, whether, finally, it was platonic or not, seems to me to matter nothing.”

The translations he collects reflect this insistent side-stepping. Although Wharton’s literal rendering of the Ode to Aphrodite is faithful to the gender of the original without comment: “Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies she shall soon follow...and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth.”

Most of the metrical renderings he collects all turn the diffident beloved to “he”. Wharton’s version of fragment 31 is less problematic, given that the original lacks the same overt reference to Sappho as the speaker and clear reference to the gender of the beloved. Thus the metrical versions by male poets that he collects can be received as the jealousy of one man (the poet) for another over the woman they both desire. Rather than a direct translation, here’s a borrowing of the imagery for another context by Lord Tennyson in 1832:

I watch thy grace; and in its place
My heart a charmed slumber keeps,
While I muse upon thy face;
And a languid fire creeps
Through my veins to all my frame,
Dissolvingly and slowly: soon
From thy rose-red lips my name
Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,
With dinning sound my ears are rife,
My tremullous tongue faltereth,
I lose my color, I love my breath,
I drink the cup of a costly death
Brimmed with delicious draughts of warmest life.
I die with my delight, before
I hear what I would hear from thee.

In versions such as this, the male literary establishment claimed Sappho’s poetic legacy for their own and for heterosexual love, by appropriating Sappho’s words and removing them from the context of her own desires.

But while one 19th century movement straight-washed Sappho in order to claim her for Romanticism, Sappho’s transgressive sexuality was enthusiastically embraced by the decadent movement that sprang up in France, who saw in her in icon of everything they considered most outrageous to bourgeois sensibilities: an aggressive and predatory female sexuality that led inevitably to madness and death.

This movement evoked their version if the legendary Sappho in works like Charles Baudelaire’s “Lesbos” (in 1857), and Pierre Louÿs’s The Songs of Bilitis (in 1894)--a cycle of poems in the voice of a fictional member of Sappho’s community.

Rather than end on that note, I’d like to close with two works by the American poet, Mary Hewitt. Her translation of Sappho’s fragment 31 published in 1845 fails somewhat in terms of poetic merit but seems to carry an intensity of emotion that many other translations lack.

Fragment 31 (Mary Hewitt)

Blest as the immortal gods is he
On whom each day thy glances shine
Who hears thy voice of melody
And meets thy smile so all divine

Oh when I list thine accents low
How thrills my breast with tender pain
Fire seems through every vein to glow
And strange confusion whelms my brain

My sight grows dim beneath the glance
Whose ardent rays I may not meet
While swift and wild my pulses dance
Then cease all suddenly to beat

And o’er my cheek with rapid gush
I feel the burning life-tide dart
Then backward like a torrent rush
All icy cold upon my heart

And I am motionless and pale
And silent as an unstrung lyre
And feel, while thus each sense doth fail
Doomed in thy presence to expire

Hewitt was also inspired to write original poetry in the style of Sappho. The following work echoes many of the themes of fragment 31, but rewoven into a new work. If anything, this poem carries a stronger sense of homoeroticism than the original, for instead of simply recording the speaker’s physical reactions, it explicitly attributes those reactions to love. When I looked for further information on Hewitt, I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover her among the literary lifelong spinsters who formed the backbone of the Romantic Friendship phenomenon. Alas, Hewitt was twice married to men--so my fantasies were shattered--but then so were many of the women of this time who wrote of their strong emotional bonds to other women. This poem suggests that at the very least she would have understood such desires.

If to repeat thy name when none may hear me,
To find thy thought with all my thoughts inwove
To languish where thou’rt not -- to sigh when near thee
Oh! If this be to love thee, I do love!

If when thou utterest low words of greeting
To feel through every vein the torrent pour
Then back again the hot tide swift retreating
Leave me all powerless, silent as before

If to list breathless to thine accents failing
Almost to pain, upon my eager ear
And fondly when alone to be recalling
The words that I would die again to hear

If at thy glance my heart all strength forsaking
Pant in my breast as pants the frighted doves
If to think on thee ever, sleeping--waking--
Oh! If this be to love thee, I do love!

---

Show Notes

In this show we’ll look at the legacy of Sappho from the Middle Ages up through the 19th century: the various images people had of her, how people used her as a symbol, the way those images affected how her poetry was translated into everyday languages, and how poets used her themes and imagery in their own work.

In this episode we talk about:

• How much poetry did Sappho write, and how much survives? Why was it lost, and why were the bits we have preserved?
• What was the changing image of Sappho from the middle ages through the 19th century? How did people reconcile their admiration for Sappho’s poetry and their disapproval of homosexuality?
• Who translated Sappho’s works and how did their opinions of her affect those translations?

The show will include recitations of the following poems:

• Ode to Aphrodite & Fragment #31: Jane McIntosh Snyder from Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho (20th century)
• “On a Lady Named Beloved” inspired by fragment #31: Anne de Rohan (1617), translated from the French
• Fragment #31: John Hall (1652)
• Fragment #31: Joseph Addison (1735)
• Ode to Aphrodite & Fragment #31: Abrose Philips (1748)
• “Eleanore” inspired by Fragment #31: Lord Tennyson (1832)
• Fragment #31 & “Imitation of Sappho” inspired by Fragment #31: Mary Hewitt (1845)

Books used as source material

• Addison, Joseph. 1735. The Works of Anacreon, Translated into English Verse, with Notes Explanatory and Poetical. To which are added the Odes, Fragments, and Epigrams of Sappho. London.
• Castle, Terry (ed). 2003. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-12510-0
• Hall, John. 1652. Sappho’s On the Sublime.
• Snyder, Jane. 1997. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Wharton, Henry Thornton. 1887. Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation. London.

This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here:

• Sappho

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)

Past-me wrote a promissory note for this introduction. Present-me needs to get in to the office and wants to get the blog up. So you'll have to be satisfied with the book summary itself.

There is nothing quite so frustrating to me as coming late to a wonderful book because the cover synopsis deliberately concealed the information that would lead me to put it on my TBR list. And given my reading habits, that usually happens when the publisher has decided to erase all but the vaguest hint of queer content.

I loved Molly Tanzer’s weird western Vermillion, so I’d idly glanced at Creatures of Will and Temper a few times in hopes of something similar, but put it down again thinking about the stacks of books already waiting for me that cheerfully embraced and telegraphed their queer female characters. Then, one day, I happened to encounter clear confirmation that some of the female characters were involved in a same-sex romance and found myself shaking my fist at the sky shouting, “Why did you think this was not important information?”

Ahem.

The book bills itself as inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, but other than the rather obvious naming of one character Dorina Grey, and the minor plot point of a painting that is not entirely what it seems, in a Victorian setting, I don’t see a particularly strong connection. Instead we get two ill-matched sisters: the beautiful free-spirited young aspiring art critic Dorina who is fond of smoking, scandal, and girls; and the older, plainer, more strait-laced Evadne who has just been Disappointed In Love and drowns her sorrows in fencing practice. (I love how my expectations were upended by making Evadne the dashing swordswoman.) Evadne becomes an unwilling companion on her sister’s jaunt to take in the sights of London, in care of their Uncle Basil the painter. And when Dorina becomes enraptured by Basil’s outrageously decadent friend Lady Henry, Evadne is only distracted from her growing protective outrage by the prospect of being welcomed into a prestigious London fencing school and winning the respect...and perhaps more...of one of the personable instructors.

And then there are the demons.

There are a lot of things to like about this fantasy adventure: the painfully realistic relations between the sisters in which neither is hero nor villain, The gradual revealing of who or what the demons are and the part they have to play in the eventual climax, but most especially the way the plot twists and turns and tumbles about. I was never entirely surprised that the twists happened, but I couldn’t predict what they were going to be. If I found any flaw, it would be that the climax felt ever so slightly off balance--not rushed, not slow, but like that last step that turned out not to be as tall as you thought it was.

If you want your paranormal Victorian demonic romp with a delightfully non-tragic queer encounter, this is your book. (There’s also a sequel, but I’m back to trying to guess whether it hits my “must buy” marks.)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 74 (previously 27a) - On the Shelf for October 2018 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2018/10/06 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2018.

Is it the fourth quarter of the year already? How did that happen! Just last week we released the third short story in our fiction project. Have you listened to it yet? I loved this early medieval story of older women finding love and comfort after a lifetime of putting other people’s needs first.

The Fiction Series

And as I mentioned in passing last month, it’s time to officially announce that the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be continuing the fiction series next year. I thought about maybe widening the scope of what sort of stories we’d be considering, but when it comes down to it, I’d like to continue focusing on supporting straightforward historic stories, without fantastic elements, so I’m keeping the same submission guidelines as last year.

The key points--and I’ll be posting the full call for submissions on the website for you to refer to--are as follows. Length can be up to 5000 words. Stories must be set prior to 1900 in an actual, real-world time and place. If you pick a very popular setting like Victorian England or the American West, you should be doing something new and interesting that stands out from the crowd. I love seeing stories from less used eras and cultures, but I want to see cultures treated knowledgeably and with respect. Romance is optional. Romance stories should have some other strong element in addition to the romance and I’m not looking for erotica.

Let me explain that a little, because last year some people tried to second-guess why I didn’t want erotic stories. The simple fact is that 5000 words isn’t much space to introduce characters, setting, and plot, and then come to a satisfying resolution. When sex scenes come into the mix, they tend to push the other elements aside and the rest of the story often becomes stage dressing for the sex scene. Sex may be implied in the story, but leave it off the page so you have room for the story itself.

And, of course, the story should center on lesbian themes. By this, I mean that it should feature protagonist(s) whose primary emotional orientation within the scope of the story is toward other women. This is not meant to exclude characters who might identify today as bisexual or who have relationships with men outside the scope of the story. But the story should focus on same-sex relations.

Authors of all genders and orientations are welcome to submit. Authors from traditionally marginalized cultures are strongly encouraged to submit, regardless of whether you are writing about your own cultural background. Like last year, we’ll be paying industry standard professional rates of 6 cents a word--we pay our narrators industry-standard rates too. Check out the full details of the submission guidelines on the alpennia.com website and start brainstorming your stories. Submissions will be accepted during the month of January 2019. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets submitted this time!

Conference

Here’s an item that might be of interest to some. In March 2019 in France, there’s going to be an academic conference entitled “Sapphic Vibes: Lesbians in Literature from the Renaissance to the Present.” I heard about it through a call for papers, but by the time this podcast goes out the due date for submissions will be past. But if you happen to be in the vicinity of the Université de Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse) next March 14-15 and have a yen to listen to research papers on lesbian themes in historic literature (in English and in French), check out the link in the show notes for more details. It looks like they’re planning to hold a second conference on the theme in 2020 in Iceland. If I were the sort to pop off to Europe for the weekend for an academic conference, I’d be there (even though the papers in French would be lost on me).

Publications on the Blog

In September the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog covered several publications relating to the subject of last month’s essay, 17th century English gender outlaw Moll Cutpurse. And while I was on the subject of gender-crossing I decided to start this month with a delightful surprise that’s been lurking on my shelf for two decades: Mary Diana Dods: A Scholar and a Gentleman by Betty T. Bennett. This is best described as an academic mystery quest, tracking down the identity of two men mentioned in the letters of 19th century author Mary Shelley--she of Frankenstein fame--only to discover that the two men were the same person, and that person was a woman. I loved this topic so much, I’ve turned it into this month’s Ask Sappho segment.

For the rest of the month, and possibly into November, I’ll be working through some books and articles I’ve accumulated on sexuality in classical Rome. From which, you might guess that I’ll be finishing up the month with an essay on women’s same-sex relations in that historic context.

Book Shopping!

There’s only one new purchase for the blog to report this month. In fact, it’s actually a book that I ordered back in June but it never arrived and I only recently realized that and inquired. So I have a replacement copy now. The title is Same-sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts by Marie H. Loughlin. It’s a collection of excerpts and selections from a wide variety of genres, both literary and non-fiction. There’s a lot of redundancy with material I already have in other sources, but also some material that I’ve seen discussed but haven’t seen in the original previously.

No Author Guest

I don’t have an author guest lined up to interview this month. I’ve been putting out a lot of feelers but didn’t get any nibbles that panned out with the right timing. So rather than scrambling to try to nail down an interview at the last minute, I’m going to reprise a pair of shows on the Greek poet Sappho and her work that have been particularly popular.

This is my chance to remind people that I’m always looking both for authors to host on the show and for enthusiastic readers of lesbian historical fiction to talk about their favorite books. My contact information is in the show notes.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

When compiling the list of new and forthcoming historicals, I’ve been rather dismayed at how few historicals--especially plain historicals without any fantasy element--are coming out from the major lesbian presses. I haven’t been doing these lists long enough to have a sense of what “normal” looks like, but the current state of the field is disappointing.

There was one book I had my eye on with an uncertain publication date that seems to have come out in August when I wasn’t looking. Devan Johnson’s Any Other Name is an erotic Regency romance with gender disguise and a marriage of convenience. I’m going to give a couple of caveats because the cover design is absolutely atrocious and it doesn’t say “Regency” at all to me. And reviews on Goodreads indicate that there are some problems with editing and narrative structure. But for those who are hungry for your Regency fix, here’s the blurb:

It’s 1834 England. Following the sudden and tragic deaths of her father, the Duke of Ashebourne, and her twin brother, Rose Marsden disguises herself as a man and assumes her brother’s identity and father’s title. Her deception works for almost a decade, but she knows that eventually she’s going to need to find a way to procure an heir. Lady Margaret ‘Maggie’ Clayton is in trouble; her fiancé has been killed, leaving her pregnant and unwed. If society finds out, she’ll be ruined. When the Duke of Ashebourne learns Maggie’s secret and reveals her own, the two women hatch a plan that may solve both of their problems: the ultimate marriage of convenience.

There are a couple of September releases that I hadn’t noticed earlier because they came out from mainstream YA imprints. As is usual for mainstream books, the queer content isn’t very obvious from the jacket copy, but I’ve confirmed it through sources. Monica Hesse’s The War Outside, published by Little, Brown Books is a YA historical rather than a romance, tackling political questions that are unfortunately relevant to us today. Here’s the blurb.

It's 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado--until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a "family internment camp" for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece. Haruko finds herself consumed by fear for her soldier brother and distrust of her father, who she knows is keeping something from her. And Margot is doing everything she can to keep her family whole as her mother's health deteriorates and her rational, patriotic father becomes a man who distrusts America and fraternizes with Nazis. With everything around them falling apart, Margot and Haruko find solace in their growing, secret friendship. But in a prison the government has deemed full of spies, can they trust anyone--even each other?

The queer content in Amy Lukavics’ Nightingale, from Harlequin Teen, is similarly obscured in the publicity, but present when you check out some of the Goodreads reviews. This one has a bisexual protagonist who has relationships with both women and men in the story. It wanders through the genres of horror and science fiction, as well as having a historical setting. Here’s the blurb:

At seventeen, June Hardie is everything a young woman in 1951 shouldn’t be—independent, rebellious, a dreamer. June longs to travel, to attend college and to write the dark science fiction stories that consume her waking hours. But her parents only care about making June a better young woman. Her mother grooms her to be a perfect little homemaker while her father pushes her to marry his business partner’s domineering son. When June resists, her whole world is shattered—suburbia isn’t the only prison for different women. June’s parents commit her to Burrow Place Asylum, aka the Institution. With its sickening conditions, terrifying staff and brutal “medical treatments,” the Institution preys on June’s darkest secrets and deepest fears. And she’s not alone. The Institution terrorizes June’s fragile roommate, Eleanor, and the other women locked away within its crumbling walls. Those who dare speak up disappear…or worse. Trapped between a gruesome reality and increasingly sinister hallucinations, June isn’t sure where her nightmares end and real life begins. But she does know one thing: in order to survive, she must destroy the Institution before it finally claims them all.

Another book that overlaps both history and speculative fiction is Jane Fletcher’s Isle of Broken Years from Bold Strokes Books. It starts out looking like yet another typical lesfic pirate adventure, but takes a sharp turn somewhere in the middle. The blurb sticks to the historic setting:

Catalina de Valasco’s parents have her future fully planned. The most important step for a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman being, of course, an advantageous marriage.  Unfortunately, a series of setbacks has left Catalina unwed. On a galleon bound for the Americas and her latest husband-to-be, Catalina again finds her marriage plans frustrated. Pirates capture the ship, and she is held for ransom. The danger intensifies as they sail into seas which, one day, will become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Catalina enters a terrifying world that she could never have imagined or planned for. Yet of all the surprises awaiting her, the most unexpected one is love.

Rebecca Wilde’s Libertine, self-published through Amazon, is a very short erotic work about a highwaywoman in 17th century England. The blurb should give you a sense of what to expect.

In 1669, England’s first female highwayman robs stagecoaches, and hearts, throughout London. Armed with her flintlock pistol, the masked “Libertine” successfully seduces England’s female nobility while at the same time, attempts to rescue her longtime lover from the hangman’s noose. Join the notorious highwaywoman in her erotic adventures as she matches wits with both the local constabulary and the established criminal underworld, lending new meaning to the phrase, “Stand and deliver!”

Ann Aptaker’s Cantor Gold gangster series has a fourth installment with Flesh and Gold from Bold Strokes Books.

Havana, 1952, a city throbbing with pleasure and danger, where the Mob peddles glamor to the tourists and there’s plenty of sex for sale. In the swanky hotels and casinos, and the steamy, secretive Red Light district of the Colón, Cantor Gold, dapper art thief and smuggler, searches the streets and brothels for her kidnapped love, Sophie de la Luna y Sol. Cantor races against time while trying to out run the deadly schemes of American mobsters and the gunsights of murderous local gangs.

And to finish up the October listings, Tammy Lynne Stoner’s Sugar Land, from Red Hen Press, has a more literary feel. Here’s the description:

It’s 1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend―who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at the Imperial State Prison Farm for men. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Lead Belly, who sings his way out (a true story)―but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

If you know about forthcoming historicals, remember to drop me a note, just in case they aren’t on my list yet.

Ask Sappho

I had so much fun sorting through the story of Mary Diana Dods, mentioned earlier, that rather than answer a listener question this month for the Ask Sappho segment, I thought I’d give you a run-down on her story.

Imagine all your favorite Regency romance tropes, then toss in a few more tropes as dessert. The bastard daughter of a Scottish earl. A false cross-gender pen name to publish plays and poetry. A glamorously beautiful unwed mother. A woman living as a man. A marriage of convenience. Parisian literary salons filled with brilliant and witty people. And in the middle of it all, Mary Shelley as matchmaker. Mary Wollstonecraft Frankenstein Fucking Shelley. If this were a historical romance novel, your editor would tell you to tone it down a bit to make it more believable.

Professor Bennett’s book on Mary Diana Dods is structured as an academic mystery, tracing the story from the first dangling threads all the way through the process of teasing those threads out and then tying them up neatly. But here’s the more straightforward story.

At the very beginning of the 19th century, Mary Diana Dods--known to her friends as Doddy--and her sister Georgiana were the illegitimate daughters of the earl of Morton, a prominent and wealthy Scottish aristocrat. They were brought up amidst luxury and privilege, though never publicly acknowledged as the earl’s children. Dods certainly had an extensive education and was fluent in French, German, Italian, and Latin. Dods also seems to have had some sort of physical disability, though it’s never described beyond being a “disproportion” of her body and references to a liver ailment. She had dark short curly hair, sharp piercing black eyes, was of small stature, and looked worn down from chronic pain--and no doubt chronic worry about finances as well. For when the earl of Morton finally married--a woman younger than either of his daughters--they were kicked out of the house with an allowance that was nowhere near enough to maintain the life they’d been brought up to expect.

Georgiana was married by that time, as Mrs. Carter, and living in India with her husband, but when she returned to England, a widow with two young sons, she and Dods found themselves endlessly struggling with debt, in part due to their father’s carelessness with regard to the regularity of payment of their allowance. The sisters did their best to find means to support themselves in line with the expectations for well-bred women of the Regency era. Georgiana tried to find a position as a paid companion to some wealthier woman. Dods set up a day school with her good friend Charlotte Figg and another woman to give music lessons and such like.

Like most single women of that era, they socialized primarily with other women and were part of a complex network of friendships and support systems that provided lodging, loans of money, professional references and leads, and simple companionship and emotional support. For Dods, part of that network included the writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and through her, entrance to a larger literary world that included Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and the London salon of Dr. Kitchener. Moving in literary circles, it’s not surprising that Dods decided to try her hand earning money from writing. And having seen the experiences of other literary women, it also isn’t surprising that, like many others, she decided to create a male pen name for the purpose. A male author would be taken seriously and paid accordingly. Female authors were treated as dilettantes when noticed at all. Thus, Mr. David Lyndsay was born. And Mary Shelley was happy to help Dods begin her career by writing letters of recommendation to publishers for Lyndsay.

Lyndsay had an initial burst of success, having multiple works published in Blackwood’s Magazine, over the course of a couple of years, and then a collection of dramas, also put out by Blackwood who was a prominent Scottish publisher and may have been influenced by the opportunity to feature a fellow countryman. But Lyndsay’s book flopped on the market. Blackwood lost money and therefore lost interest, though it took Lyndsay several years to get the hint when Blackwood failed to buy any more of his submissions.

When that pin finally dropped, Blackwood received a submission from another aspiring Scottish writer, one Walter Sholto Douglas, whose work was sent for consideration by his wife, Isabella Douglas. And now, we need to circle back and ask who Isabella was.

Isabella Robinson was generally acclaimed to be one of the most beautiful women in existence. Her father was a good friend of Mary Shelley’s father, Mr. Godwin, and the two families socialized regularly. Mary Shelley (who by now has been widowed by Shelley’s tragic drowning) doted on her, being on the rebound from a close romantic friendship with another friend whose marriage created distance between them.

And then Isabella Robinson became pregnant by a lover who decamped to America without having the courtesy to marry her. Having a child out of wedlock wasn’t entirely fatal--after all, Mary Shelley and any number of women in her radical circle had done so--but if there were no man in the picture, marriage or not, life became very difficult. And the lack of an assigned father for the child would be a significant handicap for its future.

In that age of the near impossibility of divorce, it was a normal--if not particularly common--practice for a woman to simply proclaim herself the wife of her current lover, adopt his name, and be accepted as such, with the assistance of geography, foreign travel, or simply the separation of non-overlapping social spheres. Official certificates of marriage or birth were useful, but one could manage without them with a bit of cleverness.

And so, somewhere around the time that Isabella’s pregnancy would have become evident, she went into seclusion away from London, began mentioning in correspondence with friends that she had married, and took up the role of Mrs. Douglas to act as secretary for the new pen name of Mary Diana Dods, that of Walter Sholto Douglas.

From the bits and scraps we know, it’s impossible to tell how long and how extensive they intended the fictitious marriage to be. In that era, pregnancy was uncertain and post-natal mortality was significant. If Isabella’s child failed to survive to birth or much beyond, it’s possible that Isabella would have returned to her London haunts remaining Isabella Robinson with only her immediate circle of friends the wiser. But her daughter Adeline was healthy and thriving, so some more long-term identity needed to be established. Mr. Sholto Douglas had a literary existence but not a physical one. For Isabella, one possible path might have been a convenient widowhood, but Dods was counting on Mr. Douglas as her new source of writing income.

And so, a daring plan was hatched. And Mary Shelley was in the middle of it. Shelley wrote to a friend of hers in London asking for a favor. She was about to travel to France in company with a group of friends: Mr. and Mrs. Douglas and their infant daughter, Mr. Douglas’s widowed sister Mrs. Georgiana Carter and her two young sons. It was inconvenient of them to travel to London to pick up passports, but passports must be picked up in person. The friend had a passing resemblance to Mr. Douglas -- could he find a woman with a similar resemblance to Mrs. Douglas and pick up the passports? Why yes, he’d be happy to. And in the mean time, Mary Diana Dods put on trousers and began practicing to be Mr. Walter Sholto Douglas.

If we were writing this as a romance novel, what follows would take a different path. But the Douglas’s marriage ran onto the rocks of some insurmountable difficulties. In particular, even though it was possible for an English couple to live more cheaply in Paris than in London, the Douglases still had the slimmest of incomes and yet wanted to move in the high-fashion society of Parisian literary salons. And the beautiful and engaging Isabella Douglas eagerly flirted with anything in pants. Anything except her husband, Sholto Douglas.

In October 1827, the Douglases move to Paris where they are accepted as what they appear to be--a married couple with extensive connections in English literary society. Two years later, Mr. Douglas is in a French prison for debt and in extremely poor health. Isabella Douglas has lost the friendship and support of her female friends with her romantic and sexual antics and returns to London the next year. Without her husband.

There is no trace of what happened to Mary Diana Dods, aka Walter Sholto Douglas. If Douglas had died in debtor’s prison, one might expect that the discovery of his underlying sex would have been worth a note in the archives. But possibly not. Or possibly friends took up a collection to cover the debts and then Mr. Douglas decided to disappear, along with Mary Diana Dods. The only later trace was that Mr. Douglas went down in historical records as the father of Adeline Douglas, a fact that most might consider relevant only because Adeline married a prominent enough man that she appears in biographical dictionaries.

Is there a love story anywhere within this tangle, much less a same-sex love story? Unclear. This is an era when romantic friendships between women were considered the norm, and the language Mary Shelley uses to talk about her relationship with Isabella is certainly emotional and romantic. Did Shelley convince her friend Dods to go to the extreme of living as Mr. Douglas for the sake of love? Dods--under the name of Lyndsay--left a manuscript poem written on the flyleaf of a copy of Lyndsay’s book that mourns a tragically dead beloved and speaks of being forever alone. But this was well before Douglas was invented and there is no clue to whether the poem’s subject was a real person or what gender they might have been, if so. Certainly Isabella seems to have had no particular emotional attachment to the person she presented as her husband, or if she did, she certainly didn’t act like it, though observers described Mr. Douglas as being devoted to her.

But if the life of Mary Diana Dods fails to provide us with a conventionally happy ending to this adventure, that doesn’t mean that we can’t see, in her life, the structures and themes of how two women might have constructed an adventure with just such a happy ending as we might crave. Just make it a little more believable than this true life story if you expect to sell it as a historical romance novel!

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Show Notes

Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.

In this episode we talk about:

• Announcing the 2019 audio fiction series
• A conference next March in France: “Sapphic Vibes: Lesbians in Literature from the Renaissance to the Present”
• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Publications about Moll Cutpurse
  • Mary Diana Dods: A Scholar and a Gentleman by Betty T. Bennett
  • Publications about sexuality in ancient Rome
• Book Shopping for the Blog
  • Same-sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts by Marie H. Loughlin
• Instead of an author guest, a reprise of two shows about Sappho
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • Any Other Name by Devan Johnson
  • The War Outside by Monica Hesse
  • Nightingale by Amy Lukavics
  • Isle of Broken Years by Jane Fletcher
  • Libertine by Rebecca Wilde
  • Flesh and Gold by Ann Aptaker
  • Sugar Land by Tammy Lynne Stoner
• Ask Sappho: The most outrageous, tropiest Regency same-sex relationship...and it’s all true

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)