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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 27 (previously 16b) - Interview with Farah Mendlesohn

(Originally aired 2017/11/11 - listen here)

This month's author interview is with Hugo Award-winning academic writer of literary analysis Farah Mendlesohn, who is taking her first step into being a fiction author this month with her lesbian Regency romance Spring Flowering. We had a lovely discussion about the varying attitudes toward same-sex relationships in different eras and the challenges of writing historical fiction.

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(Transcript commissioned from Jen Zink @Loopdilou who is available for professional podcast transcription work. I am working on adding transcripts of the existing interview shows.)

Heather Rose Jones: Today, the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast is delighted to welcome author Farah Mendleson to the show. Farah, I’m so glad you could join us.

Farah Mendlesohn: Thank you. It’s fantastic, particularly as we’re doing this across the Atlantic.

H: Yes! I’m going to start off with a slightly different opening question than I usually ask authors. Farah, you’ve written a number of critical studies of science fiction and fantasy literature. You’ve even won a Hugo award for co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. You’re currently working on a massive definitive study of the works of Robert Heinlein. So, why is your first novel a historical novel rather than a fantasy or science fiction?

F: Oh. Well, first of all, because I’ve never been any good at writing science fiction, which is what I would write if I could. I must say, here, I never intended to be a fiction writer. I may be the only person you ever interview who never wrote fiction as a child unless absolutely forced to. Did it once as an undergraduate because the alternative was a major theoretical essay that, of course, I had not understood one word of. I was teaching creative writing a few years ago and a colleague who shall be nameless turned ‘round and said I shouldn’t be teaching creative writing unless I’d written fiction.

H: Oh, wow.

F: I was a bit irritated, so I spent the next year learning to write fiction. One of the people I modeled myself on is a British Children’s writer called Geoffrey Trease because he always wrote 60,000-word books. Because I’m very much a structuralist, I could break them down, and I could see what he was doing. I used his work as a model and wrote several historical pieces because all my degrees are in history. I’m not a literature person at all. I have three degrees in history.

H: That was actually something that was going to come up later in the interview because it looked like all of your teaching work has been in Literature.

F: No, not at all. I started out in American Studies, moved into History when American Studies started to fold in the UK, which it did across the country. Then I got pulled into Cultural Studies and then somebody said, ‘We need somebody to teach horror! You know lots about science fiction!’ I have no idea what the connection is. I found myself being pulled into the publishing department because of my work on science fiction conventions and work with publishers. That’s how I ended up drifting, but I’ve hardly ever taught straight Literature.

H: What’s your specialty in History? Other than American Studies.

F: Well, I trained in 1930s American History. I have a passion for the English Civil War and my current critical book is a book about Children’s Literature written about the English Civil War, which is fascinating.

H: That’s pretty specialized.

F: Yeah, it really is riveting. There is almost nothing more exciting than the English Civil War for all sorts of reasons, not least because the rate of literacy was at an all time high and lots of people from sections of society you would not expect, either to have left documents or to be engaged in politics, left documents and were engaged in politics. I mean, how can you resist Brilliana Harley, who in one breath is telling her son to send home some socks so that she can re-knit them, and in the next is writing him about the arguments between Parliament and the King. This is amazing stuff! But the Regency, of course we all read Georgette Heyer.

H: Yes.

F: It’s just a part of growing up and the early 19th century got more and more interesting to me through reading a book by somebody called Jenny Uglow called In These Times. It’s about Britain during the years of the Napoleonic War.  Stuff I had never quite understood about that period started to make a lot more sense, which is that Britain is under siege, it’s poor, it’s isolated, and it’s insular. Also, by the end of the war it’s got a man shortage. All the things I realized I was fascinated by is that Georgette Heyer starts writing about the Regency during the man-shortage in the 20s and 30s.

H: Oh, I hadn’t made that connection. Yeah!

F: What she’s replicating is the post-Waterloo situation. The two periods actually match quite neatly in terms of the romantic stresses of the period. That, I think, might be why the stories she tells work so well for her initial audience. That’s why you have quite a lot of characters in it that are older women who missed out because their generation died on the field of Waterloo. It’s a fascinating period and it’s one that a lot of people don’t really make enough of when they’re writing that period. They always tend to focus on London or the countryside, when it’s the period that the great cities, like Birmingham and Manchester and Leeds are rising up. I come from Birmingham and if you come from Birmingham, you tend to be a bit of a patriot. It’s a lot like Chicago. If you think of the atmosphere of Birmingham of being very similar to Chicago, that sense of being a second capital.

H: Uh huh. I was thinking that what you were saying about the types of stories that get written during a man shortage that, with the American Civil War, the same dynamic was part of what contributed to women’s relationships, the whole romantic friendship/Boston marriage era. Where women were making their own households because they were extra.

F: Ooo. This is total piece of trivia. One of the writers I’ve been looking at this week is an American writer called Marie Beulah Dix, I think I’ve got her name right. She is an American, Boston woman who wrote historical fiction, which is very good, two of which are set in the English Civil War, who had close relationships with her female publisher and another writer and never got married. One of her stories is about a girl dressing up as a boy to go off to the war, because this child desperately wants to be a boy. There’s a lovely line in it about, ‘Any sensible girl has always wanted to be a boy.’ (chuckling) Little red flags going off everywhere. I think she went to Radcliffe and I’d love to find out more about her. Obviously, a late 19th century lesbian writer.

H: Let’s move on specifically to your book. I think it has become apparent in our discussion that this is a Regency romance type. Let me read the cover blurb for Spring Flowering. I got the cover blurb to work from because, at the time we’re recording, the book hasn’t actually come out yet. Though it will be out, as I understand, by the time we air. Here’s the blurb, “Everything changes for Ann Gray when her father dies, and her closest friend Jane marries and moves away. Ann must give up the independence and purpose she found as mistress of her father's parsonage in the country and move to her uncle and aunt's new-style house in the growing city of Birmingham. The friendship of Ann's cousins - especially the mathematically inclined Louisa - is some compensation for freedoms curtailed. But soon Ann must consider two very different proposals, either of which will bring yet more change. Should she return to her village home as wife of the new parson Mr. Morden? Or become companion to the rather deliciously unsettling widow Mrs. King...?” Do you follow more Georgette Heyer or are you following Jane Austen? Is it more the modern Regency romance or…?

F: I don’t know. In some ways it’s not quite either, in that there are no grand happenings in this book. It’s a very straight-forward story in which Jane’s father dies and she goes to live with her family in Birmingham. She meets people and she starts to settle in and she starts to develop. It’s quite a domestic story, so in that sense probably closer to Jane Austen. But you can’t be Jane Austen because Jane Austen is writing for people who take for granted the world she’s writing about.

H: Yeah. Yes.

F: Very often it’s actually easy to misread. Just a little example. I had a PhD student who wrote about how Jane Austen’s work reflects the esteem in which the navy was held. Having read Jenny Uglow, I was able to say to her, ‘No, Jane Austen is writing about the esteem she wants the navy to be held in.’ The navy is actually looked down on in this period. Partially because it’s a vehicle for social mobility because it lets oiks become Admirals. Tut tut tut.

H: Yeah, that comes up in a number of places, I’ve noticed.

F: It does and she’s assuming lots of stuff that we can’t. Because I can’t assume, for example, that you know the city of Birmingham. I can’t assume that you know the button trade of Birmingham. Or, okay, so I had to set the book within a particular three years because if I didn’t there’s no theatre. Why is there no theatre? Because Birmingham is a Noncomformist city, I think the Unitarians are growing so fast… No, it’s the Methodists… They’re growing super-fast that they build three separate chapels on the same site over twenty years. The chapel part doesn’t stay big enough. I had to explain things like that, the fact that the Noncomformists are actually ok with things like music hall, because that’s just performance, but they aren’t okay with theatre because that’s pretending to be somebody else and that’s untruthful.

H: Yes, in the excerpt from the book that I saw on the website, it was clear that the nuances of the various religious movements were going to be key to some of the characters.

F: Yes, and that’s the kind of thing that a 19th century reader would take for granted, but I can’t just assume that a 21st century reader will know anything about. I didn’t actually include the Quakers even though it’s a group I know most about because 19th century Quakers don’t look anything like 17th or 20th century Quakers and getting into that, people wouldn’t believe me when I explained. They’re barely even pacifists in that period.

H: When you were writing this book, were you treating it sort of as an homage to the genre of literature or more as a historical project?

F: Actually, it was a challenge. A friend of mine, Jane Carnall(?), who I’ve known for many, many years, we were having a discussion about whether we thought you could write a lesbian Regency and she felt it couldn’t be done because you couldn’t get the hierarchies of the relationships right. I thought it could be as long as I stayed within certain conventions that were an issue in the period. There’s a very good book called, In the Georgian Household [note: Correct title is Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England] by Amanda Vickery.

H: I think I’ve got that book.

F: It talks about the degree to which industrialization left families very anxious about their daughters. A lot of the reason why some women stayed unmarried was because they didn’t get to meet men. If you look at the Victorians, they tend to marry cousins and friends of brothers, but they stay very much within the family because that way you can make sure your daughter is safe in a world that is increasingly full of strangers. I realized that I could meet some of Jane’s concerns if I moved Ann into a quite tight-knit context. All of Ann’s possible suitors are either relations or business partners, either of her father, the Parson, or of her uncle, Uncle Joshua. I wanted to make that work and that was part of the challenge that I set out to do. The other challenge was that I really wanted some sex. I didn’t want to write a coming out narrative, so this isn’t a coming out narrative. Not least because I don’t think the Georgian’s would have understood it that way. To start with, they were much more sexual beings than the Victorians. They were much more comfortable at talking about sex, they knew what underneath women’s skirts and men’s trouser flaps, because, well, 80% of the population is still rural in this period. They know what animals do.

H: Yeah, one of the things that I find interesting in talking to authors of lesbian historic fiction is how many of them don’t understand the cyclicity of sexuality and think that you go back to the Victorian era and everybody was uptight, and nobody had sex and it must have been like that all the way back in history.

F: But the Victorians had big families… (laughter)

H: Yes, I’m talking myths here.

F: You don’t get big families by not having sex! But I remember my father talking to me years ago when I very first told him about my sexuality, and he told me about the nice two ladies who lived next door and only had one bed. Everybody knew, but nobody talked about straight sex either. In some ways, the most tricky point for homosexuals has been when heterosexuals talk about sex publicly. When everybody’s not talking about it, it’s actually kind of easier. One of my aunts was known as a career girl, for example, and [can’t make out] she went out with her lady friends. I had no idea what it meant, but it was a perfectly acceptable term.

H: I still remember the point when my mother casually mentioned, while working on genealogy materials, that, ‘Oh, your grand-aunt so-and-so, she was a lesbian, you know.’ It’s like, ‘What, what, what, what?’ This one in the early part of the 20th century.

F: The question that most intrigues me is, how do you know they were having sex? Well, thanks to Marie Stopes, we know that quite a lot of straight couples weren’t either. As a definition of an emotional relationship, that’s just silly. But yes, there’s also this thing that sex may be fairly similar and not change much, although even then, different practices are acceptable at different points, and desirable at different points. But the way people come together, and bond, has often got much more to do with economics. One of the fascinating things, accounts, is of William of Orange and his wife, Mary, because there’s some suspicion that both of them were gay and that both of them had partners. There’s a fascinating book, now, let me get this right, they’re not authors I particularly go for… The author of Mapp and Lucia, his father was a bishop and was quite well known for the young men he hung out with, but his wife, and she had six kids, was very clearly a lesbian.

H: I think I have that book on my list to cover for my history blog.

F: It’s a wonderful book, it’s hilarious. But it is quite clear that in a world in which, for the Victorians, women aren’t supposed to very sexual, therefore what women are doing together can’t matter.

H: Right.

F: Now, the Georgians think otherwise. The Georgians think of women as predatory and their approach is different. But it’s perfectly plausible that their relatively homosocial world, for men and women to just be getting on with what they want to do, while coming together to produce children within the economic unit. Unless you find that utterly revolting, which some people do, but most people kind of got on with it and then…

H: Had their fun on the side.

F: Not necessarily even thinking of it that way, just thinking of it as an intimate friend with whom they kissed, petted, and patted.

H: Yeah. This is one thing that I find fascinating, looking at the researching of lesbian history and the writing of lesbian historical fiction, have the same problem that so many modern people are looking for an exact mirror in the past, instead of embracing the past for what it was.

F: Yes, and I think people have always made their lives and that at various points that has been interfered with, with whatever the current scare was which has been expressed in many different ways. I mean, some accusations of witchcraft were probably about sexual practices, but it’s hard to tell. What we cannot assume, though, is that people did not have close emotional and physical relationships because they probably did. But how they thought of them, that’s trickier. I gave to my two a more open and clear sexuality, in part because they’re Georgians, not Victorians, they’ve not grown up protected. They’ve grown up seeing animals do things. But also because I get really bored with coming out stories. Oh, and I get really bored with the one true love trope. I’m thinking of writing a sequel and it might get a little more complicated.

H: I agree with you on coming out stories. One of the reasons that I dug deep into starting my historic research project was because I wanted to write historic lesbian fiction and I didn’t want to write just a whole series of coming out stories. I wanted to know… what did they know? What community did they have?

F: And people do construct community. People know each other, people recognize each other. I said I’m thinking of a sequel and that will involve some of that construction of community.

H: Great, I’m looking forward to that. In addition to this sequel, are there any other projects of yours that you’d like to mention for the listeners?

F: I don’t think my other work would be remotely interesting to other people. Although, the book I haven’t finished is a book on the children’s historical writer Geoffrey Trease and I’ll be working on that later next year. If you’re interested in historical fiction, he’s fascinating because he starts writing in the 1930s, he’s a genuine communist fellow traveler, by which I mean he goes to all the meetings but doesn’t join. He writes some of the first, to use the American phrase, ‘co-ed’ historical fiction. From 1940, he always has a boy and a girl. He has an awful lot of cross-dressing girls. He tries to write feminist heroines from very, very early on before it’s a norm for male writers. That might interest people, but the romance work is definitely something I think I’m going to pursue. It was rather a shock when this got picked up. I should explain: I tend to blog when I’m writing, and I do it because people asking me questions about my writing keeps me going. This was actually a Nanowrimo project and, as I was blogging and got to the end of it, Fiona Pickles asked if she could read it and I said yes thinking nothing of it. The next thing I knew, I found myself with a contract offer, thinking, ‘What? But, but, but…!’ As anybody will tell you, I have been saying for twenty years, ‘Oh, I’m not a writer, it’s just that I have things to say and the only way I can do that is to write them down.’ I’ve now been told very firmly, I am not allowed to say that I’m not a writer anymore.

H: Uh huh. I assume the book will be available through all of the regular outlets, Amazon, etc.

F: Yeah. It’s a standard kindle book. I mean, if you want a description, I would say it’s nice, slushy, bedtime reading. It was never intended to be a super exciting thriller or anything like that. It was the kind of thing I would want to read at night in bed… with chocolate.

H: On the off-chance that our listeners find you utterly fascinating like I do and want to follow you online, do you have a blog, do you want to give out your twitter handle? Facebook?

F: I have my twitter handle which is @effjayem and I will also have a webpage going live probably this weekend. It’s already live, it just doesn’t have much on it. That’s my full name, which is, unfortunately, very difficult to spell, but if you put Farah Mendlesohn, I usually come up.

H: Yeah, I’ll put all of the links in the show-notes so that people can find you easily. Well, thank you again, Farah, for joining us on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.

F: Thank you very much, it’s been a lot of fun.

Show Notes

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

In this episode we talk about:

• I chat with Farah Mendlesohn about her brand new lesbian Regency romance Spring Flowering.
• How did a literary theorist specializing in fantasy and science fiction come to write historic romance?
• Why was the 17th century a great time to set fiction about women loving women?
• How does historical fiction writer Geoffrey Trease come into things?
• How Spring Flowering came out of a challenge and a NaNoWriMo project.
• Books mentioned
  • Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn
  • In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow
  • Beulah Marie Dix (she wrote historical fiction in the early 20th century and was known to have relationships with women)
  • Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery (mentioned as “In the Georgian Household”)
  • A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain by Simon Goldhill

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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

Links to Heather Online

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

Links to Farah Mendlesohn Online

• Website: Farah Mendlesohn
• Twitter: @effjayem

It's a regular feature of my life as an author to feel like I have to justify and excuse the fact that I pay attention to what the world is saying about my books. You see, authors aren't supposed to pay attention to reviews--whether to what they say or simply to their existence. Authors aren't supposed to mention that what readers do to help spread the word about a book is important, because that puts undue pressure on readers. But it does matter and we do care. And to balance out my occasional pleas (both silent and out loud) for people to help spread the word, I like to share examples of when you, my readers, have made a difference.

Yesterday when I was doing my routine name/title search in Google to see if there were any new reviews or mentions of my books, I turned up something exciting. (I'm not going to apologize for doing regular searches like this. Often it's the only way I ever learn about great reviews, and when I get great reviews, I add those reviewers to my list of people to suggest for review copies in the future.) The Barnes and Noble book blog included Daughter of Mystery in a list of "50 Magical Romances to Read Right Now". I think it's the only f/f romance included in the list, based on a quick skim of the summaries. And I am quite certain that it was included because of one of those twitter crowd-sourced requests for books with a particular theme.(*) And that means, that it was you, dear readers, who brought it to the blogger's attention and saw that it was included.

I don't know if you can imagine how great it feels to see my work side by side on a list put out by a major bookstore chain with authors like Nora Roberts, Mary Robinette Kowal, K.J. Charles, Zoraida Córdova, and Ilona Andrews. And you did that. You did it by telling the world how much you love my books and finding opportunities to recommend them to other people. It matters. And I love you for it.

(*) I'm pretty confident that Daughter of Mystery was included based on recommendations rather than the blogger having read the book, because the summary turns Margerit Sovitre into "Lady Margerit" which is a peculiar error to make if you've read it.

Readers and writers both have strong opinions about point of view, even when that strong opinion is, “Any point of view can work if you’re skilled enough.” I’ve heard authors proclaim that they’ll only use one specific type of point of view because that’s the only one that works for them. Fair enough. One can’t argue with what works.

I’ve found two ways in which point of view can be the key to telling the story I want to tell. One is in limiting what the reader is allowed to know, and thus positioning them with respect to specific characters in the story. One of the reasons I’ve stuck to a very tight third person POV in the Alpennia stories (at least so far—don’t count on it staying that way!) is to manipulate what the reader knows about the events of the story and the motivations of the other characters. An omniscient point of view can either remove suspense or leave the reader annoyed about selective omissions of information.

But a second reason I’ve found to choose a particular point of view is to break myself out of specific storytelling modes. This is particularly the case when I’m working with traditional tale forms, such as the Merchinogi stories. The immense weight of the original literary style of medieval romances can be hard to fight if you use the same tools as the original tellers. Medieval romances can be wonderful for their flights of description and their use of repetition and cadence, but they’re really bad at showing interiority. King Arthur may have done great deeds, but we don’t get a lot of insight into what he thought about those accomplishments, or why he made the choices he did. When I first started writing “Hoywverch,” I used the third person to match the original Mabinogi, but found the result more flat and simplistic than I cared for. Shifting to the heroine’s voice helped me break free of that flatness.

Retold fairy tales are another genre where the stylistic weight of the original material can feel overwhelming. In my first draft of “The Language of Roses”—my Beauty and the Beast retelling--I followed what has become my default mode: tight third person rotating between key viewpoint characters, with events allocated carefully to keep the reader in suspense regarding important plot points. And it felt like it was working fairly well until I decided to bring in the fairy who laid the crucial curse as a viewpoint character. She had an important role to play in setting up certain elements of the backstory that no one else had put together yet. But I found the scenes I’d given to her somewhat lackluster. She was thin. A cardboard prop. And the crucial world-building information she supplied felt wrong as something a character would ruminate over on her own.

And then, on this morning’s drive, the first line of her first scene came to me in a different voice. An accusing, critical, second person voice. And things clicked. It’s an omniscient voice: someone who knows everything that has happened in the past and who hints at knowing how the story will come out when none of the characters themselves do. (I have a suspicion just who that voice is, and that may shape some of the rewriting.) This isn’t a second person POV where the reader is being addressed, which is the version that people who dislike second POV tend to rail against—the “choose your own adventure” type that tries to force the reader into being a participant. It’s a voice that allows the fairy to remain a cipher while providing the reader with a very personal glimpse of her.

Ah, Peronelle! You are patient now. Patient enough to stand outside the gates of Betencourt for days to see what might befall. You were not so patient when you were…but no, you were not young. It has been very long since you were young, hasn’t it? The fée are young only once and old for a very long time. But one may be foolish and impatient at any age. Do you remember when you were young, Peronelle? Do you remember your parents and the glittering tower where you dwelt with them? Do you remember the guests and the balls and the hunting parties when they would ride out to slip between the worlds and tease those in mortal lands? Do you remember learning to walk the worlds for yourself and how to draw glamour after you to hide the truth from mortal eyes?

And having made that choice, I now needed to know what to do with all my other points of view. That second person wasn’t going to work for all of them. I wanted differentiation. But at the same time, having one character’s scenes in second and the other three POV characters all in third felt unbalanced. Well, it isn’t really three—more like two and a single chapter from the remaining character. What if (I thought)…what if I gave one of them a first person approach? What if my Beauty (who isn't named Beauty) tells her own story? That would work well for her: the confused innocent who is still sorting out her place in the world and how she feels about it. Yes, that feels right. While the third primary viewpoint character (who is definitely not the Beast) is more knowledgable, more controlled, more deliberately distanced. Third person works for her.

Now my immediate reaction to this idea was, “You know, this is one of the features of N.K. Jemisin’s award-winning novel The Fifth Season—a feature that is a key element of the plot—and maybe it’s going to look a little bit like you’re being a copycat?” Well, heck. If you’re going to be a copycat, copy a great writer. You can make any approach to point of view work if you do it well, and if you don’t do it well, it doesn’t matter that someone else did make it work. But I’ll acknowledge that the idea of mixing first, second, and third person in the same story isn’t some fantastic new invention I came up with.

Maybe I’ll make it work, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll finish up the whole story and decide I need to unravel it and do something different. But when I heard that voice snarking at Peronelle, something clicked into place. And any author can tell you that when you feel that click, you should pay attention.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 26 (previously 16a) - On the Shelf for November 2017 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2017/11/04 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2017.

Sometimes it’s easy to tell that when it comes to history, my heart lives in the middle ages. Last week’s episode on women knights in shining armor was a lot of fun to put together. But the middle ages isn’t just about pageantry and castles. The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog has been covering a number of publications that look closely at how medieval people thought about sex and gender. The essays in the collection Premodern Sexualities ask questions like “what does it mean when homosexuality is not considered an identity but being a prostitute is?” Or “what was the relationship between gender identity and sexual orientation, and how did that affect how medieval law treated people with ambiguous bodies?” It can be easy to acknowledge today that gender and sexuality are social constructs, but it can be harder to accept that people in the past used such different constructs that it can be hard to draw clear parallels between our lives and those of our ancestors. When we encounter hints of homoerotic sentiment in the writings of women like Margery Kempe, do we work too hard to try to fit them into our modern identity boxes?

When I finish up the papers from the Premodern Sexualities volume, I look at the original text of Knighton’s Chronicle that I talked about in last week’s episode--the one about the gang of cross-dressed women showing up at a 14th century tournament. I don’t usually include primary sources in the blog, but sometimes it’s fun to let a text speak for itself. After that I cover an article on an unusual joint memorial brass to two women from 15th century England. Memorials like this gave me an idea for a future essay, so hold on to that thought.

After that, the blog is going to plunge deep into the pool of historiography and theory with Valerie Traub’s book Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. This book was a lot more dense than what I usually choose to cover and talks more about talking about history, than looking at the past itself. I’ll be continuing on a similar theme of historic theory for much of the rest of the year, covering the articles in a collection titled The Lesbian Premodern, which includes a lot of essays on what it means to think about lesbian history as a field of study, and the academic conflicts between various ways of approaching the study of the past. I’m finding the debates intensely interesting and it makes me want to find people to discuss the parallels between the study of lesbian history and the creation of lesbian historic fiction.

This month’s author guest is someone I can imagine having those discussions with. Farah Mendlesohn is publishing her first novel: a lesbian regency romance titled Spring Flowering. Farah is an academic with a background in history and literature and has a lot of interesting things to say about the social dynamics of gender and sexuality in the early modern era. And I can’t wait to read her novel, which should be on my iPad by the time you’re listening to this.

This month’s essay is going to be on the vocabulary of women who love women, looking at the words used in various languages and cultures across the ages, both technical language and everyday slang. You can tell a lot about how people perceived lesbian sexuality by the root meanings of the words that were used. But you can also learn a lot from the simple fact that such vocabulary existed and by noticing how and when it was used.

This month’s Ask Sappho question touches on the question of how women have communicated their desires in the past. Rose Herman-Pall asks “How did women in history signal to each other that they were Sapphically inclined, especially if they were in marriages to men?”

The question doesn’t specify a particular era or culture, but I’ll focus in the last several centuries in England and America, since that’s the context most listeners are likely to be familiar with. And this is going to be a lot more off-the-cuff than usual, so there’ll be no footnotes in the show notes.

In the past, when I’ve done research for historic re-enactment, or answered research questions for authors, I’ve always found it a useful exercise to take a question that starts out “How did they...?” and back up a step to ask, “Did they...?” I remember once someone asked, “How did medieval people get going in the morning when they didn’t have coffee yet?” That started a conversation on the history of breakfast as a concept, and the other changes in society that happened around the time that stimulating beverages like coffee and tea entered Western society, and the ways in which rituals around those beverages have become so ingrained in our lives that it’s hard to imagine life without them.

So let’s think about what underlies that question: “How did women in history signal to each other that they were Sapphically inclined, especially if they were in marriages to men?” There are at least three important assumptions here that we need to unpack before thinking about an answer. The first is that women needed some special way of signaling their desires to each other. The second is that women have always had a specific concept of lesbian desire as something different from the default. The third is that women would have viewed heterosexual marriage as a barrier to expressing those desires.

For those of us who grew up in the latter part of the 20th century--and that’s pretty much all of us at this point--it can be just as hard to imagine a world in which same-sex desire is not considered a separate, fixed, inborn orientation as it is to imagine a world in which people have never encountered coffee or tea. But when you look at women’s literature around romance, affection, and passionate expression during the last several centuries (and earlier as well, but I’m focusing on maybe the 17th through 19th centuries) it becomes clear that passionate and romantic feelings between women weren’t considered some special separate aberration, but were considered normal, natural, and desirable. It was women who didn’t experience sentimental attachments to female friends who were considered odd.

In a world where women are expected to call each other beloved, to speak of their undying devotion to each other, and to long for each other’s presence and embraces, in a world where it is utterly normal to exchange kisses, caresses, and embraces, both in public and in private, in a world where it is completely expected that people of the same sex will sleep in the same bed as a sign of their close emotional relationship--or simply for the sake of convenience--it can be hard to figure out what sort of special signal a woman would need to use to express romantic interest in her special friend.

I emphasize the word “special” because this isn’t to say that women didn’t have ways to indicate that they wanted to shift the intensity of the friendship. We can see some methods in the diaries of Anne Lister because she talks about them explicitly. She talks about mentioning certain works of literature that discuss same-sex desire to see if the other woman is familiar with them. Or maybe she kisses the object of her interest in a more lingering way than she would kiss an ordinary friend. But the fact that she kissed her would have been considered normal.

Another thing to consider is how geographically circumscribed most lives were before the 20th century. The vast majority of people you interacted with would be people you’d known all your life. People who lived in the same town as you--or if you were part of the minority who lived in a large city, people who lived in the same neighborhood or who were part of your family’s social circle. If you wanted to delicately hint that you wanted a deeper relationship with someone, you weren’t likely to be dealing with a stranger. It would be someone you’d known for some time. Someone whose opinions and responses you were already familiar with.

When considering the lives of pre-20th century women, it’s also important to understand that the dividing lines between sex and affection were drawn in different places at different times. Activities that we consider sex acts might have been considered ordinary expressions of very close friendship. A woman might want to make sure that the object of her affection felt the same degree and intensity of attachment that she did before committing herself wholeheartedly, but it wasn’t necessarily a negotiation that either of them would have felt needed to be done covertly. And they wouldn’t have considered the degree of attachment and affection between them to be something separate and apart from what other female friends felt for each other.

But--you ask me--what about the historic records we can find in which women that we would consider lesbians are criticized or punished? This gets back to the question of how society is drawing lines between concepts and behaviors. You will find women being criticized if they claim male social prerogatives. If they cross-dress. If they marry a woman in the guise of a man. You will find women being criticized if they explicitly resist the expected forms of society. If their attachment to a female friend leads them to reject what would be considered a desirable marriage. In some eras, if they are open about genital sexual activity of any type--with a woman or a man--this will be cause for censure. And in some eras, public discourse around stereotypes of female same-sex sexuality is used to communicate expectations and limits, and to create social divisions that prevent women as a class from advancing women’s causes. In eras when outspoken, socially active women were accused of lesbianism, the point wasn’t to control women’s sexual activity, but to control women’s social and political agency. Sex itself wasn’t the point, it was the weapon.

So getting back to our third assumption--that women who desired other women would have considered marriage to a man to be a bar to those relationships or to expressing those feelings. This takes a very modern position on the optionality of marriage. For most of history, marriage was not about making an individual, voluntary choice based on erotic desire or even on romantic attraction, even in eras when romantic attraction was held up as an ideal. Marriage was primarily an economic transaction--at the very least a major influence on one’s economic and social status. As a parallel, consider how absurd we would consider it to think that one’s employment should be based primarily on personal bonds of affection with the employer. Sure, in some cases you may be offered a job because of personal connections. And sure, in some cases you may end up having a personal friendship with your boss. But those things aren’t considered expected. A woman opting out of marriage because she didn’t have a pre-existing erotic attraction to the man she was marrying would have been considered as silly as we would consider refusing a job because you didn’t think your future boss was hot.

Another aspect of pre-20th century society that we sometimes have a hard time imagining is how strongly gender-segregated people’s lives were. (Think about that awful politician who said he had a rule never to be alone in a room with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Now imagine everyone in society thinking that way.) In a society that considers a woman suspect for any sort of emotional attachment to a non-related man, it’s not only expected that your close emotional bonds will be with other women, but that is considered desirable. Friendship, as the theory went, was only possible between equals, and men and women could rarely be equal. Women were expected to rely on other women to fulfill their emotional and affectionate needs. (Just as men were expected to rely on men for those needs.) In that context, the dividing line between affection and romantic love was functionally non-existent. The dividing line between ordinary physical expressions of that love and something that went beyond the norm was exceedingly fuzzy. And that dividing line would be negotiated between two women who already had established an emotional bond and engaged in a lot of physical expression of that bond already.

So, to a large extent, the original question presumes a universality to our 21st century experiences of desire, our expressions of desire, and our social expectations. We won’t find 18th century women secretly signally their erotic desires to complete strangers by using carefully color-coded handkerchiefs, because they had no need to do so. They would be walking side by side in the park, with arms twined about each other’s waist, leaning in for a kiss the way that good friends were expected to do, and then maybe lingering over that kiss just a few moments longer than they ever had before, to see how the other woman would respond.

Call for Submissions

And now for a special announcement. I’ve been pondering what to do with the occasional fifth show when there are five Saturdays in a month. And the idea that kept coming back, as persistently as a cat at feeding time, was to include some original lesbian historic fiction audio short stories. So I’ve posted a call for submissions on my website. You can find the link in the show notes. In January 2018 I’ll be accepting submissions of original, unpublished short stories of up to 5000 words and choosing two to record for the show. The text will also be published on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project website. I’ll be paying professional rates because the purpose of the Project is to encourage people to write and enjoy really great lesbian historic fiction, and you only get the best by letting authors know you value it. There are some content specifications, so be sure to read the call for submissions if you’d like to submit a story for consideration. Instructions on how to submit will be posted closer to the submissions window, but this gives you two months to get writing.

Show Notes

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

In this episode we talk about:

• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Premodern Sexualities - a collection of papers on the history of sexuality
  • Knighton’s Chronicle - a primary text mentioned in the “female knights” essay
  • Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns - a theory-heavy book on the process of doing the history of sexuality
  • The Lesbian Premodern - another collection focusing on theory and historiography but specifically looking at lesbian premodern history as a field of study
  • An article on a medieval English joint memorial brass
• Announcing this month’s author guest, Farah Mendlesohn, and her debut novel Spring Flowering
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • Still waiting to start this segment.
• Ask Sappho: Rose Herman-Pall asks “How did women in history signal to each other that they were Sapphically inclined, especially if they were in marriages to men?”
• Call for submissions for the new LHMP audio short story segment. See here for details. See here for details.

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)