In this article, Lanser examines the intersection of changing conceptions of sexual difference (i.e., the difference between male and female) and changing attitudes toward sexuality in the 18th century, specifically with regard to how female homosexuality plays a part in these processes.
Literary Passionate Friendship
This category covers literary characters who are portrayed as being in intense romantic friendships with other women where there is no overt erotic component and typically where they are not living as a committed couple.
LHMP entry
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
In this article, Ingrassia challenges scholarship that views 18th century novelist Eliza Haywood’s work as depicting only heterosexual relationships and instead points out and discusses many aspects of her fiction that represent a wide spectrum of relations between women that range from the homosocial to the homoerotic. [Note: This article has a lot of literary theory jargon, which I tend to find of less interest, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the discussions of the content of Haywood’s work.]
This article looks at contrasting concepts of “woman writer” and “professional author” in the 18th century, using the lens of Eliza Haywood’s writing, and specifically the discussions around writing and authorship contained in her work The Tea-Table. In the early 18th century, resistance to the idea of women as “writers” (which had influenced many women to circulate their work only in manuscript among private social circles) was shifting to resistance specifically to women as professional writers, i.e., ones who aspired to make a living at it.
The novel Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) maybe the earliest American literary depiction of a passionate romantic relationship between women. Criticism of the work has tended to reflect the attitudes toward women’s same-sex relationships prevalent in the critic’s own era, rather than considering it within its own context.
[Note: Keep in mind that Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Man was published in 1981. This article is part of the ongoing research she was doing that eventually contributed to that work. For that reason, I’m going to skim a bit, since I’ve covered that publication extensively.]
Introduction
The author points out that this is an inescapably political book and should be read in that context. He points out that the question of “who is queer” is not at all straight-forward [pun intentional] in a historic context, and that queer figures have been silently and invisibly embedded in US history far deeper than most people are aware.
Jankowski examines Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale—and particularly the question of just where Hermione might have been hidden by Paulina during the period when she is presumed dead, and what they were doing there—to challenge traditional assumptions about the presence and extent of f/f eroticism in his plays, following themes of invisibility and hidden spaces. She takes as a premise that there “must have been women who desired other women and had erotic and/or sexual relations with them” in the early modern period and therefore looks among Shakespeare’s characters to find them.
Introduction
In the second half of the 18th century, women established themselves as writers of novels in dramatic numbers, thus the genre is imbued with a diverse array of women’s concerns. The novels discussed in this book tell stories often at odds with the official cultural narrative. Within that diversity, they contribute to a common tale of women’s options and how they negotiate them.
Introduction
In the later 18th century, there is a conflict in the English imagination between the foreign, dangerous, “female friends,” personified by the image of sapphic Marie-Antoinette, and the positive image of such celebrated English female couples such as Ponsonby and Butler, Seward and Sneyd. Hester Thrale personified this conflict, expressing deeply negative views of sexualized female relationships, but praising and even engaging in intimate (but not overtly sexual) relationships between women, such as Frances Barney.
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