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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 318 - On the Shelf for July 2025

 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/07/08 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for July 2025.

You might think that retirement means I’d never have a late podcast ever again, but here I am uploading it several days past the first Saturday. A certain amount of it is finding myself in the middle of “Time? What even is time?” But there’s another factor at play. They say that in retirement, every day is a weekend. Well, my weekends used to be jam-packed full of projects, and now every day is a weekend. On the plus side, I’m making a lot of progress on a lot of projects.

Publications on the Blog

I fulfilled my pledge to blog a publication every day in June for Pride Month, focusing mostly on materials relating to US history, which I’ve tended not to prioritize in the past. This included surveys of Colonial-era legal issues and cases, such as:

• Richard Godbeer’s “’The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England”
• Robert F. Oaks’ “"Things Fearful to Name": Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England”
• Alden Vaughan’s “The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall”

and

• Greta LaFleur’s “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America”

or similar issues in the post-Colonial period, such as:

• Estelle B. Freeedman’s “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics”

Several articles looked at literary themes, such as:

• Lillian Faderman’s  “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James”
• Mary E. Wood’s “’With Ready Eye’: Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”

and

• Kristin M. Comment’s “Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic”

Several articles examined transmasculine topics, such as:

• Jen Manion’s “The Queer History of Passing as a Man in Early Pennsylvania”

and

• Rachel Hope Cleves’ “Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man? The Life of Frank Shimer (1826-1901)”

And of course I spend over a week blogging Cleves’ book Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.

Several articles tackled the process of researching queer lives or the historic resistance to doing so, such as:

• Sylvia Martin’s “'These Walls of Flesh': The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate”
• Pamela VanHaitsma’s “Stories of Straightening Up: Reading Femmes in the Archives of Romantic Friendship”
• Lillian Faderman’s “Who Hid Lesbian History?”

and

• Linda Garber’s “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction”

And due to the vagaries of my process, some non-US topics slipped in, such as Theresa Braunschneider’s “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women.” It’s been a while since I covered that much material in a single month, so I guess I can be excused for getting distracted from writing podcast scripts!

News of the Field

Before I move on to the new book listings, I wanted to give a shout-out to that rare instance of sapphic characters in a historic tv series. Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers follows the careers of a group of American heiresses looking to marry into aristocratic English society. There was a previous miniseries based on the same material in 1995 that stayed somewhat closer to the original material. The current show plays a bit more fast-and-loose with historic accuracy, introducing some race-blind casting and modern party-girl sensibility, but most pertinent to our interests, we get a sapphic romance that develops with the same scope and detail as several of the other relationships. This particular plot point does not exist in the original text, so we must be grateful to the producers for acknowledging that a female same-sex romance was solidly accurate for the period and working it in. We can’t yet know whether they’ll be allowed a happy ever after ending, but as the heterosexual pairings in the story don’t all get one, it’s probably a toss-up.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

While pulling together this month’s new book listings, it felt like I was finding a lot of titles on the theme of unsent or lost letters, though some of them were part of the current flood of publications that smell like AI, so they won’t be mentioned here.

I’ve been doing some initial stats for this year’s books and one interesting—or possibly concerning—trend is the dearth of historicals from the small queer presses, though in exchange we’re getting a startling number from major publishers. I hope to get back to doing a deeper analysis at some point, though it means I have to go back and do a lot of data-coding.

There are a couple of May books that only just came to my attention.

The Housekeeper's Ledger by Allison Ingram has a solidly gothic feel to it, but it’s difficult to guess exactly when the story is set.

When Anna Hale takes a humble position as housekeeper at the sprawling Ashmore estate, she expects long days, silent halls, and the cold indifference of Lady Catherine Ashmore. What she doesn’t expect is a trail of secrets hidden behind locked doors, a crumbling legacy haunted by old debts, and the sharp undeniable pull between herself and the woman she serves.

As whispers of betrayal and scandal echo through the estate, Anna and Catherine must navigate a web of lies, dangerous rivals, and the looming threat of ruin — all while confronting the fragile, fierce love blossoming between them. In a world eager to break them, Anna and Catherine will risk everything to stand side by side, but surviving the storm will take more than trust. It will take a choice.

I’m not sure that I can give a recommendation to A Truthful Companion By My Side by Claudia Haase, although the historic setting looks solid, but the writing feels like a very awkward translation from some other language.

Princess Agatha is alone at court with her cultural interests and intellect. She does not find any suitable conversation partners in her companions and ladies-in-waiting. Her curiosity is aroused all the more by the smart Ernestine and her unconventional lifestyle - and finally she finds the person with whom she can share all her passions.

The young Countess Ernestine doesn't think much of the aristocratic goings-on at court. She represses the thought that she was once promised to a crown prince as his wife. However, she could imagine a life together with Princess Agatha. But no sooner have they become close than the royal family insists on an early wedding ceremony with Agatha's brother.

Immerse yourself in the love story of two aristocratic women who lived at Bergfels Palace and Sturmstein Castle in the transition from the 17th to the 18th century!

June books cover a fairly wide spread of eras, including some unusual ones.

Secrets at the Ambrose Café by Carryl Church from Choc Lit Historical Romance is set in England just after World War I.

Two women. Two different worlds. One secret that could ruin them both.

Exeter, 1925. Della Wilde has set aside her dream of moving to Paris to study at the renowned Le Cordon Bleu, choosing instead to support her family torn apart by war. By night, she works at the prestigious Ambrose Café, serving the city’s elite — she feels utterly invisible.

Until a chance encounter with rebellious Alice Winters, the daughter of a powerful MP, upends Della’s world.

Alice is a woman caught between duty and desire. She secretly yearns to be an artist but is expected to marry a respectable suitor and raise a family. Della, with her sharp wit and quiet strength, is unlike anyone she has ever known. She makes Alice feel alive.

So she draws Della into her orbit — first as a muse for her secret art, then as something infinitely more intimate. But in a world where reputations are easily shattered, their growing bond is a danger that threatens not only their futures, but those around them.

As Alice risks scandal and Della faces the consequences of following her heart, they must decide: will they allow others to choose their path, or dare to forge their own?

Salt in the Silk by Delly M. Elrose sounds like it’s telling a Titanic story in an alternate form, set a decade earlier on a fictional ship.

1898. Aboard the RMS Victoria’s Grace, bound from Liverpool to New York, two women from opposite worlds collide: one born into ivory and etiquette, the other into soot and survival.

Catherine Ashbury, a refined upper-class heiress, is being shipped off across the Atlantic for an arranged marriage to save her family’s dwindling fortune. Cloaked in silk, obedience, and unspoken longing, she’s resigned to her fate—until she meets a girl who lives with no rules at all.

Nell Nolan, a tough and clever third-class passenger from East London, is an orphaned pickpocket disguised as a seamstress. With calloused hands and a pocket full of stolen coins, Nell isn’t afraid of breaking laws—or hearts. She boards the Victoria’s Grace with a stolen ticket and nothing left to lose, desperate to start a new life in America.

Their first meeting is accidental. Their second, unforgettable. What begins as curiosity becomes defiance—then desire. But love is dangerous in the shadows of a ship ruled by class, reputation, and silent codes. And when disaster strikes in the icy Atlantic, Catherine and Nell must face a choice no woman should have to make: Love, or survival.

A couple years ago I listed the first book in the Lavender and Foxglove series by Hilary Rose Berwick, set in a medieval convent in a world with a bit of magic. Somehow I missed books 2 and 3 when they came out—A Bounty of Bitterwort and A Rondel of Rosemary—but now book 4 turned up on my radar once more: A League of Lavender. Now I only wish the series was available somewhere other than Amazon because it sounds intriguing but not quite intriguing enough to drop my ethical objections.

Within the convent walls, the pestilence has largely passed, and Prioress Emmelot des Étoiles has a new conundrum: how, exactly, do bones become relics, and what will it mean for her convent when the pilgrims come to see them? Of more concern is the king's increased interest in those with magic sheltered by holy orders, including Emmelot's beloved, the novice Ysabeau.

But before she can solve those problems, Emmelot discovers the infirmary holds an unknown body with no signs of pestilence: a young woman clutching a posy of lavender — a sign of the conflict between followers of the old gods and the new. Now Emmelot must solve this murder before a longstanding feud erupts into open warfare.

In Her Own Shoes (The Ferrier Chronicles #1) by Mark Prime is another book with a medieval setting. I was a bit thrown by the title, because I’ve never encountered any adage similar to “in her own shoes” and can’t quite figure out what spin it’s trying to give.

In a castle built on legacy, one woman dares to claim her own name.

England, 1425. Tamworth Castle stands as a fortress of stone, secrets, and centuries-old power. When Elizabeth de Ferrel arrives to marry into the Farrier family, she isn’t stepping into a life of privilege—she’s walking straight into a battleground.

To secure her inheritance, Elizabeth must wed Sir Thomas Farrier, the ambitious heir of a noble bloodline now clinging to its influence. But she brings with her more than a title—she brings a dagger, a sharp wit, and a past she refuses to bury.

Inside Tamworth’s walls, every gaze has weight. Elizabeth forms an unexpected bond with Mae, a dark-haired scullery maid whose loyalty cuts deeper than her silence. Meanwhile, Griselda, the stone-faced housekeeper with more secrets than the cellar, watches Elizabeth’s every move—not as a threat, but perhaps as a guardian. And in the shadows, young Jonah, a servant boy marked by trauma, carries a truth that could set the castle ablaze.

When a bishop dies under mysterious circumstances, and Elizabeth receives a lock of hair as warning, alliances fracture, hearts are tested, and no one escapes untouched. Whispers rise of a Black Nun haunting the chapel—a spectral reminder that Tamworth remembers every sin carved into its walls.

At the heart of it all: a woman who refuses to shrink. Elizabeth isn’t interested in being the lady of the house. She wants to rule it. And she’ll do it in her own shoes.

The Letters Beneath Her Floorboards by Mira Ashwyn is one of those “unsent letters” stories I mentioned above, this time with a supernatural twist and stories in parallel timelines.

One letter. One mystery. One chance to heal.

When Rae Ashcroft returns to her late grandmother’s coastal estate, she isn’t looking for closure—she’s looking for silence. Haunted by a past she’s tried to bury, Rae just wants to escape. But the creaking old house has other plans.

Beneath a warped floorboard, she discovers a letter.

Written decades ago by a woman named Elise, the message unravels a forgotten love story between two women—one that was silenced, hidden, and never resolved. Drawn deeper into the mystery, Rae begins uncovering secrets Elise took to her grave… and uncovers echoes of her own.

At the heart of it all is Camille: the fiercely gentle, storm-eyed artist living next door. Rae doesn’t want to fall for her—but Camille is patient, kind, and maddeningly persistent. As the two grow closer, past trauma rises like a tide, threatening to drown the fragile trust Rae is learning to rebuild.

But someone is watching. The more Rae uncovers, the more dangerous things become. And the more she realizes—Elise never left. And maybe… she never meant to.

We get another medieval romance with lots of danger and angst in House of Ash and Honor by W.S. Banks.

When duty demands sacrifice, love demands everything.

Lady Avilene Northcliff has always been the perfect noble daughter—until her family arranges her marriage to the cold and calculating Lord Westmark. Desperate to escape a loveless union, she flees to the one place no one would think to look: the estate of her family's sworn enemies.

Lady Elara Blackwood should turn away the Northcliff daughter seeking sanctuary. Their houses have been locked in bitter feud for twenty-five years, built on lies, betrayal, and bloodshed. Instead, she offers shelter to the woman who ignites feelings she never knew existed.

As forbidden attraction blooms between them, both women discover that the enmity dividing their families rests on a devastating deception. When explosive family secrets surface, Avilene and Elara must choose between the safety of silence and a love that could cost them everything.

In a world where women's hearts belong to others, two enemies will risk everything to claim their own destiny.

The July books are mostly 20th century settings, or close enough. And as usual, the rhythms of pre-publication publicity mean that they’re almost all from major publishers.

Lavender & Gin by Abigail Aaronson leans in to the current fashion for Prohibition stories.

Taking on her brother’s identity has given Kasia almost everything she wants: money, power, a gang to call her own in Prohibition-era Detroit. Until a new police chief threatens to destroy everything she’s worked for, and a beautiful woman tempts her to expose her secret.

After a decade disguised as her missing twin brother, Kasia leads a gang running liquor for the most powerful mob in the city. The ruse gave her a foot in the door, but in order to keep her position—and more importantly, to keep money flowing in for her and her sick mother—she has to be willing to do whatever it takes. And what it takes is cold calculation and a ruthless hand. She needs both in spades when a new police chief is determined to eliminate Detroit’s mafia, a threat to destroy everything she’s built.

When Kasia learns Sophia—a glamorous flapper who owns an underground queer club—has an unusual hold on the supposedly-incorruptible chief, Kasia wants in on Sophia’s secret. Blackmailing Chief Harding could protect her gang and give her a leg up in the mob’s ranks. But her plan unravels when she falls for Sophia’s fiery spirit and sophisticated charm. After years of avoiding relationships to protect her identity, her feelings for Sophia lead Kasia to take bigger risks than ever. Risks that endanger her gang, her secret, and her life.

Emma-Claire Sunday follows up on last year’s Regency romance The Duke’s Sister and I with another Regency, The Fortune Hunter's Guide to Love once more from Harlequin Historical.

How can Lady Sylvia save herself from financial ruin?

Step 1: Move to the seaside for the summer, where there will be no shortage of wealthy bachelors holidaying.

Step 2: Strike a deal with local farmer Hannah. If Hannah can help Sylvia bag a rich husband, Sylvia will fund Hannah’s dream of opening a cheese shop.

Step 3: Charm their way into luncheons, parties and exclusive balls, but do not start to confuse friendship with romantic feelings for Hannah.

Step 4: Focus on her fortune-hunting scheme and do not let her heart get carried away by her unexpected and magical kiss with Hannah!

With a title like The Rebel Girls of Rome by Jordyn Taylor from Harper Collins, one might guess we were looking at a classical setting, but this one is a dual-timeline story set during World War II and the contemporary era.

Now:

Grieving the loss of her mother, college student Lilah is hoping to reconnect with a grandfather who refuses to talk about his past. Then she receives a mysterious letter from a fellow student, Tommaso, claiming he’s found a lost family heirloom, and her world is upended.

Soon Lilah finds herself in Rome, trying to unlock her grandfather’s history as a Holocaust survivor once and for all. But as she and Tommaso get closer to the truth—and their relationship begins to deepen into something sweeter—Lilah realizes that some secrets may be too painful to unbury…

Then:

It’s 1943, and nineteen-year-old Bruna and her family are doing their best to survive in Rome’s Jewish quarter under Nazi occupation. Until the dreaded knock comes early one morning, and Bruna is irrevocably separated from the rest of her family.

Overcome with guilt at escaping her family’s fate in the camps, she joins the underground rebellion. When her missions bring her back to her childhood crush, Elsa, Bruna must decide how much she’s willing to risk—when fully embracing herself is her greatest act of resistance.

Another story using that popular motif of dual timelines via historic research is The Secrets of Harbour House by Liz Fenwick from Harper Collins.

When Kerensa is sent by her father’s auction house to catalogue a neglected house overlooking the sea in Newlyn, Cornwall, it’s a welcome escape. Once the home of two female artists, Harbour House is a treasure trove, but one painting in particular catches Kerensa’s eye – a hypnotically sensual portrait of a beautiful young woman which dominates the hallway.

Captivated and intrigued, Kerensa finds herself piecing together the enigma of Bathsheba Kernow, a fiercely talented young artist who left St Ives almost a hundred years before, eager to escape a society that wouldn’t understand her, and her sweeping journey from the underbelly of Paris to the heady luxury of Venice, where a chance encounter would change her life for ever, drawing her into the most dangerous and forbidden of love affairs.

For Kerensa, still reeling with a grief of her own and facing an uncertain future in love, Harbour House will have secrets that will change her life too, and in ways she could never have imagined…

It’s fairly rare to find sapphic stories set in non-Western cultures written from within those cultures but there have been several in the past year. This month’s candidate is Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath by Moon Heeyang, set in Korea, although I’m not quite sure of the date as the reference is to a dynasty that lasted for five centuries.

In a world where lineage rules and silence is survival, two women in a noble Joseon household discover a forbidden love that defies rank, custom, and time.

Soona, a humble maid, and Lady Hyeon, the daughter of the house, share stolen glances in the steam of the bathhouse. What begins as duty unfolds into desire, and soon into a secret bond.

But when their love is seen—by the Lord himself—everything changes. A proposition is made. A second wife is named.

And both women find themselves pregnant.

Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath is a lyrical, emotional, and unflinching tale of queer motherhood, silent rebellion, and love that grows like magnolia in the cracks of stone.

The Original by Nell Stevens from W.W. Norton & Company has a twisty plot that looks like it has a lot of layers.

In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.

An unwanted guest of her uncle’s family since childhood, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household. She has unusual predilections: for painting, particularly forgery; for deception; for other girls. Her life is altered when a letter arrives from the South Atlantic. The writer claims to be her cousin Charles, long presumed dead at sea. When he returns, a rift emerges between family members who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. Grace, whose intimate knowledge of fakes is her own closely guarded secret, is forced to decide who to believe and who to pretend to believe. In deciphering the truth about her cousin, she comes to understand other truths: how money is found and lost, and who deserves to be rich; what family means to queer people; and the value of authenticity, in art and in love.

Skating the edge of my definition of historical fiction, we have Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs from William Morrow Paperbacks, where the lesbian is one of a large cast of characters.

In 1968 we meet six teens confined at the Good Shepherd—a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns—locked away merely for being gay, pregnant, or simply unruly.

Mairin— free-spirited daughter of Irish immigrants, committed to keep her safe from her stepfather.

Angela—denounced for her attraction to girls, sent to the nuns for reform, but instead found herself the victim of a predator.

Helen—the daughter of intellectuals detained in Communist China, she saw her “temporary” stay at the Good Shepherd stretch into years.

Odessa—caught up in a police dragnet over a racial incident, she found the physical and mental toughness to endure her sentence.

Denise—sentenced for brawling in a foster home, she dared to dream of a better life.

Janice—deeply insecure, she couldn’t decide where her loyalty lay—except when it came to her friend Kay, who would never outgrow her childlike dependency.

Sister Bernadette—rescued from a dreadful childhood, she owed her loyalty to the Sisters of Charity even as her conscience weighed on her.

Wayward Girls is a haunting but thrilling tale of hope, solidarity, and the enduring strength of young women who find the courage to break free and find redemption...and justice.

Finishing up this month’s books we have a mid-century rural English romance: Miss Veal and Miss Ham by Vikki Heywood from Muswell Press. This is another book where my impulse is to buy it, but the publisher makes that difficult, not because of my Amazon blockade this time, but because they only distribute ebooks through one particular obscure phone app. Ah well.

Public companions, private lovers.

It is 1951 and behind the counter of a modest post office in a leafy Buckinghamshire village Miss Dora Ham and Miss Beatrix Veal maintain their careful facade as respected local spinsters. But their true story is one of passion: suffragist activists who fell in love at a rally in the 1900s, danced in London's secret gay clubs between the wars, and comforted one another during the first night of the Blitz. Together they have built a life of quiet dignity and service in rural England. Now over the course of one pivotal day their carefully constructed world begins to fracture. Through Beatrix's wry perspective we witness the severe impact of post-war changes on their peaceful existence. Changes that will lead to heart-breaking decisions for Miss Veal and Miss Ham. At the heart of this intimate, moving and witty novel is a story of resilience, the dignity of love that cannot be spoken, and the challenges that come when the future no longer feels safe.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been reading this month, once I get past the complex logic of how I want to acquire and read books? I often have three novels going at a time: one in hard copy, one in ebook, and one in audiobook. The different formats help me keep the stories separate in my head, but that was a bit trickier than usual this time because Joanna Lowell’s A Rare Find (my audiobook) and Lindz McLeod’s The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet (my print book) are both Regency romances and overlapped so solidly in feel and reading period that I kept having to remind myself which story I was in. Not that the stories are that similar in plot or characters, but if I had it to do over I’ve have avoided overlapping them. A Rare Find has a lot of resonances with the author’s Victorian-era story A Shore Thing which you may have spotted if you listened to my interview with the author. In addition to interesting gender choices, they share a tendency to pack the story full of subplots. So if you like a lot going on, this could be your thing. The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet is a fairly standard “let’s pick a couple of characters from the Austen Cannon and make them sapphic.” McLeod’s Mary Bennet is quite different from the book’s character and gets a complex queer community supplied by the author’s imagination.

A sale on the Chirp audiobook platform let me to pick up a series starting with The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman about which I’ve heard good things from friends. Like magical school stories, there’s an entire subgenre of magical library stories, which should be solidly my jam. In retrospect, I did definitely enjoy the book, but somehow in the middle of it I kept forgetting that it was waiting for me. Not sure why, but it meant it took me over a month to finish.

Wanting something a bit more bite-sized, I browsed through my to-be-read bookcase (yes, I have an entire bookcase with lonely hard-copy books waiting for me to pet them) and picked up Servant Mage by Kate Elliott. This fantasy novella managed to pack in enough plot and action for an entire novel—maybe even for a trilogy. A masterpiece of telling you just enough about the world and setting that you can fill in large spaces on your own.

Author Guest

One of the things I’ve wanted to work harder on in my theoretically greater free time is doing more interviews. I’ve made a good start this year, but from the other dropped balls you might guess that I don’t have one in this show. I do have several interesting people lined up for later this year—not all of them authors—and I’m always interested in doing companion interviews for new releases. In the last couple years, that means most of them have been for books from major publishers, because those are the books I know about enough in advance to set up the interview. I’d love to work with more small press and indie authors, but you have to let me know that you’re going to have books coming out!

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• TV series: The Buccaneers
• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Faderman, Lillian. 1978. “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3: 309-332
  • Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “’The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286
  • Manion, Jen. “The Queer History of Passing as a Man in Early Pennsylvania” in Pennsylvania Legacies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 6–11.
  • Vaughan, Alden. 1978. “The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86: 146-48.
  • Oaks, Robert F. 1978. “"Things Fearful to Name": Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England” in Journal of Social History, Vol. 12, No. 2: 268-281
  • Wood, Mary E. 1993. “’With Ready Eye’: Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” in American Literature 65: 3-4.
  • Comment, Kristin M. 2005. “Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic” in Early American Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 57–78.
  • Freedman, Estelle B. 1982. “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics” in Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects: 196-215
  • LaFleur, Greta. “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America.” Early American Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2014, pp. 469–99.
  • Cleves, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-933542-8
  • Martin, Sylvia. 1994. “'These Walls of Flesh': The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 20, No. 2, Lesbian Histories: 243-266
  • VanHaitsma, Pamela. 2019. “Stories of Straightening Up: Reading Femmes in the Archives of Romantic Friendship” in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol. 6, No. 3:1-24
  • Cleves, Rachel Hope. “Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man? The Life of Frank Shimer (1826-1901).” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 32–62.
  • Faderman, Lillian. 1979. “Who Hid Lesbian History?” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Autumn 1979, Vol. 4, No 3. 74-76.
  • Garber, Linda. 2015. “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction” in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(1), 129-49.
  • Braunschneider, Theresa. 2004. “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45, no. 3: 211-29
• Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
  • The Housekeeper's Ledger by Allison Ingram
  • A Truthful Companion By My Side by Claudia Haase
  • Secrets at the Ambrose Café by Carryl Church
  • Salt in the Silk by Delly M. Elrose
  • A Bounty of Bitterwort (Lavender and Foxglove #2) by Hilary Rose Berwick
  • A Rondel of Rosemary (Lavender and Foxglove #3) by Hilary Rose Berwick
  • A League of Lavender (Lavender and Foxglove #4) by Hilary Rose Berwick
  • In Her Own Shoes (The Ferrier Chronicles #1) by Mark Prime
  • The Letters Beneath Her Floorboards by Mira Ashwyn
  • House of Ash and Honor by W.S. Banks
  • Lavender & Gin by Abigail Aaronson
  • The Fortune Hunter's Guide to Love by Emma-Claire Sunday
  • The Rebel Girls of Rome by Jordyn Taylor
  • The Secrets of Harbour House by Liz Fenwick
  • Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath by Moon Heeyang
  • The Original by Nell Stevens
  • Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs
  • Miss Veal and Miss Ham by Vikki Heywood
• What I’ve been consuming
  • A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell
  • The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Lindz McLeod
  • The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
  • Servant Mage by Kate Elliott

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

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

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
• Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

After the flurry of postings in the last month, I'm taking a brief break for the holiday weekend. In fact, the "On the Shelf" podcast episode will be delayed probably until Tuesday, since I'm not going to try to record it in a hotel room. (I'm currently at BayCon/Westercon.) If you're at the con, make sure to find me and say hi.

This is just a placeholder for a cross-reference. Go about your business.

There's an entire genre of articles on the theme "why is it so hard to find historic evidence for female same-sex relations?" It covers everything from the types of erasures and displacements that Faderman talks about in this article, to the deliberate and selective exclusion of f/f vocabulary from the Oxford English DIctionary (which continues the process of erasure to this day, as people relying on it to be complete and detailed). Time after time you get slapped in the face with the understanding that f/f relations were erased because people considered them shameful and embarrassing. Not even necessarily the people engaged in them! But their biographers, their descendents (who controled their legacy), and most historians up through the late 20th century. If a woman was considered otherwise admirable and praiseworthy, it was important to make sure that nothing "stained" that. And, of course, we can't ignore the contribution of general misogyny, because as we all know a woman must be perfect and of unstained reputation to avoid getting torn down for daring to be a woman in public. But one of the things that Faderman's work points out, is that much of the overt erasure is specifically a product of the post-sexological world.

This is an error that creeps into a great deal of sapphic historical fiction: characters are concerned about aspects of their relationships that actual people of the period would not have blinked at. Sharing a bed? No biggie. Kissing, embracing, and holding hands in public? Utterly normal. Writing love poetry and effusive declarations of affection? But of course! And yet so many current sapphic historicals have characters freaking out over things that their historic counterparts would have taken for granted as, not simply acceptable, but expected behavior. A romance novel requires conflict and roadblocks, but they should be ones that are true to the era, not ones borrowed from the 20th century.

I like setting myself little challenges for the Project to keep up my momentum and to avoid the sense that it's become an endless march from one random publication to the next. Thus, I alternate between thematic groupings and simply working my way through what's left in a folder or on a shelf. Doing an "every day" push for Pride Month helps kick-start me out of a period of distraction where other projects take priority. At this point, I have enough written up to continue posting every day into mid-July. And given what I know of my work habits, I'll probably do just that , though I'll probably slow down a little once I get caught up.

As you might notice from some of the briefer summaries I'm posting currently, in going for a somewhat content-neutral completeness goal, I'm now finding myself encountering a fair number of articles that are preliminary versions of material I've covered in book form, or articles that are more "popular" presentations of material where I've already covered the scholarly version. The Project, of course, has multiple functions. Foremost is the incentive for me to read and digest the information. Secondly is the purpose of presenting a summary for a non-academic audience. But one additional purpose is to give readers a chance to figure out whether they want to track down the original publications to do a deeper dive on their own. And for that purpose, summarizing an article as "this ended up being chapter 3 in book X" or "this material is covered in much greater detail in article Y" or "this is badly outdated and you might want to read Z instead" might help someone else map out their own research more efficiently.

Besides which, with over a thousand titles in my database, I can't always remember what I've already read and blogged! So including everything with any potential relevance that I've looked at means I don't find myself duplicating work on items that I concluded--at some point--weren't all that interesting. One step in working on each entry is reviewing the notes and references to find new publications to add to the database. I regularly find myself thinking, "Oh yeah, that's going to be interesting! Oh...wait...not only is it already on the list, but I've already read it!"

In the group of articles I've been reading lately, there are two interesting meta-topics: scholars talking about the process of research and their relationship to their subjects, and philosophical questions about the nature of "romantic friendship." I have some thoughts on the latter, which I'll put in the comments that display with the entry itself.

This finishes up Cleves' book on Charity and Sylvia. As I noted in a previous blog, the entry numbers are going to be a bit jumbled for a while, both because I'd accidentally skipped a run of numbers and because I've already assigned a number to a book that's taking some time to write up, for logistical reasons. In the mean time, I have a bunch of short articles ready to go, which will take me through the end of Pride Month, after which I won't hold myself to the "post every day" schedule. It's been a fun challenge, but I have other projects that need to move forward as well!

One "fun" project has been an in-depth statistical study of what people have nominated over the years for the Best Related Work Hugo in all of its several forms. The results show some interesting dynamic interactions between categories as people try to find places to nominate works that don't quite fit, or as types of works shift from category to category as they are reorganized and expanded. Having done some initial work on the history of the category--as well as pulling the basic nomination data--I'm now slogging through the process of looking up each nominee and coding it for format (initially, always "book", but more recently rather variable), genre (e.g., biography, reference, criticism, humor), and specific topic. I've been pointed to some previous surveys of the category that tended to focus on the winners (or at most the finalists), but I think I'll be adding something new to the field.

When constructing fictional narratives of the past, we often run into absolute statements along the lines of "women couldn't...," "women didn't...," "women always..." But when we look at the detailed truths of history, we usually find a lot of "women couldn't unless they..." and "women didn't typically..." and "women always...except when..." Once we get past the falsity of absolute statements, we need to get past a blythe assumption of exceptionalness, fighting our way to a nuanced particularity of the circumstances in which some women could, did, and didn't--with an understanding of the costs and tradeoffs and consequences.

Historical fiction usually centers around people who are atypical in some fashion--perhaps even extraordinary. And historical romance has conventions that often stretch the bounds of plausibility. (Young, handsome, unmarried dukes with no venereal discase anyone?) So when we're designing our historical sapphists, how obligated are we to make our characters more plausible than the standards straight characters are held to? That's a question that haunts me both as an author and as a reader, and in the end it's a question that each author grapples with on their own.

What are the historic structures that can be bent with little consequence for reader reception? Which are the ones that will start to throw readers out of the story? How many readers? To what degree? Where is the line between historical fiction and historic fantasy--not the historic fantasy of overt elements like magic and dragons, but the historic fantasy that has become unmoored from the details of ordinary existence that should have context and consequence?

Which readers will notice that unmooring, and how much will they care? Will they care if an early 19th century widow acts oblivious to the expectations for her state? Will they care if a woman engages in a profession that would have been hedged about with restrictions and handicaps because of her sex...but encounters none of those? Will they care if a woman carries a noble title that there was no legal way for her to hold in the stated time and place? Will they care if a character has an anachronistic worldview regarding sexuality? And which of these are essential to the story the author wants to tell as opposed to being dismissed as simply not being important enough to reflect?

Actual people in history often surprise us--as when Charity and Sylvia are able to become accepted and cherished by their community as a recognized couple. But it is the details of their path to that acceptance that make their story plausible. Charity's early missteps that showed her which hazards she needed to avoid. Sylvia's diplomatic negotiations to maintain family ties. The particularities of small-town New England life that allowed for possibilities of a specific shape and nature, but would not have allowed for others. (For example, it's unlikely that they would have received the same acceptance if Charity wore male clothing and took up a specifically male-coded profession. Either of those in isolation, perhaps, but probably not in the context of being part of a recognized female couple. For that, they would probably have needed to relocate to a community where she could pass entirely--as some such couples did.)

For myself as a reader, there are some historical infelicities that will move a book from "historical fiction" to "historic fantasy" in a way that the author may not have intended. And if my brain was set for the expectation of history, it may be the difference between whether I enjoy the reading experience. (There have been books where I could only enjoy the story by flipping that switch in my brain.) As an author, I enjoy the challenge of writing stories that both follow history and provide a desired HEA, within the constraints of the times. It's the same way that I enjoy the challenge of writing strict meter poetry--the point isn't simply slavishly following a particular scheme of rhyme and meter, but of doing that and creating a work of beauty and emotional catharsis. And, as always, the goal of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project isn't to say "you must write this specific type of story with this specific level of historic accuracy" but to provide tools to know that whatever choices you make are informed ones.