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Saturday, June 20, 2026 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 345 - So You’re Writing a Sapphic Historical Romance: Questions to Consider (Reprise) - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/06/20)
I’m re-running some older episodes for the next month or two because I broke my arm, which interferes greatly with typing up new scripts. This episode originally came out in 2020 when I started thinking about one aspect of the book version of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. In addition to creating a general resource book for people writing lesbian and sapphic historic fiction, I thought it would be useful to create guides focused on specific historic settings that are popular in the genre. This podcast outlines my thoughts about what types of information would be most useful in such a guide.
My original idea was to have these setting-specific guides be chapters in one section of the book. But the more I’ve worked on developing the material the more I’ve realized how impractical that is. The one guide that I’ve developed so far—focusing on the English Regency—runs around 20,000 words. And my current outline calls for about a dozen different guides. Far too large a page-count! So my thinking is shifting to creating these focused guides as separate publications, which also means I can spread out the work of writing them a little more.
In any event, here are my thoughts on what to consider when writing your sapphic heroines into history.
Introduction
When I first got the idea that ended up becoming the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, I envisioned putting together a simple sourcebook of background information for authors of lesbian historical fiction. How hard could it be, after all? It’s not like there was that much information available on lesbians in history. Silly me. I was so delightfully wrong. But as I began realizing the scope of the historic information available, and as I began thinking about the fuzzy edges of what a resource of that type should cover, I set aside the idea of a sourcebook and focused on a more granular approach to familiarize myself with the field.
That dream has never entirely left me. When I interview authors on this podcast, one of the questions I always ask is, “how did you approach researching how your characters would have understood and experienced their sexuality?” And time and again I get responses that focus on the difficulty of finding information and the need to extrapolate from modern experiences and to rely on imagination. I keep returning to that idea: just as there is a market for reference books that tell you about everyday life in historic settings like Jane Austen’s England, I think there’s a market for a reference book that tells you about the experience of women who loved women in historic settings. Not in all the academic ambiguity, but laid out in a practical way for authors who just want to get on with writing a story. And I think, just maybe, I’m ready to start working on it for certain times and places.
Any guide to writing sapphic characters needs to examine two different topics. What do we know about the specific experiences of women who loved women? And what was the range of experiences for all women in the chosen setting? So my outline falls into the following categories. For women’s experiences in general, we start with demographics and the sociology of family life. Then we look at the legal, religious, and economic context of people’s lives. Next we examine the range of women’s interpersonal relationships outside the family. This is followed by a gradual look at the norms of women’s physical relationships and displays of affection, starting from the very public, through more private contexts, and finally addressing the specific question of erotic behavior. Having broached the topic of erotic same-sex relationships, we look at the available social models for gender and sexuality, and how same-sex relations were viewed in popular culture. Finally, we step back a little to consider a slightly broader context in space and time.
What I’m discussing today is not the answers, but the questions. It may not be possible to answer all these questions for any given fictional setting. But thinking about them can get you started down useful pathways.
Demographics and Family Relations
Before we start thinking about the presence of same-sex love, consider simply the absence of heterosexual marriage. While it’s true that many women in history negotiated the complexities of both, in historical romance we tend to expect our protagonists to be free of other ties. So what proportion of women in our chosen culture were never married? What proportion were previously married but are now single, whether widowed or separated? What was the typical age at which women married? At what age would an unmarried status be seen to be outside the norm, or at least the ideal? What were cultural attitudes toward non-married women? Do we actually need to come up with extraordinary pleading for our heroines to be unmarried or is it something unremarkable?
To what extent do women feel able to make choices with regard to marriage? How much influence can they have over timing or the choice of a spouse? What are the reasons (other than lack of heterosexual desire) that a woman might put off or avoid marriage? How is the social context different for a widow as opposed to a never-married woman?
Looking at the lives of singlewomen as models for our characters goes beyond the simple question of marriage. Until very recently, a woman in a same-sex partnership would be treated by society as if she were single. So what were the circumstances in which a non-married woman might live outside the parental home? What were the plausible household arrangements? We often forget how the simple logistics of everyday life made living completely alone impractical. How common was it, and under what circumstances, for two or more non-married women to share a household? What circumstances might make that unremarkable?
For that matter, what were the typical or possible dynamics for relationships with her extended family? How did a non-married woman relate to her siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, or more distant kin? What were the range of attitudes toward her?
Another very important question is how the answers to these questions differ based on family class and/or income. It’s popular to focus historic romance on the lives of the privileged, but might the story we’re telling work better in a middle class or working class setting? This question will come up time and again because differences in lives and attitudes by class or income can entirely change relationship dynamics.
Economics, Law, and Religion
The next set of considerations are related in that they are external forces that have both a strict, formal aspect, and a more variable practical aspect. These are economics, law, and religion.
What is the range of possible economic situations for a non-married woman? And how do these options affect her interpersonal relations? How do class and family wealth affect these options? Are certain economic possibilities closed to her due to class expectations? How does all this affect her possible living situations? This is one of several contexts where it’s important not to rely on popular culture to limit our expectations. I can think of lots of stories that started with a premise of “women couldn’t do X” – couldn’t work outside the home, couldn’t run a business, couldn’t have an independent income – when counterexamples can be found in history. Be aware of what is typical, but also of what is possible. Is your character being truly transgressive or only unconventional? Or can she do what the plot requires without even flouting convention? Conversely, we need to know what the constraints were. What ways of making a living would need careful justification as opposed to being ordinary? What options are so implausible you’ve used up your readers’ suspension of disbelief all on that one thing?
Narrowing the focus down to setting up a romance plot, what economic circumstances could enable or prevent two women from co-habiting? How do the economic possibilities shape our possible happily ever afters? This is a context where looking at the demographics of everyday life for all social classes can be an eye-opener. How did actual women make an independent household together and how did they come to that place?
The law is another context where we need to examine not only the letter but the practical application. And keep in mind that laws were not the same everywhere, or in all eras. Furthermore, application of the laws could change depending either on public mood or private whim.
The first question to ask is, were there any laws addressing women engaging in same-sex relations? The answer isn’t necessarily “yes”. But if so, what specific aspects of those relations was the law concerned with? When we look at historic cases when lesbian-like women ran afoul of the law, it’s rarely the case that the simple fact of being a lesbian was on trial. The law might concern itself with specific sex acts. Or with gender transgression.
Even when there were laws against certain acts, we need to know who was actually at risk of having those laws enforced against them. Was class a protection from either the suspicion or the accusation of those acts? Were women in certain professions either automatically suspect, or silently given a pass with regard to transgressions? If women got in trouble with respect to the law, were the authorities specifically looking for transgressions or did the matter only arise incidentally? Was homosexuality only brought in as an issue when there was some other complaint to begin with? What were the hypothetical and the actual penalties? Were legal penalties only enforced for very specific offences within the larger sphere of same-sex relations?
The legal questions are a major framework for how our heroines view their lives. For example, unusually in the European context, England never had laws addressing female homosexuality, very much in contrast to the legal position of male homosexuals, or the situation of women in some continental cultures. So a gay male historic romance set in England will involve some critical concerns that a sapphic romance in the same setting won’t deal with. Similarly, when you look at trials in France or Germany or other places in central Europe, the cases that were pursued and that involved the rare extreme punishments most often involved gender-crossing or penetrative sex using an instrument. Two women who presented as feminine and whose sexual activities did not mimic penetrative sex rarely seem to have been at serious risk under the law. So if we don’t want the fear of legal reprisals to be a part of our story, what are the ways that our characters could be functionally invisible to the law, within our chosen setting?
Religion is another context where it’s important to consider not simply what the official opinions were, but how they were applied in context, and how women’s same-sex relationships were interpreted within that context. (And remember that not all religions have had similar opinions about same-sex relations, and that attitudes have changed at times.)
How does our characters’ religion (whether their personal beliefs, or those of the culture they live in) view same-sex relationships? Do those attitudes focus on the sexual aspect or more broadly on romantic relationships? What is the range of attitudes our characters might have about how their lives fit into their religious beliefs?
Does the religion have formal positions on same-sex activity? Does it have informal positions? What aspects of same-sex relations are central to those positions? How do attitudes toward same-sex relations differ from those on similar opposite-sex relations? What is the range of opinions?
This is yet another context where it’s important not to look only at formal, learned positions, but on the interactions of everyday life. Even when the formal religious position is that homosexual relations are unacceptable, they may be viewed simply as a human weakness. Conversely, there have been eras in Christian culture when same-sex relations were considered one of the worst possible sins. At those same times, intensely romantic same-sex relationships could be treated as praiseworthy, as long as there was no suspicion of sexual activity. And individual people have regularly found their own philosophical accommodation between their romantic and sexual desires and the teachings of their religion. It’s rarely a clear black-and-white situation.
Emotional and Romantic Relationships in their Social Context
When plotting the problems and opportunities for your romantic couple, keep in mind how their experiences will differ from the courtship of a heterosexual couple. In many historic societies there is a presumption that male-female interactions will always carry a sexual overtone, but the same assumption is rarely made about same-sex interactions. It is usual for every society to have established patterns of intimate friendships – of close and enduring emotional bonds taken on by choice, rather than the chance of birth. These can provide fertile ground for how our characters might “try on” their romantic leanings.
Within our chosen society, what is the degree of mixing or separation of the genders in everyday life? In what context do women socialize in mixed-gender groups versus all-women groups? Is there any special meaning placed on a woman who primarily socializes only with women or is this typical?
Does the society have models for close emotional relationships between women who are not immediate family members? What is the range of possible relationships of this type? How are women expected to behave in them? What are their benefits and consequences? What is the vocabulary used to talk about them?
At what age, and in what context do women typically establish lasting emotional bonds with other women? How long are such bonds expected to endure? How are these bonds expressed? How are they described and characterized by others? What other models do people compare them to? What are the similarities and differences between relationships within the family and those with someone outside the family?
Just because a society has some established models for intimate same-sex bonds doesn’t mean those models are value-free. How are women’s intimate friendships viewed within the context of society? How are they viewed in comparison to marriage? How does class or income affect this? Are close friendships praised or viewed with suspicion? Are they expected to be fleeting or life-long? Are they expected to be exclusive or are women expected to have many close relationships?
What do people think about the erotic potential of close same-sex emotional relationships? Is it even considered a possibility? Is eroticism expected to be a normal part of intimate friendships? Or is it unimaginable—that is, to those not involved in them!
Whether erotic or not, how did women approach each other with regard to establishing a close relationship or increasing the intimacy of a relationship? Were there conventional rituals? Was there a vocabulary for the process? Were there rites of passage in establishing an enduring intimate friendship? How did women indicate the desire for an erotic relationship? How did they react to being solicited for an erotic relationship by another woman? Were there particular signals they might use?
In this section we’re presuming that the romance will involve some sort of romantic bond and not only a sexual relationship—which seems a reasonable presumption for writing historic romance—but we could ask some of the same questions about purely sexual relations. And not all romantic friendships had sex as a component or a goal. But in general, knowing how our target society feels about close friendships between women gives us a lot of useful information on what our characters will experience and what their options are.
Public Displays of Affection
You know that stage where you like someone and you want to give them a hug but suddenly you’re all self-conscious about how they’ll take it? Or you thought you were talking casually and you put your hand on their arm as you’re talking…and you realize that you’re feeling more than just the enthusiasm of making a point. Or you’re walking with your girlfriend in an unfamiliar place and you wonder how the people around you will interpret it if you two hold hands? How about if you hear someone address another person as “sweetheart” or “darling” or “beloved” and you’re trying to guess what their relationship is?
The societal norms of physical and verbal affection can vary enormously and shift subtly in meaning. What are the gestures and words that would be unremarkable between strangers who have just been introduced? Between casual friends? Between bosom buddies? What are the gestures and words that would unmistakably signal an intimate or erotic relationship? And who can use those in a general public setting without comment? And do any of these vary according to the apparent genders of the participants?
These questions are significant for three aspects of story development. Firstly, what is the “background noise” of affectionate interactions between women in our historic setting? What is the range of behavior that would be ordinary and unremarkable between two women with no erotic or romantic relationship? For that matter, what is the range of behavior that would be remarkable in its absence? Secondly, what are the subtle shifts in behavior that our characters can use to either initiate or recognize the developing intimacy in a relationship? Which of these would their society find unremarkable (and I use this word in the sense of “no one would think to comment on it”) and which might be considered significant to others? Thirdly, what are the behaviors that might be considered suspect or transgressive if done out in the public eye, regardless of who does them?
Are there differences between the gestures and language of affection used within a family versus those used with outsiders? In what contexts and with what meaning are these extended to non-family members? Are there differences between displays of affection that are assumed to be purely conventional and those that are always assumed to carry personal meaning? Are there systematic differences in the norms of how a woman displays affection to an unrelated man as opposed to an unrelated woman? This particular question can be useful not only in the sense of what two women can “get away with”, but also if one character is using masculine-coded behavior to signal romantic interests as opposed to platonic interests.
What is the catalog of specific actions used in our setting? Keep in mind that certain gestures may have fallen out of use, or may have only arisen recently, or the assigned meaning may have changed over time. As a specific example of what I mean, in Europe from classical times well into the early modern era, there was a conventional gesture known as “chin chucking” in which one person gently holds the other person’s chin in one hand. This was strongly associated with erotic love. If you see two figures in historic art using this gesture, you can assume the two people are either getting it on or are about to. It faded in more recent centuries to being more a signal of power or age differentiated invasion of personal space. And today it has largely faded from the social repertoire entirely. So we need to consider not only how our characters might have used or interpreted the displays of affection that we are familiar with, but whether they had ones we don’t use.
That said, consider the following types of physical gestures and what meaning they have for our characters and in our setting: embracing, holding hands, touching the hand, arms, face, etc., kissing the cheek, kissing a hand, kissing the mouth, sitting in close contact, sitting or walking together with arms around the shoulders or waist, sitting on someone’s lap. Does our setting have special terminology for any of these gestures? How would they describe them?
Similarly for verbal endearments: what is the range of use that is considered ordinary or typical between people who aren’t married to each other? Are there terms that one would only expect married people to use or that would signal a marriage-like relationship? How do people address each other directly (either face to face or in correspondence) and how do they refer to the other person when speaking to a third party? Are there clear differences between conventional social language and language that indicates an intimate emotional relationship?
All of these details can give us a context for showing the development of a romantic relationship within the conventions of the setting. Which is our couple likely to do first: address each other by the first name or kiss? The answers can be surprising.
Private Displays of Affection & Bedroom Behavior
Every culture has degrees of privacy in how affection is displayed, regardless of whether that affection is romantic in nature, or is within an approved relationship. The previous considerations were about how our characters might act out in public: on the street, at a social event, while traveling. But it’s also useful to know the accepted range of affectionate behavior in more restricted settings, while still considering both actions that would be unremarkable between platonic friends and those that would be understood as signaling a more intimate relationship. How do people behave within the family home? At a small party limited to close friends? How do women behave when socializing with each other in private, whether in small groups or in pairs? And which of those behaviors might provide an opportunity either to make or to respond to a suggestion of an even more intimate encounter?
The specific possible behaviors and language are similar to those considered for the public sphere, but we might find them carrying a different meaning in different contexts. The length of a kiss, the language used for flirtatious teasing. Are there affectionate gestures that are acceptable and “neutral” in private that are not considered appropriate in public? Are there gestures or forms of address that are considered merely conventional in public that become more personal in private? For example, a man who kisses a female acquaintance in public as a neutral greeting might find the same action taken differently if the two are alone together. Would the dynamic be the same between women?
Before we even get into the question of erotic activities, what meaning is placed on others entering one’s private space within the home? How does our culture define and manage privacy? What are the spaces in which one might interact with strangers? With mere acquaintances as opposed to close friends? Are there spaces reserved for only those most intimate friends? As an example, the French salonnières of the 17th century would often preside over their gatherings from their bed, when the bedchamber was a more public location that it would become in later centuries. How does the domestic geography of privacy intersect with the domestic geography of erotic activity? How much privacy do people expect or get? As always, how is this affected by class and status? For the wealthy and privileged, what is the place of servants in one’s expectations of privacy? For the lower classes, in what contexts might one expect to have privacy at all?
Is it normal or common for women of equal status, who aren’t immediate family members, to help each other dress and undress? Or to be present when another woman is dressing or undressing? So many opportunities!
Is it normal or common for women friends to share a bed without this having an erotic implication? “There was only one bed” is a trope that doesn’t carry the same significance if there is an assumption that people will share beds as an ordinary thing. But conversely, in our target culture, does bed-sharing have a symbolic importance within intimate friendships? What is the range of interactions that people have in bed together other than sleeping? Is it a place for conversation? For reading? Is it normal or common for people who share a bed, but do not have a sexual relationship, to cuddle together?
For that matter, do people typically share a bedroom whether or not they share a bed? If our characters employ servants, would a servant typically sleep in the same room? What is the expectation for privacy in the bedroom? For comparison purposes, do heterosexual married couples of an equivalent class to our characters typically sleep in the same room and bed? Or is it common for them to have separate rooms? To what extent is sexual activity closely associated with bedtime and sleeping?
Sexual Practices
And that brings us to the consideration of sex. In considering the sex lives of our characters within their cultural setting, it’s important to keep in mind that women in same-sex romantic relationships exist within a continuum of erotic and sexual expression. This is true for the present day and it’s true within history. The point of having a special section to talk about sex is not to say that all sapphic historical romances should include activities that we would today classify as sex, but rather to explore how sex was understood within that historic setting and to consider how our characters would engage with it if sex is part of their relationship.
A key question that should not be overlooked is how our target culture defines and classifies “sexual activity.” It can be possible for our characters to engage in a variety of sensual and erotic activities without thinking of what they’re doing as “having sex” within the understanding of their times. This can have a big effect on how they think about their lives!
Cultures can give us clues to how they define sex by what types of activities they talk about in conjunction with the central case of heterosexual procreative sex. Some cultures may define “sex” exclusively as male-female activity, and while that can be maddening on a philosophical basis, it can mean that our female couple don’t consider that any rules or taboos on sex apply to them. Similarly, some cultures focus very specifically on penetration as defining “sex” regardless of the genders involved. This doesn’t necessarily mean that activities not classified as “sex” have no social significance attached to them. For example, masturbation may be categorized as “not sex” but still have social stigma attached. The idea here is to shake up our modern assumptions about how people think about sex and see what we can discover about what our characters would think. Or at least what some of their contemporaries would think.
The worm in the apple here is that it’s extremely rare in Western culture before very recent times for women to write candidly about their own sexual knowledge and sexual experiences. Given the double standards around gender and sex, it has often been common for women to hedge this information about with metaphor, coded language, or simple omission. On top of that, women’s writing was often prevented, suppressed, self-censored, or erased after the fact. This can mean that for some eras and cultures, the only recorded information about women’s same-sex practices that have come down to us has been filtered through men. And in some eras it has specifically been filtered through a male pornographic gaze. So when we’re exploring the information about women’s sexual practices, it can be very useful to sort things out into “what men thought or fantasized about lesbian sex,” “what women were willing to admit in public about their sex lives,” and “what women recorded about their sex lives in records that weren’t intended to be public.” All of this still leaves vast gaps where we must muddle though as best we can.
So having covered basic kissing and embracing and cuddling in previous sections, and having delved into the philosophical question of “what counts as sex?” let’s move on to thinking about some specific sexual practices women enjoy together. Are there specific practices that are associated with female couples? Is there evidence in this culture for “tribadism”, that is rubbing the vulvas together? Is there evidence for performing manual stimulation? What about digital penetration?
Is there evidence for using a dildo for penetration? If so, do we know what it might have been made out of? Would it be held in the hand or attached to the body? If a dildo is used, would it be associated with particular types of gender expression? Is there any specific social meaning attached to using one? Are they also used for solitary stimulation?
Is there evidence for open-mouthed kissing or tongue-kissing? Is this considered to fall under the category of sex? Is there evidence for oral sex generally regardless of the genders involved? How about between women? Is any special social significance attached to oral sex?
How does the culture understand female orgasm? Is it generally expected to happen during sex regardless of the genders involved? Was sex between women expected to result in orgasm? How did popular culture view sex between women, assuming it acknowledged the existence of such a thing? What did people think about it compared to heterosexual sex? What sort of social meaning was placed on the idea of sex between women? Why did people think women might engage in it?
What was the vocabulary of sexual anatomy, acts, and accessories involved in sex between women? Were there words specific to lesbian sex? Were there different levels of politeness available in talking about lesbian sex? What sorts of euphemisms were used? To what extent was there a common, shared vocabulary, or to what extent do women seem to be putting together their own language, based on borrowings from heterosexual practice and individual invention?
How did women negotiate the initiation of a sexual relationship? Did the culture have specific customs or rituals that might be used in this context? Is it something that women felt able to talk directly about before an encounter? How did they talk about it after a sexual encounter? Does there seem to have been a shared progression of how a sexual relationship developed?
What is the degree of general awareness of erotic potential between women? How is that awareness communicated within the society? Does it show up in literature or popular culture? Is there a general awareness of specific women in the culture known (or believed) to be engaging in same-sex erotics? How are they viewed? What sort of popular culture representations (if any) of women’s same-sex erotics are in circulation within the culture? Who has access to them? Do pop culture depictions of sex between women vary depending on the class or status of the participants, or of the audience?
Cultural Understandings of Gender and Sexuality
Having focused in on the specifics of sexual activity, let’s step back to consider the context of how relations between women were understood in our target culture. This takes the phrase “same-sex” and looks individually at the “sex” part and the “same” part. How does the culture (and our characters) understand gender and understand sexuality? How do our characters categorize male and female? How does the culture understand and deal with people who don’t fit neatly into those two categories? Is gender considered to be innate or performative – that is, is it something you are or something you do? Are there categories other than gender that are relevant for romantic or sexual relationships? How do class or social status interact with gender?
How does the culture view the dynamics of romantic or sexual desire? Are there default expectations of who will desire whom? To what extent is desire prioritized as a basis for formal relationships? What about for informal ones? Are people thought to have an innate tendency to desire a particular type of person? Are certain objects of desire more acceptable than others? Does the culture have a theory that explains individual preferences in desire? Do different groups in the culture have different models or understandings of desire?
Looking at some of the possibilities more specifically, does the culture include understandings of same-sex or same-gender desire that consider it to be “normal” or at least ordinary? Is same-sex or same-gender desire viewed neutrally, or is it given a positive or negative judgement?
Is there a model of desire based on gender difference? If so, are there understandings that view same-sex desire as caused by variant gender identity? (For example, that desire for a woman is “inherently masculine” and implies some degree of masculine identity in the experiencer?) Does this relate to other cultural understandings of gender, or of gender-appropriate behavior?
Is there a model of desire based on similarity? That is, is there an assumption that people will be drawn to those most similar to them? If so, what does this mean for same-sex relationships? Does the model cover sexual relationships or are they treated differently from non-sexual relationships?
If the culture has both difference and similarity models for desire, how do they interact? Are they applied in different circumstances or coexist as equal alternatives? Are there differences in how couples are perceived based on whether they involve gender-similarity or gender-difference? To be more specific, does the culture view the equivalent of butch-femme couples differently from femme-femme couples?
Does the culture have concepts equivalent to transgender identity? Is there a perceived relationship or continuum between female homoeroticism and transmasculine identity? If so, are there characteristics that distinguish within this continuum? Do we have evidence for how people understood their own identities within this context?
Does the culture expect couples to experience symmetry of desire or is there an expectation that one member will experience a more active desire and the other will accept that desire? If this model exists, how does it play out in courtship and in erotic activity? Does the culture expect an active/passive contrast or does it expect both parties to actively pursue the relationship? Are female couples different in this regard than heterosexual couples? If there is an active-passive difference, are people viewed differently depending on which role they take?
What is the vocabulary for women with same-sex desires? Is there a range of terminology that covers everything from platonic friendship to sexual partners? What sorts of nuance can be expressed with different words? Does the culture have explicit words that only apply to same-sex desire, as well as more euphemistic expressions? Are there cultural differences in who these words are applied to or who uses them?
Is there a belief or perception that certain physiological, behavioral, or sartorial traits are signs of lesbian desire? Are certain habits or actions perceived as communicating same-sex interest? Are they used deliberately to communicate interest or identity?
Women Loving Women in Popular Culture
That question merges seamlessly into the question of representations in popular culture, which we’ve touched on in several categories already. But it makes sense to gather some of the topics together.
What is the range of representations of women’s close emotional relationships in popular culture? How do those representations vary with class? How does access to those representations vary with class or other demographics? What sort of models do women encounter in their culture that help them put their own feelings and experiences into context?
More specifically, what is the range of representations in popular culture of romantic relationships between women, that is, relationships expressed using the same language and symbolism that would be used for a heterosexual couple? Similarly, what is the range of representations of erotic activity between women in popular culture? Who has access to those representations? What purposes do they have?
What are the boundaries between positive and negative depictions of all these categories? What types of relationships are depicted as praiseworthy and which as bad examples? Is there a social purpose to pop culture representations of female couples? Are they intended to shape behavior? To satirize? To entertain? To express the author’s experience?
Outside of fictional representations, were there women who had a reputation of being in romantic or sexual relationships with women? How was this reputation communicated? What language was used? And how were these women viewed?
General Historical Trends
No era or culture is an island. In every generation, there will be older people who remember when Things Were Different. Change around gender and sexuality may happen gradually or rapidly enough to create a generational clash. It can help to understand what attitudes or practices around gender and sexuality have changed leading up to the setting for our characters. What lingering ideas will they be exposed to? What stories about the goings on of the previous generation will they hear about? In what direction are things changing?
If one looks at only the last century or so, it can be easy to assume that attitudes around sexuality and gender have always evolved in the same direction, from more repressed to more open and accepting, but that’s far from the case. It seems like every couple of centuries attitudes revolve in a cycle. And those older attitudes will definitely affect our characters’ lives and experiences. For that matter, with hindsight, we can know how the culture will change after the period of our story. How will those changes affect their happy ending?
In addition to the larger context of time, consider the larger context of space. Cultures aren’t isolated from one another. What do our characters know about same-sex relationships in the countries they might visit? Or the ones that visitors come from? Might our characters be more or less comfortable if they traveled abroad? Might there be hazards in another land due to different laws and customs? Or might there be more freedom away from one’s own culture? Might our characters “get ideas” about the possibilities available to them from the people or popular culture of other places? What does our target culture think about their neighbors with respect to same-sex relationships? What do their neighbors think about them? Are those cultural beliefs true or are they embedded in stereotypes?
Conclusions
I realize that this discussion may feel daunting! Do you really have to know the answers to all these questions before embarking on a sapphic historical romance? Absolutely not! As I pointed out at the beginning, for many cultures, a lot of the answers are unknowable. But there are more answers out there than you may think. And sometimes it helps to know what the questions are.
I want to read all manner of historical romances that are deeply rooted in the settings they’re depicting. I want to read about relationships that are both positive and true to their times—stories that have happy endings that work for the culture they’re set in. I want to read stories that aren’t modern characters in fancy dress. And I will do my best to continue providing authors with help finding the information they need to write them.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about the questions to ask about sapphic relationships and how they are perceived in your story’s setting:
- How easy is it to live outside of the heterosexual marriage paradigm?
- What are the economic, legal, and religious constraints on your characters?
- What is the ordinary “background noise” of non-sexual displays of affection?
- How does the culture of the setting understand privacy and how does that affect your characters’ behavior?
- What are the realities and perceptions around sex between women in this setting?
- How does the culture of the setting understand gender and sexuality?
- How are female couples depicted in popular culture of the time?
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
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Friday, June 19, 2026 - 19:00
This section of the dissertation continues the structural analysis of Anne Listers papers by examining the interplay between her letters and journal entries.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Anne’s Intertextuality
This section looks more closely at the interplay between the journal and the correspondence. The two neither duplicate content exactly nor represent entirely distinct content.
Letters received or sent were recorded in the correspondence index at the beginning of the journal volume. This also kept track of the reciprocity of the letters – all were answered, those to Aunt Anne and Mariana within a few days, others less promptly. The index (if I’m understanding correctly) was relatively bare-bones, simply including the date and correspondant. Then within the daily journal entries themselves, the existence of the letter was flagged with an “L” in the margin and the letter would be summarized, with more important content being transcribed in quotation marks. This was the case for both letters received and sent. In many cases, these extracts and summaries are the only evidence for the content of the letters that have not survived. (More on this later.) Examples are given of the interplay between the letters and journal entries covering the same events and topics.
None of the surviving letters use the crypt hand, but the journal extracts from them may use it. This complicates conclusions about the purpose of the crypt hand as it clearly does not always signify things kept secret, if those matters were written openly in the letters. Crypt hand extracts included discussions of clothing, finance, servants, and relations with other residents at Place Vendôme – though all these matters might also appear in plain hand.
As noted in a journal entry, letters to Mariana were (always?) written in crypt hand. (See the previous note about her husband reading their correspondence.) Lister was selective about who she shared the key to the crypt hand with. She had previously given it to another lover, Miss Valance, but there is no indication she ever shared it with Mrs. Barlow.
Destruction of letters was a regular and systematic aspect of correspondence. When they parted, Lister obtained a promise from Mrs. Barlow that she would destroy her letters after reading. Lister sometimes comments about reviewing older correspondence and sorting out some for destruction, especially letters that she felt might reflect badly on her – those from romantic contacts she no longer had relations with, poetry from a rejected male suitor. This process, combined with the journal extracts and the selective use of crypt hand, enabled her to retain content of interest while managing access to knowledge about her sex life.
In a few instances, Lister kept a full copy of letters she sent as a separate document from the journal, and in rare cases she notes keeping the original of a letter received, as well as extracting it to the journal. In one case she notes “I shall keep and read it by way of stimulus” suggesting the possibility that reading it was an erotic act.
The pact with Mrs. Barlow about burning letters gave Lister more freedom to be candid and explicit in their contents. She records:
“I should then write more at my ease assured that she would destroy all that it might be imprudent to keep this is sanction enough to my writing what I like observed that many things I said it would not be prudent to write if she kept my letters.” [Note: as this is written in crypt hand, there is no internal punctuation therefore I have not added any.]
The active role of letters within a relationship is evidenced in multiple ways, in addition to those noted above. The sharing of letters from and to third parties to the Lister-Barlow relationship formed complex literary romantic triangles, shaped by management of which letters to share and which to withhold or delay sharing. Lister regularly shared quite personal letters from Mariana with Mrs.Barlow. It’s unclear if Mariana knew her letters were being shared (though it appears this was an expected practice) but she was clearly aware of the relationship from Lister’s correspondence with her. Mrs. Barlow, on her side, had been engaged in an amorous correspondence with a male suitor, whose tone shifted to an offer of marriage. Lister was aware of the correspondence, but the specific content was not shared initially. Mrs. Barlow kept her suitor dangling without a clear yes or no up through Lister’s departure, but the existence of the continuing relationship (and Lister’s disapproval of the man’s character) contributed to the disruption of their partnership.
This section concludes with a summary of the main themes covered.
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Thursday, June 18, 2026 - 13:00
I've developed a system of notetaking and speech to text transcription that is enabling me to keep up with my post a day for June, but there's one aspect of processing publications for the blog that I am having to delay until later. One of my side projects is creating a database of vocabulary related to lesbianism and sex between women based on primary sources quoted in the publications or on primary sources that I identify based on them. But creating the database entries involves a lot of typing of things that would not work well for the automated speech to text function. So I'll have quite a backlog to deal with once I can type properly again. That's nothing new though, because I only started keeping the vocabulary database within the last year, so there are a lot of prior publications that I need to go back and extract material from. I have no idea what form the eventual form of this database will be. I hope to be able to produce something in searchable form for the website but at the very least some of it will go into the lesbian history book that I am still working on.
I've never really seriously tried to use dictation for my fiction because the start and stop rhythm of dictating to the computer doesn't work well with my composition style. But I'm finding that with more practice I'm getting better at using it to dictate explanatory text like this. The blog entries have an intermediate step of writing out the text in longhand. But I'm using the dictation more and more for social media and less formal contexts, like this introduction. I suspect that the process of dictation is altering my verbal style and that it would be possible to distinguish social media posts that I have dictated versus those I've typed. An interesting question.
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LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Anne’s Letters
This section explores the nature and structure of the Lister’s correspondence. Although the correspondence index in the journal lists the full number of letters sent and received, and some note of their contents, the actual number of surviving letters is much smaller and selective. The nature of the content is also distinct from the journal, even apart from the restriction in which items survive. Letters carefully construct the self that Lister wished to present to the world, as well as managing her social relationships with her correspondents.
Published editions of Lister’s correspondence are found only in the two works by Green, who focused on Lister’s social life and environment while traveling. The surviving letters from the Paris trip constitute 19 items out of 30 indexed, primarily those written to her Aunt Anne, but also several to a friend, Miss Maclean. No letters to Mariana or Isabella survive. (To survive as part of the Shibden archives, the letters would need to have been returned there. This may have happened at the death of Miss Maclean. Aunt Anne’s correspondence, of course, had been sent to Shibden in the first place.)
The index lists 37 letters received by Lister, many from Aunt Anne, half a dozen or so each from Marianna, Isabella, and Miss Maclean, and three from miscellaneous sources. None of these survive except as index summaries and occasionally in larger transcribed extracts in the journal. As none of the surviving correspondence is with Lister’s lovers, and as the record is not otherwise representative, Orr’s analysis focuses on how the correspondence illustrates Lister’s social interactions.
Correspondence was sufficiently important to Lister that she had a portable writing desk, which features in journal references to its placement and arrangement. There are journal records of sourcing writing paper and of writing “small and close” to be cost-effective with respect to postage, but Lister’s handwriting in these is more carefully readable than her journal and uses few of the abbreviations that the journal is rife with. She notes making rough drafts before composing the final form of letters, often over a space of multiple days. Compared to the journal content, the letters often expand the detail of events and observations over the same material in the journal.
A great deal is made about how the sentimental, romantic language found in letters between female romantic friends was “just how everyone wrote back then,” but an examination of Lister’s writing practices find that the reality is more nuanced than that. While all of her letters used sentimental and affectionate language, distinctions can be identified in the language used toward Aunt Anne and that written to her friends and lovers. Sentiment was an important index to personal relations. Lister relates reading one of Mariana’s letters to Mrs. Barlow and the two commenting that it failed to match the tone of Lister’s letter to her (quoted in the journal) but rather was unrevealing of anything more than “what might be read to all the world.” This is a clear indication that the sentiments expressed in letters to lovers were expected to be different in quality from ordinary levels of sentimentality and might be entirely too revealing to third parties.
Much of the content of her letters might be thought of as maintaining webs of connection – providing and requesting updates on the health of friends and relatives, and the like. These networks included Lister’s close friends, her lovers, her immediate family, and close friends of family members such as Aunt Anne. Given the nature of the content, Aunt Anne at the very least was aware of the nature of Lister’s romantic relationships and accepted them.
The topics in Lister’s correspondence differ from her journal in some systematic ways around class. While the journal describes her encounters and interactions with a wide variety of people, from French nobility to tradespeople, her letters tend to focus more narrowly on relations with servants, such as her maid Cordingley.
Another function of letters that emerges from analysis is how they functioned in a similar way to “references” in communicating and supporting the reputation people had in their community. Mrs. Barlow read to Lister a letter from a friend back home to demonstrate the good character she had there. Lister similarly read to Mrs. Barlow letters from Mariana and Miss Maclean to demonstrate the same. The potential for letters to break as well as build relationships is illustrated by an anecdote in which Mariana’s husband read one of Lister’s letters to Mariana and it destroyed any further amicable relations between Lister and the man.
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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 - 17:00
This dissertation does a lot of setting the stage for the analysis, by digging deeply into the physical and structural aspect of Lister's records. It's always tempting to dive directly into the juicy content, but by focusing on the details of the structure, Orr is able to identify subtle shifts in how Lister treats different people and subjects.
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LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Chapter One Anne’s Texts: Writing the Paris Sojourn 1824-25; Anne’s Journal Volume
As an illustration of how topics were handled, this section opens with “this treadmill business.” As part of her general curiosity about the world, and based on a recommendation by a friend, Lister decided to view and try out the penal treadmill at Clerkenwell prison. Public reaction to this event haunted her for some time. Evidently her proposed visit was so out of line for gender and class expectations of the time that not only was she required to get special permission from the prison magistrates, but the event was considered noteworthy and peculiar enough to be reported in London newspapers, and also the paper aimed at English ex-pats in Paris, where she was next heading. So she not only arrived in Paris to find gossip waiting for her, but she agonized over the possibility that the story would make it to Halifax.
In two journal entries, Lister notes having discussed the event with Mrs. Barlow and with her landlady Madame de Boyve. A connection is made between the public reaction to the treadmill event and reactions to Lister’s display of personal style and manners. While Lister regularly veered outside normative behavior, she disliked being viewed as straying outside class boundaries.
The treadmill incident appears in Lister’s texts in multiple ways, reflecting her various textual strategies. Most of her journal entries about it are in crypt hand, where she is exploring how she felt and reacted. But the journal used plain hand (as does her correspondence) to defend and explain her actions. Crypt hand was for internal processing, plain hand was for constructing a public representation of the event. Thus this one topic (and one not directly related to the more fraught issues of romance and sex) illustrates that the interplay of journal and letters, encryption and not, is more complicated than “crypt hand is for sex.”
This section concludes by laying out the contents of the chapter: an analysis of the format and contents of the journal, a similar analysis of letters, and an exploration of how the two are interconnected.
Anne’s Journal Volume
This section analyzes the nature of Lister’s journal and its contents, more in a structural sense than a narrative sense (which will be covered later).
She wrote a journal entry for every day of the Paris stay although, as will be discussed later, some entries were written up retrospectively. The physical volume that includes the Paris trip begins a month and a half before she traveled and continues for four months after her return to England, with about 2/3 covering Paris.
The physical specifications of the journal are described. The pages were blank and unlined, meaning that any formatting of the text was entirely by Lister’s choices. In addition to the daily entries, the journal contains three other types of content: a summary of letters received and sent, an index of books read, and an index to the journal entries that included brief summaries of their content and a number of symbols used to highlight content of particular interest. Orr notes that while previous researchers have undoubtedly used these indexes, they have not previously been analyzed for content.
The summary of letters comes first. Material from the letters was sometimes recorded in daily journal entries but would not then be included in the journal entry index, thus keeping structural separation between the two indexes.
[Note: I may have missed it – or the information may come later – but I don’t see a reference to whether Lister allocated a certain number of blank pages to the correspondence index before beginning the daily journal.]
Next in the volume come the daily entries. The index to the daily entries appears in the back of the volume with the book turned upside down so that the text progresses in standard fashion from the cover inward. (In theory, the volume would be full when the daily entries and the index met in the middle, but in actual fact a section of unused pages was left.)
Although Lister noted at one point that the index would be useful “should I ever publish” and although she used it when rereading older material, she never did create any sort of comprehensive or retrospective summary of her life and experiences.
The literary index, also located in the back of the volume, was written almost entirely in plain hand, one exception being a 16th century book of erotic poetry. The daily index used a mixture of crypt and plain hand. In general the writing mode in the index matched that in the entries, but there were exceptions.
The length of the entries and index notes was variable due to several factors. During the courtship of Mrs. Barlow, entries increased in length due to the amount of description and analysis Lister devoted to this topic. During particularly busy times not related to her romances, the entries might be relatively short, such as during her initial days in Paris, or when preparing to move or travel.
The journal index not only summarized key topics but signaled degrees of interest, especially using two symbols. The “cross” symbol (+) flagged sexual events. Within the journal entries it often indicated a session of masturbation, linked to the specific time of day and context. While text might describe this as “incurring a cross” a plus sign would be placed in the page margin to flag that content.
But the plus sign was not limited to recording masturbation. It also occurs in conjunction with references to reading sexually stimulating material. In all cases, a plus sign in the journal entry would be echoed by one in the relevant index, whether of the daily entries or literature.
A different symbol, the section mark § (also known as a silcrow), was used to flag content of particular interest. This was used in sets of 1 to 3 symbols appearing in both the journal entry and its index entry. A single mark was most common. A double mark was somewhat less frequent and marked topics that Lister might want to review in the future. The rare triple mark indicated experiences of intense emotion, whether positive or negative. There is a discussion providing examples of the types of content that each might appear with. There is a correlation between the number of markers and the amount of crypt hand in the associated passages.
The next part of the section describes in detail changes in the length of journal entries and the use of crypt hand relative to the events in Lister’s life. Factors that might result in postponing the writing up of entries are also considered. In some cases, an entry might note an event that interrupted the writing process, describing it in a footnote.
A separate writing practice enabled these delayed write ups to retain their accuracy and detail. Lister wrote up “memoranda” on slips kept in a “pocket casebook” kept close. These would record the details in real time that would be expanded in later journal entries. They might also be used for drafting entries or letters when particular care in composition was desired. [Note: possibly these memoranda were discarded after being written up in a more permanent form.]
[Aside: Completely unrelated to Lister, her practice here reminds me of a similar one my great-great-grandfather describes in the context of his Civil War diaries and letters from the 1860s. He would write up daily memoranda that would later be the basis for more detailed letters to family. But in his case the memoranda were written up in a notebook, which he would then mail home when it was full, and not on discardable slips of paper.]
Lister’s purpose in creating such a detailed record of her life is alluded to in an entry from 1821.
“By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, in some degree to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past and present and thus to cheer and edify the future.”
The section concludes with a summary of the types of topics that Lister recorded in her journals.
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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 - 08:00
I must confess that I am a methodology nerd. When I'm reading a historian's work, I love to hear all the details of how they're approaching the material, how they're interpreting it, and how they're presenting it. In my own nonfiction reading, I sometimes feel that this matter overwhelms the meaningful content of what I'm writing about. But I have one adage that I hold to, both in my own research and when teaching others, which is: "if you don't know how you know something, then you don't really know it." Given the firehose of online factoids that we are constantly inundated with, this is a good principle to keep in mind. How much of what we receive online is something we actually "know" by this standard?
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Representing Anne in Paris
When focusing on the Paris era, Orr found that existing edited material was deficient. Although Whitbread’s No Priest But Love focused on a similar period, she included less than 1/6 of the journal material for that era. Green cataloged 30 letters from the era, but included only 17 of them. Liddington emphasized the importance of incorporating other documentary material–account books, etc.—for a complete understanding.
Is this section, Orr reviews the nature and scope of the documentary material covering the 1824–25 Paris trip, plus some additional material that provides context for the trip and its experiences. Orr also notes certain topics which she excluded from detailed analysis, such as a brief flirtation with a Miss Pope and an evidently platonic, if sometimes indecorous, relationship with her French language teacher who was not part of the residence at Place Vendôme.
Orr’s interest is in how we use sources like journals and letters to produce “women’s history.” They are often trivialized as primarily emotional rather than rational, autobiographical while not being intended for public consumption, and part of a personal analytic self-fashioning rather than a neutral record.
This section includes a lot of theory-talk about the interpretation of such sources. It then moves on to lay out Orr’s editorial practices, intended to find a balance between readability and preserving structural data, such as distinguishing crypt hand from plain hand. As the crypt hand included no distinction of case, no punctuation, and no word spacing, the edited versions adopt these formatting practices from how similar text was treated in plain hand. Indications of Lister’s corrections and insertions are explained. Abbreviations are generally expanded, except for personal names where the use of abbreviation can indicate degrees of familiarity. The handling of illegible text is discussed.
The section ends by laying out the three topics that are the focus of the work—textual issues, social context, and sexual practices—then reiterating the key reasons why Lister’s material is of importance to history.
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Monday, June 15, 2026 - 17:00
It's been along day involving a flat tire and I'm tired, so no clever intro today.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Sexuality and Sociality in Anne’s Journals
In this section, Orr challenges the accepted ideas about the meaning and uses of Lister’s “crypt hand.” Most previous editors have presented excerpts from the diaries that do not clearly distinguish material recorded in cipher from that in ordinary writing. Whitbread notes the crypt hand was used to record Lester’s “intimate” (that is, sexual) life, creating the impression that her sexual and emotional observations were always encrypted and that crypt hand was used only for this purpose. But the crypt hand was also used in correspondence with her intimate partners–the sharing of the key was an almost ritual aspect of a shift in her relationship with someone.
Even so, the correlation of the use of crypt hand with content related to sexuality has helped produce a segregation in analysis and theorizing about Lister’s life, depending on whether a researcher utilized the encrypted materials or not. The encryption also helped enable censorship about her sexuality, beginning with John Lister’s published excerpts that drew only from the “public” portions.
When examined across writing modes (crypt versus plain) and genres (journal versus letters), Lister’s voice is notably consistent. With respect to the use of crypt hand, Whitbread concluded it was used for matters that Lister wished to keep secret–not only sexual matters, but thoughts about her clothing. Some researchers have identified the crypt hand a type of “closet,” enabling Lister to create a separation of her public and private identities. Yet Lister’s commentary on both her sexuality and use of the crypt hand do not reflect this idea. She expresses no stigma about her desires, considering them utterly natural. And her internal dialogues about her sexuality appear in both types of writing, intertwined with each other. Further, Listers “plain hand” had its own version of obfuscation, in a dense system of abbreviations and cramped writing. When she found Maria Barlow examining her journal she made no protest, suggesting she “make out what you can,” evidently considering the decipherment of even plain hand to be sufficient barrier.
The crypt hand had its own arc of evolution, initially used to record brief expressions of emotion and only later expanding to extensive passages; expanding from the use of Greek letters to a more extensive repertory. Handwriting was not the only technique used to create meaningfully distinct texts. When Lister first became involved with Mariana, she began a new journal specific to recording that relationship. Rather than her name being transcribed, Mariana was assigned a unique symbol within the text. By the time of her relationship with Mariana, Lister had developed her own sexual vocabulary, using “kiss” to indicate an orgasm, and ‘cross” or a cross symbol to indicate masturbation.
In Rowanchild’s analysis of the journals, she identifies the network of women with whom Lister shared the key to the crypt hand, representing a privileged “inner circle” of women who engaged in same-sex relations.
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Sunday, June 14, 2026 - 17:00
Today's section of Orr's dissertation looks at the ways in which other researchers have interpreted Lister's life.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Theorizing Anne’s Sexual and Social Identity
Each of the major editions of Lister material focused on selected aspects of her social or sexual identity at specific life stages. This disjunction mirrors similar disjunctions within lesbian and feminist history. Operating in the context of queer and feminist academics of the 1970s and 1980s, Whitbread and Faderman tended to view Lister’s sexuality through a modern lens, applying sexological theories, or viewing her as transmasculine.
Faderman’s claim that Lister “would have recognized herself” in the sexologists’ category of “congenital invert” (a theoretical framework that was not created until decades after Lister’s death) as she considers Lister’s self-description as incompatible with the prevailing framework of (nonsexual) romantic friendship. But all of these frameworks – invert, romantic friendship, and whatever Lister experienced – are social constructs specific to a particular historic context. Orr notes that further analysis suggests that the “mannish lesbian” stereotype that flourished around the turn of the 20th century was not a product of sexological theory, but rather was an existing identity that emerged out of its specific historic context, and not some sort of universal constant that could be applied retroactively.
Others who have studied Lister’s life have tried to fit her into a butch-femme framework, seeing her as the only “true” lesbian within her various relationships and looking to apply the same dichotomy to other homoerotic couples she encountered. But this view privileges the visibility of Lister’s appearance and behavior, contributing to “femme erasure” and artificially reinforcing a binary view of lesbian identity rather than exploring potential continuity.
By looking for historic reflections of the cultural and behavioral features of modern lesbian identity, the illusion of absence is created, leading to projecting modern identities into that void. Lister’s unambiguous and explicit statements of her erotic orientation and practices were then considered evidence that “modern lesbianism” could now be pushed a century earlier than the sexology era. But this framing separates her from her own historic context–making her a precursor of modern identity rather than an ordinary exemplar of her own era.
If one steps away from the imperative to find a reflection of modern lesbianism, Lister begins to appear to belong solidly to her own time. Sedgwick argues that Lister could be “an almost archetypal Jane Austen heroine.” Many aspects of her life and loves fit solidly within the social and literary discourse of the long 18th century. But even those historians who connect her with 18th century themes fall prey to pigeonholing. Mavor associates her with the late 18th century “cult of sapphism,” ignoring the evidence that Lister was well aware of “sapphic practices” and disavowed that as an identity. [Note: We could use a closer look at exactly what Lister considered “sapphic practices.” Perhaps that will be covered later in this work. The specific aspect she notes is the use of a dildo, which seems an awfully specific thing to define an identity around.] Regardless of how she felt about the idea and label, she was clearly aware of it and the idea it was available to her in her own negotiation of identity. When Lister contrasts her own “natural” style of lovemaking to the “artifice” of the dildo-wielding sapphists, this distracts from how otherwise similar the two appear.
In her focus on education and self-improvement, Lister also has strong echoes of the bluestockings, but once again we have direct evidence that she was aware of that culture and considered herself separate from it. She has comments that seem to reflect an internalized misogyny–valuing her own learning but disapproving of women’s education for others and not valuing education in her own potential lovers. Here we see the conflict between Listers class identity (conservative, upper-class) and modern expectations of female or queer solidarity.
Lister had a variety of examples of other female romantic couples to compare herself to. She visited the Ladies of Llangollen while traveling in Wales and speculated on the nature of their relationship. More locally, she socialized with a female couple Miss Pickford and Miss Threlfall and recognized their couplehood as similar to what she inspired to. Yet she deliberately misled Pickford about her own sexual desires and experience, even as she elicited confessions from Pickford.
But each of these intersections demonstrate that Lister not only was not temporally isolated in absolute terms, but was not isolated even in her own direct experience. Even if her experience and practices differed in detail from those of other women she encountered, she clearly existed within a continuum of homoerotic practice within her own historic context. This evidence of a “lesbian continuum” (to use Adrienne Rich’s term) around the turn of the 19th century contradicts the theories of historians like Smith Rosenberg and Faderman who saw a sharp dichotomy between nonsexual (though often sensual) romantic friendship and lesbian relations defined by genital sexuality. The problem is that–as we actively see in Lister’s own writing and negotiations–active management of sexual knowledge and representation mean that we could rarely know where the dividing line was between sexual and non-sexual relationships.
Among the other models of lesbianism that we know Lister had access to were classical texts like Juvenal’s satires and novels such as Belinda. She may even have been aware of the Pirie and Woods court case. Lister commented on medical texts discussing lesbianism that she found unhelpful in understanding herself. [Note: From context, it appears the central point was the myth of the macro-clitoral lesbian. Lister examined her own genitals and found no evidence of such a thing.]
Lester also used reading and texts as a way of engaging with other women, either using texts such as Byron to sound them out on their romantic receptiveness, or arranging for parallel reading as a practice reinforcing couplehood.
Although Lister sometimes described her own behavior in masculine terms, such as “gentlemanly” she does not–contrary to some historians’ claims–appear to have considered herself “a man in a woman’s body,” even though on one or more occaseven though on one or more occasions she records having fantasized about having a penis or about passing in order to marry. On one occasion she describes herself as “not all masculine but rather softly gentleman-like.” But the forms and nomenclature of heteronormativity were inescapable. She referred to her established partnerships as “like husband and wife.” [Note: This was hardly unique to Lister. Romantic correspondence between women regularly used husband-wife language from as early as the 17th century through the 20th.] The sartorial presentation that felt natural to her was a hybrid of specific masculine-coded garments and an avoidance of “femininity” via the use of sober colors and plain stylings. Some researchers have analyzed how Lister deployed shifting strategies of presentation to address the varied concerns of gender and class. Class was an extremely significant aspect of her identity that she was constantly constructing, negotiating, and defending.
Class becomes relevant in exploring how Lister built relationships with women that she was not romantically involved with. Further, her interactions were not always clearly distinguished between romantic and not. Many women shifted easily between the categories of acquaintance, friend, flirtation, affair, and romance.
Orr sets out that her purpose is not to “correct” previous conclusions about Lister’s sexuality, but to identify some that have become accepted knowledge and overwrite them with a more nuanced view that draws on her specific historic context, rather than evaluating her life in terms of anachronistic models.
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Saturday, June 13, 2026 - 07:00
Orr's dissertation aims to approach the Lister documentary material from previously unexplored angles. So the first step is to map out the existing landscape. (To be honest, it sometimes feels like Orr is criticizing previous work for not having studied aspects it didn't set out to study. But I guess a dissertation needs to justify its existence.)
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Representations of “Anne Lister”
This section describes the nature of the Shibden Hall archives and their history. It covers the history of the several times the cipher has been assailed, from John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s initial cracking of the code, through several researchers who chose to exclude the references to sexuality from their deciphered transcripts, up through Whitbread’s publication of that previously censored material. The nature of Lister’s sexuality was known as early as 1892 but was suppressed for almost a century after that, with each new researcher re-discovering and re-erasing it.
The discussion moves on to the history of Orr’s engagement with the material. Orr describes how each researcher presented the contents (and thus their version of Lister) differently. Although Whitbread published one volume focusing on the Paris trip, Orr views it as having marginalized the presence of Maria Barlow in favor of framing Mariana as Lister’s one grand passion.
Liddington drew from a wider variety of sources and focused on the larger social and political context of Lister’s life, as a mature woman. Liddington’s take on Lister’s sexuality has a negative tinge, touching on her manipulativeness and predatory reputation.
Green, who avoided touching on the explicit material, focused on Lister the traveler, drawing primarily from her correspondence rather than the focus on the diaries that others used.
Thus, previous work formed a patchwork, employing different subsets of the material and displaying different aspects of Lester’s life–ones that can almost seem to be different people. The section concludes by pointing out how this dynamic leaves space for a new, more integrated understanding of Lister that attempts to understand her within her own context, rather than fitting her into pre-existing theoretical frameworks.
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Friday, June 12, 2026 - 14:00
In order to make this dissertation manageable, I will be posting it in smaller segments--portions of the fairly lengthy chapters.
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LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Introduction
This is a doctoral dissertation so it’s structured somewhat differently than a book would be, although of similar length. The work examines the period of Anne Lister’s life when she was in Paris in 1824, and particularly how she interacted with a community of women there, both socially and romantically. The focus is how Lister’s various written records document and reflect those interactions, including how her “crypt hand” cipher reflects her psychological states and processes.
The dissertation is structured in six parts: an introduction, three sections examining key aspects of the topic, a conclusion section, and appendices. The main sections are a bit awkward in length–a bit long for conveniently covering in a single post, while their subsections are perhaps shorter than ideal for individual blogs. But I’ll mostly be covering them in shorter chunks in order to meet my artificial goal of blogging every day for Pride Month.
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The introduction begins with an overview of Lister’s life and a brief explanation of her importance to various aspects of history. [Note: I’ll skip the background details, as I assume readers are familiar with the general history.]
A key element of Lister’s extensive documentary record in journals and correspondence is her romantic and sexual interactions with women, beginning in her earliest diary during her school days when she began an intense romance with fellow student Eliza Raine, continuing with a more casual relationship with neighbor Isabella Norcliffe, an extended but ultimately unsatisfactory romance with Mariana Lawton, the brief affair with Maria Barlow that is central to this study, and her eventual romantic partnership with Ann Walker that lasted until Lister’s death.
For about a century, excerpts from Lister’s papers were published to illustrate various aspects of her life, but with the lesbianism carefully censored. Not until the 1980s was this aspect of her life made public, after which it became a focus of intense interest for queer and women’s historians. The explicit, detailed, and revealing descriptions of her sexual attitudes and activities upended the conventional view of 19th-century women’s same-sex relationships as being limited to conventional sentimentality and platonic affection.
But Lister’s sexuality continued to be interpreted in ways that failed to disturb existing narratives. She was a unique anomaly. She was an early example of the sexologists “congenital invert.” She could be interpreted in the framework of butch-femme culture. Some even considered the journals to be inauthentic. But all these approaches ignored the historic context of her life rather than using her to expand the understanding of early 19th century sexuality.
There were a number of possible models for same-sex relations that Lister could have “tried on” to understand herself. She explicitly rejects the label of “sapphist.” [Note: Although she appears to associate the word with specific behaviors, especially the use of a dildo.] Other possible identities include bluestockings (whose circles often included same-sex bonds of various types) or theatrical crossdressing up (given that she identified her preferred sartorial style as “masculine”).
The text reviews various takes on Lister by previous authors working with her material. These produced different views depending on the interests (and avoidances) of the researchers. Muriel Green- focused on Lister as a traveler and erased any mention of her sexuality. Liddington was most interested in her social and political context, while acknowledging her sexuality. Whitbread focused primarily on her sexuality but shaped her presentation of the material around the idea of Mariana as the central “great romance.” Others have presented a more integrated view of her life but worked from the existing published excerpts rather than returning to the original documents.
Orr cautions against using Lister’s life as a single cornerstone for new understandings of homosexual history, or trying to fit her life into existing categories, yet the value that Lister contributes to our historic understanding cannot be overstated.
Given this, Orr sets about to create an experiential understanding of Lister’s relationship to her world, in particular how she initiated and developed erotic relationships with women, as recorded in her own writings. The choice of Maria Barlow for this is due to several factors. The entire period of their interactions is well documented. It began at a time with Lister at extensive previous sexual experience. The relationship progressed significantly (unlike some briefer flirtations). And this particular relationship has not been seriously studied previously.
Barlow was a mature and experienced woman–a widow with a child. She was economically independent and met Lister on a relatively equal footing. The relationship is also of analytical interest in that it began within a female community (at a boarding house) that illustrates the everyday interactions and social connections against which it is differentiated. Another feature is that the relationship developed when Lister was displaced from her family setting (and from English culture entirely) allowing the highlighting of her sexual habits and textual practices against a neutral background.
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Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 11:00
When I pulled together the journal articles in my folders on biographical topics for this cluster I also added a couple other publications that I had in electronic form on the topic of Anne Lister. As one of those items is a doctoral dissertation and another is a collection of articles, these materials are likely to see me through pretty much the rest of June. There is, as I sometimes comment humorously, an entire academic industry of Anne Lister studies. This means that I sometimes pick and choose to avoid having this and similarly well-documented topics overwhelm a broader coverage of lesbian history. This first article in the set makes a good introduction, as it covers the history of interactions with, and deciphering of, Lister's journals.
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LHMPFull citation:
Liddington, Jill. 1993. “Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax (1791-1840): Her Diaries and the Historians” in History Workshop, 35: 45-77.
When reading this article, I had to keep reminding myself that it was written more than 30 years ago. The second volume of Helena Whitbread’s selections from the diaries had just been published. Anne Lister had not yet evolved into an entire academic industry. It would be interesting to put together an extensive chronology of Lister scholarship since then to illustrate how knowledge and awareness of her spread.
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This is not so much an article about Anne Lister history as it is Anne Lister historiography. It traces the awareness of her life and diaries, both scholarly and popular. The article begins with a very brief biography that situates her life in time and space.
Initial awareness of the importance of the Lister papers centered on their scope and the potential for detailed evidence of everyday life in her particular social context. An article in 1991 noted the daunting task for the researcher to tackle the 24 volumes (actually 27) consisting of 2 million words (eventually determined to be more like 4 million) in a relatively difficult hand, even before dealing with the coded “crypt hand” that made up about a sixth of the text. As a comparison, the famously detailed diaries of Samuel Pepys from the 17th century come in at only one and a quarter million words. In the 1991 article, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Lister’s birth, there was only a suggestion that she “may well have been a lesbian” although Whitbread’s first volume of extracts had established the fact rather solidly three years earlier.
The diaries are only a fraction of the archival material from Shibden Hall, which provides essential historical context for the site and family. And Anne Lister’s fascinating personal life is only a small part of the historic value of the archive. But this article focuses on the history of the diaries and their interpretation, including the points where their survival was uncertain.
After Lister’s death in 1840, her estate was left to her wife Ann Walker for her lifetime, after which it would go to relatives. Three years later, Walker’s relatives conspired to have her declared insane, creating a legal squabble between the two families. An inventory of papers was drawn up in 1850 in the midst of this process, including a line-item for 3 parcels labeled “Diaries and Journals of Mrs. Lister.”
After Walker’s death, the property went to a branch of the Lister family that had been living in Wales. John Lister–the key figure in this history–was born seven years after Anne Lister’s death and was eight years old when the family moved to Shibden Hall. Local memory of Anne was no doubt still active, but may have focused on her eccentricity and refusal to marry. The relationship with Ann Walker would likely have been folded into general acceptance of romantic friendships between women. John Lister, in his 40s (circa 1887 onward) begin publishing selections from the diaries in a local paper, focusing on social and political anecdotes.
[Note: There is a prevalent myth in Lister lore that the diaries were “hidden away behind a panel” like a buried treasure. When I visited Shibden Hall, the museum staff took pains to contradict this, pointing out the built-in cabinetry where the diaries and other archives had been kept. John’s work with the diaries also points out that they were known–even if the more controversial contents were yet to be identified.]
Although the ordinary text of the diaries makes regular reference to the women that Anne had relationships with, the personal details were all encoded. John was aware of the cipher but didn’t begin trying to decipher it until he and an antiquarian friend found a phrase that turned out to be something of a Rosetta Stone, confirming the correspondence of a handful of letters.
Their Initial transcriptions revealed material that “turned out…to be entirely unpublishable.” The friend recommended that the diaries be burned to conceal their contents. John Lister refused. This was in 1885, when sexological theories of homosexuality were just beginning to spread. John was no doubt balancing an antiquarian’s respect for ancient documents with a concern for the Lister family reputation. There is also reasonable evidence that John himself was homosexual, which may have added complications to his considerations.
In any event, another 40 years passed before the next engagement with the diaries occurred. John died in 1933 and, although evidence of his deciphering survives in his papers, the knowledge was not passed directly to other scholars. A local librarian took on responsibility for the Lister papers and his daughter, Muriel Green, took on the task of organizing and cataloging. She was stymied by the cipher but began work on Anne’s correspondence. Her father managed to make contact with John’s antiquarian friend who shared how the code had been cracked 50 years earlier, adding a warning about the scandalous contents, but providing the cipher key that he and John had worked out.
Muriel later recalled that she and her father had never discussed Anne’s sexuality at that time and she kept all mention of the topic out of her transcripts of Anne’s letters. In 1938 Muriel published her catalog and transcript of the correspondence (an abridged version of which was published in 1992 as Miss Lister of Shibden Hall).
Another 20 years passed, then Phyllis Ramsden and another local historian decided to tackle the diaries. They don’t appear to have had contact with Muriel, but the local museum committee offered them a copy of the cipher key. Around 1966 they compiled an index and chronology of the contents, including references to content in the cipher, but they censored the sexual content, noting that it was “almost exclusively of such purely personal content as to contain nothing of historic importance or interest.” Their publications were also subject to review and approval by the library committee.
Clearly, awareness of the nature of and coded material was spreading, but it was still considered too scandalous to make public. Indeed, some of the transcripts Ramsden had created were deliberately destroyed to prevent unauthorized use.
But by 1970 access was improving and the requirement for committee approval had dropped. In the mid-1980s, Helena Whitbread began her own transcriptions of the cipher text and published her first volume of extracts I Know My Own Heart in 1988. Now Anne Lister’s lesbianism and self-identification were open knowledge in the world. A second volume followed, detailing Lister’s year in Paris (No Priest But Love) and though there was some controversy around the publications (and the accusation that they put unwarranted emphasis on the more sensational aspects of the diaries) there was no putting the cat back in the bag.
Liddington, having encountered Whitbread’s work, became interested in adding to the project. The remainder of the article focuses on three specific time points, providing excerpts and context: her school years from 1806 to 1810, late 1819, and a brief period in 1832. Liddington’s more extensive books based on Lister research were yet to come when this article was written.
The article concludes with a summary of the key historic importance of Anne Lister’s documentary material, not simply to the history of sexuality, but as a female land owner, and a woman active in industrial and political movements of the day.
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