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Monday, November 10, 2025 - 14:00
This post launches a mini-grouping of articles on theatrical cross-dressing, whether at public masquerades or on stage. While reading this article I kept thinking about the use of masquerades as a dangerous liminal space in the historic romances of Georgette Heyer. Her examples sometimes post-date the masquerade era identified in this article and align solidly with the cautionary fiction of the 18th century that saw them as Not The Thing. But for a story solidly set in the early/mid 18th century, it's easy to see the possibilities of a masquerade setting for sapphic encounters.
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Castle, T. 1983-4. “Eros and Liberty at the English Masquerade, 1710-90” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, XVII, 2: 156-76.
This article looks at the culture of public masquerade entertainments in 18th century England (primarily London), especially in how they promoted and supported an atmosphere of sexual liberty. This reputation of masquerades is solidly documented in social commentary and fiction of the time, such as the works of Pope, Hogarth, Fielding, and others.
Public masquerades were open to anyone who paid the entrance fee and thus were attended by people of a wide variety of social classes. This, combined with the effects of costume and masks to conceal the identity (including concealing the gender) of the attendees made them an ideal setting for assignations, casual hook-ups, and comedies of errors. Popular costumes included historic dress, “exotic” foreign costume, especially Turkish outfits, religious costumes, outfits depicting various working-class occupations, and theatrical characters such as Harlequin. In addition to dancing, gaming, and social mingling, they offered food and drink. They were typically held at night, in an elaborately decorated space, and lasted until morning.
Masquerades were the targets of moralistic pamphlets, as well as the cautionary writings of advice manuals and popular fiction. Like many “vices” they were attacked as being a foreign import, echoing the famous carnivals of Mediterranean regions. Both their threat and their appeal derived from a sort of “institutionalized disorder” in which social norms and barriers were cast aside and social hierarchies of class and gender could be inverted.
Within the sexual realm, masquerades offered the opportunity not only for cross-dressing, but for engaging in non-normative liaisons under the fiction displayed by the costumes. At the same time, the theatrical and performative nature of the events provided cover and excuse for sexual liberties. Anti-masquerade literature hinted obliquely at the presence of (male) homosexual encounters, alongside heterosexual liaisons.
Public masquerades were inspired by several roots—Continental carnival traditions, as well as local English festival traditions. [Note: The article doesn’t directly discuss the tradition of court masques as an inspiration for the use of character costumes, but I have to think it was another strand.] They became popular in the 1710s, initially sponsored in private venues by socially prominent figures, but then as more commercial productions in public venues also used for dramatic performance. In the 1720s and 1730s, the weekly masquerades held at the Haymarket had attendance between 700-1000 people.
There was a brief dip in the fashion in mid-century, then a return to popularity in the 1760s and 1770s. In addition to the regular ticketed masquerades, even larger outdoor events were sometimes held for special occasions. After the 1780s, the popularity of masquerades began to wane with a general shift to social conservatism in the wake of the French Revolution, although occasional ones were held during the Regency era. But by the early 19th century, the public masked assembly had functionally disappeared as an institution. (Though private masked/costumed events continued to be part of English society.)
For women, the masquerade offered both opportunity and danger. Anonymity and the conventions of the event gave women the freedom to mingle and to initiate interactions with strangers. This freedom was also available regardless of rank, and anti-masquerade literature railed against the social leveling as well as the licentiousness. The crowds could also include thieves, card sharps, highwaymen, and sex workers, all taking advantage of both the anonymity and distracted targets. But in particular, women had a freedom unavailable in their ordinary lives to attend as free agents, without chaperones or concern for their reputations as long as they remained masked. (Though conversely, a woman known to attend masquerades was assumed to have damaged her reputation, regardless of her actual actions.) This was a key factor in criticism of masquerades. In an era when “good” women were expected not to make a spectacle of themselves, masquerades were all about becoming part of the spectacle. Masquerade costumes could be extremely revealing (for both women and men). And both women and men regularly took on cross-gender costumes.
The hazards were just as real as the benefits. Aside from the usual hazards of unsanctioned sexual liaisons for women, masquerade anonymity (and the assumption that you knew what you were getting into) offered little redress in cases of sexual assault or abduction, or even simply the consequences of mistaken identity.
The article discusses references to homosexual encounters at masquerades, but if one can read through the euphemistic language, the concern was for male homosexuality (this was also the era in which “molly clubs” emerged, also featuring cross-dressing). Concerns about cross-dressing women are generally framed as being about rebellion against “women’s place,” although Henry Fielding’s anti-masquerade writings can also be linked to his work The Female Husband, in which female cross-dressing leads to sex between women.
The article speculates on the extent to which the experience of cross-gender exploration at masquerades might have contributed to the feminist movement of the later 18th century, as well as to what extent reactions against masquerade licentiousness provoked the reactionary turn to repressive gender roles in the 19th century.
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Thursday, November 6, 2025 - 08:00
As I mentioned in the intro to the previous post, trying to interpolate the historic realities of f/f desire in the classical era is extremely difficult. Ovid's Iphis and Ianthe is multiply distanced from the internal reality of his characters. He is a man discussing f/f desire (in a context where men were not culturally expected to have any interest in the interiority of female desire), he sets his characters in a mythic past, and he places them in a Greek setting while he himself was a product of Imperial Rome. All of this might lead us to discount the opinions and positions taken by his characters in relation to any actual historic culture (his or his characters'). And yet, even though the overt theme of the work is "f/f love is impossible," the story if full of evidence contradicting that claim. Perhaps we should instead read the moral of the story as "f/f love is not officially recognized by society," in which case it might have something useful to tell us.
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Walker, J. 2006. “Before the Name: Ovid’s Deformulated Lesbianism” in Comparative Literature 58.3, pp.205-222.
The basic theme of this article is how, even as the overt message of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe denies the possibility or imaginability of female same-sex love, the way in which it does so creates and reinforces that possibility in the audience’s reception. The article starts with a detailed synopsis (for which you could see my podcast on the topic). Then there is a review of studies of Roman attitudes towards female same-sex erotics that consistently try to displace it from contemporary reality. (See, e.g., Hallett 1997)
The article then moves on to presenting the argument that Ovid “formulates the thought of the possibility of lesbianism” even as the text continually proclaims its impossibility. But the textual claim of “impossibility” is not a simple reflection of the author’s position (or that of his society) but rather attempts to dictate what counts as culturally legible by claiming ignorance of the very thing that is being described. The general topic here is how to examine “active ignorance” in historic texts. Walker cautions that the standard “magical sex-change” ending of this genre of story shouldn’t be given too much weight in terms of what the audience could envision, as it is dictated by social rules about what type of outcome is recognizable. [Note: compare to how lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s were required to have a “tragic” ending, regardless of how that diverged from the lived experience of their lesbian readership.]
Overall, this article is very theory-heavy, but has some interesting things to say about the interplay of “natural” versus “cultural” rules within Iphis’s internal debate. There is also a discussion of the ways in which f/f desire had no structural place within Roman sexual hierarchies and rules, except to the extent that one member of the could “become male” either physically or behaviorally. At the same time, the text undermines the notion of how gender is determined, by emphasizing the initial similarity between Iphis and Ianthe (despite Iphis being read as male by those around her), but then noting how the “magical sex-change” is not simply the attachment of a penis, but the appearance of a whole menu of masculine attributes and behaviors, whose previous absence somehow failed to raise suspicion about Iphis’s pre-metamorphosis status. Furthermore, the story focuses intensely on female-female bonds and relationships (Iphis and her mother, both of them and the goddess Isis, Iphis and Ianthe) and the depiction, discussion, and experience of love and desire between Iphis and Ianthe is entirely restricted to the time when Iphis is physically female, with only the marriage and consummation briefly presented after the transformation. Thus the content of the tale argues continuously in contradiction to the official message of impossibility.
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Monday, November 3, 2025 - 08:00
Trying to get at the possible experiences of female homoeroticism in Classical Rome requires a lot of interpolation from data that doesn't address that specific conjunction of identities. Here's one interesting angle.
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Levin-Richardson, Sarah. 2013. “Fututa Sum Hic: Female Subjectivity and Agency in Pompeian Sexual Graffiti” in The Classical Journal, 1083. pp.319-45.
Research into sexuality in classical Rome often gives the impression that the attitudes of elite men that are our primary source material represent universal cultural attitudes. And while it’s true that there is a tendency for the opinions of culturally powerful demographics to influence how the less powerful view themselves, I have to wonder whether it’s worth challenging that understanding. Just because the elite men who wrote about sexual hierarchies (for example) are over-represented in the available source material, does that make it reasonable to believe (or presume) that their opinions were universal? This is particularly frustrating in the context of women, and especially hypothetical women who loved women.
The Roman sexual system placed women, especially unfree women, at the bottom of the sexual hierarchy—people whose agency and right to sexual pleasure was considered to be non-existent. People whom the very structure of the language categorized as passive and inferior. But did women believe that or simply accept that it was a system they were subject to? Similarly, did women who loved women in classical Rome have the same beliefs and understandings of themselves as how elite men portrayed them? Or are we dealing with the equivalent of false social stereotypes that bear no relation to people’s actual lives.
One can ask even more detailed questions. Did women have the same negative attitude toward cunnilingus that men did? The elite male attitude toward oral sex was that it degraded and defiled the person performing it. But for those who were expected to perform oral sex as part of the sexual hierarchy, did they find it more degrading than any other sexual technique that they were expected to accept? And would a woman—as the recipient of pleasure from cunnilingus—have the same negative attitude toward the act (regardless of her partner’s gender) that an elite man would (for whom there are two disjunctions from the sexual hierarch, in that his penis is not involved and his pleasure is not assumed).
We can do little more than speculate, but even asking the questions is a useful challenge. This article doesn’t touch at all on potential female same-sex scenarios, however it does address women experiencing sexual agency.
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This article considers the question of if and how Roman women used the writing and reading of sexual graffiti to claim sexual agency within a culture that officially denied them such agency. There are many complications to trying to assess this topic. There isn’t always direct evidence for the gender of the person who wrote a particular text, and never direct evidence for who was reading it. But Levin-Richardson sets up a plausible basis for making conjectures. The article works through three main topics: evidence for women’s literacy, an analysis of sexual graffiti plausibly written by women, and speculation (the author’s term) on how women might experience a type of sexual agency by reading sexual graffiti that defamed men.
Evidence for literate women among the elite is plentiful, whether taught by private tutors or sometimes schooled together with their brothers. Education for daughters could be seen as a status marker. Education was sometimes noted as an accomplishment on funerary inscriptions, not only for the elite but across social classes. Portraits of women sometimes depict them with writing implements. Business women required literacy for record keeping and correspondence, while women working as secretaries or bookkeepers necessarily were literate. Women are depicted as literate in fictional texts and even the depiction of sex workers as literate, e.g., in Lucian, does not appear to be intended as unbelievable. Not only do we have evidence of elite women composing poetry and writing letters, but artifacts such as the Vindolanda tablets show women of relatively low status writing their own correspondence, or in some cases adding a personal postscript to the work of a professional scribe.
Graffiti was unlikely to have been written by a professional, therefore texts that are written from a female perspective (identifying the author with a female name, or using grammatically feminine descriptions) can reasonably be assumed to have been written by a woman. (Note, of course, that a great deal of graffiti had no overt gender markers, but has traditionally been assumed to have been written by men unless there is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.)
Levin-Richardson uses the following criteria to evaluate probably female authorship of graffiti. A first-person statement combined with a feminine adjective or title. Given that graffiti often represents the author in the third person [note: think “Kilroy was here”] a third-person statement combined with a feminine subject strongly suggests a female author. Texts in groups where multiple texts address other women, but no texts address men, is strongly suggestive of women writing to each other (sometimes as simply as “Hi so-and-so”).
As the sexual graffiti under consideration is from Pompeii, it’s also worth noting that Pompeii had a strong culture of literacy among all classes, to varying degrees, therefore estimates of literacy rates elsewhere in the empire may underestimate the Pompeiian situation. All this taken together supports the conclusion that female authorship of graffiti is not simply plausible but probable.
This brings the article to specific examples of sexual graffiti. The article’s title is a clear example “fututa sum hic,” with its first-person statement “I was fucked here” and a grammatically feminine form of the participle. Not all of the examples have the same level of proof of authorship, but Levin-Richardson, having established that women of all classes could be literate, and that at least some sexual graffiti was written by a woman, looks for examples of sexual graffiti that provide a strong case for female authorship.
One type of evidence is the grammar of sexual acts, in which men normally appear as the agents of “insertive” verbs while women (and low-status men) appear as the recipients. [Note: Most identifiable sex acts in Latin vocabulary occur in matched pairs, one focusing on the insertive partner, one on the recipient. Thus, not only can the “active-passive” dichotomy in Roman sex be indicated by grammatically active versus passive verb forms, but also by word choice where the “recipient” of a hierarchical sex act can also be the agent of the active form of a verb for being the recipient of that act.] However being the subject/recipient of a penetrative sex act was treated as degrading even if it was part of normative sexual practice. I.e., women were degraded by being fucked even as they were expected to consider it the normal state of affairs.
This is all background to examining the grammar of sex in graffiti. Our first example is “Fortunata fellat” (Fortunata [a female name] sucks [dick]). [Note: Levin-Richardson makes creative use of sexual slang as well as of deliberate spelling “errors” to represent the emotional impact and literacy competence of individual inscriptions.] The graffiti examples for this article were identified by searching for forms of the verbs futuere (fuck), fellare (suck-dick), pedicare (ass-fuck), irrumare (mouth-fuck, i.e., the active mirror to fellare), and the most common nouns for the male and female genitals and the anus. A significant subset of the likely-female-authored graffiti involve forms of fellare, making the woman the grammatically active subject, despite being “sexually passive.” In contrast, there are no graffiti examples in the data assigning a woman the grammatically-passive and sexually-passive role of irrumare. Versions like Fortunata’s are common, either alone or sometimes including a price (thus likely being a form of business advertising). Other graffiti use a (feminine) agentive noun “fellatrix” again highlighting the agency of the female participants. Levin-Richardson suggests that this was a way of “fashioning identity” as a professional specialist.
A somewhat less logical use of an agentive noun is an inscription identifying a named woman as “fututrix.” This construction appears both in private houses and brothels. A straightforward literal reading would be “woman who is the active and insertive partner in penetrative sex” however the suggestion in this article is that it was claiming a role as a willing and eager participant in the act, rather than claiming a penetrative role. [Note: Levin-Richardson along with a co-author have a much more detailed discussion of this conundrum in Kamen & Levin-Richardson 2015.]
In the last (and most speculative) section of the article, the author discusses the motivations and experience of women reading aloud from graffiti that sexually denigrates men, identifying them as “fellator” (cock-sucker), or as performing cunnilingus. In cases where the inscription doesn’t contain a specific name, reading off the inscription could be experienced as accusing any random man in the vicinity of the act. In the case of the cunnilingus inscriptions, this experience could be compounded by the female reader positioning herself as the socially dominant recipient of pleasure. A handful of inscriptions parallel the fellatio + price format, stating that a named man performs cunnilingus for a stated price. As with the fututrix example, this offers a perplexing question of whether there were actual male sex workers selling their oral services to female clients, or whether the inscription is simply meant as the worst insult someone could think of.
Similarly, it is suggested that women could “try on” sexual agency vis-à-vis men by reading graffiti where the author is represented as the sexual agent of a socially degrading penetration of a man (in the mouth or anus).
Women’s interactions with sexual graffiti create a tension between claiming sexual agency and supporting a social system that considered normative female roles in sex to be inherently degrading.
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Saturday, November 1, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 327 - On the Shelf for November 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/11/01)
Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2025.
Is everyone enjoying the season of spooky stories and pumpkin-spice lattes? We’ll have a seasonal story later this month as the fourth quarter fiction episode, but first I’ll be setting up some background in the mid-month episode. Back when I was doing an episode every week—and how I managed that I no longer remember—I’d occasionally reprise a previous episode to give myself a little break. It’s been about five years since I did a reprise and this time it isn’t for lack of content but to provide context for the fiction. Our story will be an alternate view of Christina Rossetti’s classic poem “The Goblin Market”—a view that addresses the shadows of prejudice and anti-Semitism that haunt the poem’s imagery. Maya Dworsky-Rocha’s story “Ma’am This is a Fruit Stand” rather assumes that the audience is familiar with Rossetti’s work, so to create the optimal context for its reception, I decided to repeat the Goblin Market episode before airing it.
This month’s story won’t be the last I have on tap—I have a pair of shorter works already lined up to air in January. But January is also when submissions will be open for next year’s fiction series. I’m always delighted by the quality of work I have to choose from, but I’m also always deeply anxious when the majority of submitters wait until the last few days of the month to send their work in. There’s no absolute benefit to submitting earlier or later, but you’ll make this podcast host much happier if I’m not spending most of the month freaking out that I won’t get enough submissions. So spread the word, read the submissions guidelines (linked in the show notes), and get those stories in as early in January as you can so I can relax!
News of the Field
If you follow the podcast through my blog, I’m working on a minor update to the site. Podbean, my podcast host, provides a player widget for each episode, which I’ve been noting down but not using because I couldn’t just plug them into the existing blog structure. Well, after a very productive work session with my web consultants, I now have a field for entering the player widget. So going forward, you can play the episode directly from the blog with the transcript. It’ll take me a while to go back and add the widgets to the back catalog—all 325 episodes!
Another thing we started working on for the website is more on my authorial side and will take a while to set up, but I hope to have my own storefront eventually, to sell my self-published work as well as autographed copies of my other books. And who knows? Maybe someday there will be podcast merch. If I ever figure out what people might be interested in. What would you love to have in the way of Lesbian Historic Motif Project merchandise?
Speaking of books, I’ve been putting in some serious work on the book version of the Project, though there’s still a very long way to go. At the moment I’ve been working through the introductory material, talking about what the purpose of the book is, what the content will be, and setting out some background for understanding my approach to lesbian and sapphic history. It’ll probably be a couple years before I’ll have a finished draft, despite having a lot of existing text to work with already. You have to keep in mind that I’m also writing some novels at the same time.
Publications on the Blog
And, of course, even as I work to codify my research in fixed form, I continue to read and process research articles and books. I find it entirely too easy to spend all my time working on blogs for the Project and let my other projects languish, so I’m trying to restrict myself to only a couple of posts per week. That makes 8 articles since I last reported. I’ve been organizing my most recent haul of downloaded articles into thematic groups, and this month was all ancient Greece all the time.
There were two articles analyzing the ambiguous possible lesbian hints in Anacreon’s poem 13: Hayden Pelliccia’s “Ambiguity against Ambiguity: Anacreon 13 Again” and J.F. Davidson’s “Anacreon, Homer and the Young Woman from Lesbos.” Four articles add to the body of Sappho scholarship. I rather liked J.C.B. Petropoulos’s “Sappho the Sorceress: Another Look at fr. 1 (LP)” which compares one of the poems to the texts of love magic. In contrast, I hated George Deverux’s “The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 LP as Evidence of Her Inversion” which claims Sappho’s description of her physical responses to be proof of her internalized homophobia and deviance. Yeah. Two articles—André Lardinois’ “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho's Poetry” and Glenn W. Most’s “Reflecting Sappho” are more conventional studies of the content and reception of Sappho’s work. Sappho is presented as inspiration and touchstone in the work of another female poet in M.B. Skinner’s “Sapphic Nossis”. And finally Ruby Blondell and Sandra Boehringer analyze Lucian’s courtesan dialogue as a satire of philosophical discourse in “Revenge of the Hetairistria: The Reception of Plato’s Symposium in Lucian’s Fifth Dialogue of the Courtesans.”
Book Shopping!
I haven’t picked up any new books for the project, but I did acquire two lovely publications from the London Topographical Society that will be valuable for my Restoration-era series: The A to Z of Charles II’s London 1682 and The Whitehall Palace Plan of 1670. My fiction work has involved some intensive map work as I’ve sought out and studied maps of Marseille and Paris for the next Alpennia book. Given the rather drastic changes Paris went through in the early 19th century, I’m incredibly lucky to have a map and some tourist guidebooks dating to within a couple years of my setting. At this point I’ve mapped out all the most important locations in Paris for my story. Have I mentioned that a great deal of Mistress of Shadows will be taking place in Paris? It’s a bit terrifying to be working with an actual location rather than being able to make things up.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
One way or another, making things up is the most fun part of fiction, so here are the books that authors have made up for you in the past few months.
I have three September books that only just came to my attention. Kerri Reeves’ No Love for an Outlaw looks like it has a bit of a southern gothic feel.
1931, North Georgia.
Silvia Copeland just buried her mama. The mill is breaking her down, the town is choking her spirit, and there’s nothing left to hold her in Briarsville but grief and sawdust. When her oldest friends drag her into a backwoods bootlegging operation, she sees a chance to escape for money, danger, and the open road.
But the ridge has teeth. Bodies are turning up nailed to trees, gutted and marked with strange symbols. Black-eyed hounds stalk the woods. And something older than sin itself is stirring beneath the mountain.
Caught between loyalty to her makeshift family and a growing, complicated love for a woman who seems bound to the land itself, Silvia is forced to decide how far she’ll go and what she’s willing to sacrifice before the ridge takes everything.
It’s always a delight to reimagine traditional stories in sapphic versions—the “what ifs” of history. Velis Aenora transforms the traditional Korean love story of Chunhyang and Cheong into sapphic form in Twin Flames of Namwon.
In this bold reimagining of Korea’s most cherished folktales, Chunhyang, famed for her defiance of corrupt power, and Cheong, remembered for her selfless sacrifice, discover not only resilience—but each other.
Bound together as Twin Flames, they resist tyranny, confront the hunger of the serpent, and vow their love beneath the willow by the Namwon river. This is not the story of maidens waiting to be saved. This is the story of two women who burn against shadow, rewriting legend with the fire of their bond.
The repressive mid 20th century is the setting for Neon Nights by William Ellison.
In the smoky heart of 1950s Chinatown, where neon signs flicker with secrets and jazz pulses through hidden lounges, Ellie Chen navigates a world of forbidden love and perilous intrigue. Caught between family duty and her electrifying bond with Maggie, a daring rebel with a knack for forgery, Ellie defies a society that demands conformity. As corrupt agent Baxter tightens his grip, threatening raids and deportation, their romance blooms in stolen glances and heated caresses, each moment a rebellion against a world poised to crush them. From underground safehouses to chaotic dance floors, the community weaves a tapestry of resistance, laced with dark humor—slipping disguises, bumbling spies, and shattered heirlooms sparking laughter amid danger. Ellie uncovers family secrets tying her to wartime legacies, while betrayals from kin and allies unravel a conspiracy that could topple empires or tear her world apart. With every kiss a vow and every escape a gamble, Ellie and Maggie race through fog-lit alleys, their love a beacon in the neon night, promising futures uncertain but fiercely claimed.
Just as they slip into the mist, a cryptic note from a vanished ally surfaces, hinting at a final trap. Will their defiance outshine the shadows, or will Baxter’s vendetta claim them first?
The October releases are delightfully diverse in settings and content. First up is Raised for the Sword by Aimée, which I’m currently in the middle of reading. (I should add the disclaimer that the author was the translator for the French edition of my Daughter of Mystery so I may be a bit biased.)
France, 1560. The wars of Religion are tearing the kingdom apart. Being a Huguenot is more often than not a death sentence. Meanwhile, at court, nobles play and scheme. To that court comes Isaure de Montfaucon, sent by her father to become part of Catherine de Médicis’ entourage, and hopefully to find a husband.
Another father sends his child to the French court, but all is not as it seems. Enguerrande de Vaubernier has never worn a skirt and has been raised as a boy. As a Huguenot, and as a woman disguised, she could be executed at any time. A fateful duel puts an end to aspirations, and Enguerrande has to flee, but not without the young woman who has unwittingly stolen her heart, even though a future together seems impossible.
Isaure and Enguerrande travel through France to Navarre, looking for safety in a country where being different can cost you your life. When the mask falls, will everything change, or will they feel closer than ever?
I held over The Salvage by Anbara Salam from Tin House Books from last month’s listings because Anbara is our author guest this month. Check out the interview later in the podcast.
It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist, has been called to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, dragged from arctic waters, holds the remains of a celebrated explorer and the treasures of his final expedition. But on her first dive down to the ship, Marta becomes convinced she has seen a dark figure lurking amid the wreckage.
When the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deep chill of a record-breaking winter keeps Marta stranded on Cairnroch, she forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working in the island’s only hotel. When the ship's artefacts inexplicably disappear, Marta and Elsie have to brave the freezing conditions to search for the missing objects before anyone else catches on. As something eerie seems to follow her at every step, Marta must confront if the haunting is a figment of her imagination, the repercussions from a terrible mistake from her past, or if something more sinister is at play that will trap her and everyone on the island―and their secrets―in an icy wilderness.
I don’t usually include re-issues in these listings, but every rule has its exceptions. Dani Collins has a out-of-print collection of sort spicy historic romance stories entitled Lovers and Liaisons and has now issued them as individual titles. Only one of the stories is sapphic: A Lady for a Highwayman.
Robbing aristocrats at pistol-point is a last resort for Velvet. Her fortunes have fallen and she has no choice. She really shouldn’t have stolen a kiss when she stole a young woman’s locket, though. Especially because that young woman was resourceful enough to track her down!
Facing a marriage she doesn’t want, Annabelle finally experiences passion—in an unexpected kiss. She wants more, but meeting Velvet again--for a passionate encounter--is only half the battle. Annabelle is still expected to marry and Velvet will never survive being exposed as a thief.
Time is running out, what options do they have, beyond living the life of fugitives?
Ishtar Watson specializes in imagining queer lives in ancient history. In My Mother's Spear from Dark Elves LLC she tackles the cultural mixing in 2nd century Roman Britain.
Cynna is a Sarmatian horse archer with no hope or future, who fights for an empire she despises. Meala is a Caledonian warrior who carries her mother's spear and father's shield into battle to fight for her people, claim her warrior birthright, and escape her parents' will that she marry a man. These two brave women will meet upon the field of battle, where they will find themselves, each other, and learn who their true enemy is.
Set in what is now southern Scotland along the Antonine Wall, this story brings the ancient world of Iron Age Scotland alive through the eyes of two women fighting to find their places in the world while they struggled against the Roman steel and their own inner turmoil. Can they escape the might of Rome and their own traumatic pasts?
Phoenix is the 9th Intertwined Souls novel by Mary Dee from AUSXIP Publishing.
1958. Sydney, Australia. When Zoe becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign by Australia's revered decorated war hero turned radio host, she’s quickly plunged into a battle of public opinion to defend her art and wartime service. Recovering from a grueling surgery and with her 30th birthday fast approaching, Zoe fights to protect her integrity.
Meanwhile, Eva's company, Lambros Industries, is under siege. With their professional reputation on the line after a slew of government contracts mysteriously disappear or are outbid, Eva can’t escape the creeping suspicion that someone is targeting them. Their adversary has been playing the long game... to what end?
Combining the trends of gothic novels and roaring 20s, S.M. Namkoong gives us Ophelia.
After a brief stint in Italy working under a master painter, Lawrence Stoner returns to America craving inspiration. Drawn to the wild coast of Maine, she takes up residence in a seaside hut, hoping to secure a commission from one of the wealthy summer elites.
Shortly after putting out an ad, Lawrence receives an invitation to dine at Ashmore Hall. Despite the whispered warnings and ghost stories, Lawrence accepts and is immediately captivated by its enigmatic and beautiful mistress, Ophelia Aldane.
The number of dead continues to rise, but Lawrence finds herself hopelessly ensnared in Ophelia’s web of allure. As those closest to her begin to fall prey, Lawrence feels Death drawing nearer with every passing day. Lawrence must confront the darkness or risk being consumed as well.
Between Two Silences by Shanon O'Brien is set in 1943 Stockholm during the height of World War II.
Neutral Sweden is a cold, quiet sanctuary, but for war refugee Rivka Weiss, every silence holds a memory she can't escape. After fleeing unimaginable horrors—marked by the fading numbers on her forearm—she is placed in the care of a Swedish stranger. All Rivka wants is a place to stop moving.
Ingrid Björklund is a woman of rigorous order (Ice Lady!). Her world is meticulously measured by thick-cut bread slices, four clockwise coffee stirs, and a front door bolted out of discipline. When the guarded, silent Rivka arrives on her doorstep, Ingrid is forced to confront a life she has systematically kept simple. She sees the scar through Rivka's eyebrow and the pain in her eyes, yet she says nothing.
What begins as distance soon feels like a thread drawn taut, threatening to break the quiet order of Ingrid’s life and the protective shell around Rivka’s heart. From the deep cold of January to the bloom of May, their connection becomes a dangerous necessity.
World War II is also the setting for The Secret War (Hattie James #3) by Stacy Lynn Miller from Severn River Publishing.
In a factory hidden deep in the Brazilian jungle, the Germans are developing a long-range bomber capable of reaching the United States—a weapon that could tip the scales of World War II in their favor. With the clock ticking down to a sneak attack on American soil, singer-spy Hattie James’s mission becomes clear: she must gather intelligence and stop the Nazis before it’s too late.
But when a failed assassination attempt in Rio on the American Vice President puts her loved ones in jeopardy, Hattie realizes both developments are connected and that the price of failure is more than she can bear. With betrayal hiding around every corner, Hattie must confront the brutal reality of war as even those she once trusted—her fellow spies and closest allies—might have their own deadly agendas.
As alliances shift and enemies close in, she faces a desperate battle in the heart of the jungle—a fight to destroy the Nazi threat and save the lives of those she loves. The stakes are higher than ever, and Hattie must use all her wit, charm, and courage to survive.
The November books start with a rather intriguing alternate Regency novel in which the handsome dukes are women—or at least one of them is: The Duke by Anna Cowan from MacMillan.
Kate, Duke of Howard, is known throughout Europe as a merciless autocrat not to be crossed. Consumed by a bitter rivalry, she avoids society and has vowed never to trap a woman into marriage with a monster like herself.
The beautiful, ambitious courtesan Celine Genet once threw herself on the mercy of the visiting Duke of Howard. She was desperate to escape the guillotine. But after a night of searing passion, the duke left her to the ravages of Revolutionary Paris and didn’t look back. Now Celine is in London and in possession of a dangerous letter that proves the Duke of Howard committed treason as a child - and possibly even murder.
Celine wants a titled husband in return for keeping the duke’s secret, leaving Kate no choice but to parade her around the most fashionable ballrooms. But as Celine takes society by storm, Kate finds herself growing fond of the woman set on destroying her. And as their attraction mounts, Kate faces an impossible choice: keep her childhood secret, or win the woman she loves.
Genta Sebastian takes up the popular Western motif of gender-crossing as the context for a sapphic romance in My Darling Clementine (Clementine #1) from Macoii Publishing
Clem Dennison, 23, lives as a man among men, passing as a male prospector in California where she is a respected author writing popular articles about the gold rush and the colorful people of the wild west. After a disturbing visit back east, she makes plans to return to the gold fields, joining a late-season wagon train headed for Sacramento. On the long train ride from Boston, she notices a fascinating young lady.
Kizzy Walker, 18, escapes her life in dreary Rocheport as the minister’s scandalous daughter, and jumps on the next train leaving. She arrives in Independence, Missouri as a single woman, alone, her only plan to chase the gold fever driving her west. While considering her limited options, she sees Clem and recognizes her as a woman who is passing. Kizzy chases her into the dark night to confront her, making herself a target for ruthless men.
Clem rescues the inexperienced, beautiful, impulsive woman, and finds herself in a passionate embrace. Kizzy gives her a key to her hotel room and invites her to visit after everyone’s asleep. She takes that chance and meets a woman unlike any other. No one else has ever seen through Clem before, much less thrown themselves into her arms.
She agrees to take Kizzy with her to California and teach her how to pan for gold, if the fascinating woman will marry her the next day, so they can travel in the wagon train as man and wife.
The publicity for Where There's Room for Us by Hayley Kiyoko from Wednesday Books says it’s set in a “reimagined 1880s England” though it isn’t clear from the description just how much it diverges from our timeline.
When her brother unexpectedly inherits an English estate, the outspoken and infamously daring poet, Ivy, swaps her lively New York life for the prim and proper world of high society, and quickly faces the challenges of its revered traditions–especially once she meets the most sought-after socialite of the courting season: Freya Tallon.
Freya’s life has always been mapped out for her: marry a wealthy lord, produce heirs, and protect the family’s noble status. But when she unexpectedly takes her sister’s place on a date with Ivy, everything changes. For the first time, she feels the kind of spark she’s always dreamed of.
As Ivy and Freya’s connection deepens, both are caught between desire and duty. How much are they willing to risk to be true to themselves—and to each other?
Other Books of Interest
I have two titles in the “other books of interest” group.
The Fault Mirror by Catherine Fearns from Quill & Crow Publishing House is a dual-timeline story in which the framing story is not sapphic, but the embedded one is. That makes it hard to tell how prominent the sapphic content is and how central the historic setting is.
Everyone sees the house they want to see... Paris, 1900: Amidst the decadence of the Belle Époque, American heiress Lydia Temple falls in love with ethereal aristocrat Séraphine de Valleiry, and builds her a whimsical castle in the Swiss mountains. The Chateau des Miroirs becomes a bastion of spiritualism until it is taken over by sinister forces during the First World War. And then it disappears. Or did it ever really exist? Oxford, 2035: Elderly professor Cyrus Field is rapidly losing his sight and his will to live, when student Haydn Young presents him with a collection of letters previously lost to history. These letters may contain the answer to the philosophical problem that has been his life’s work. But does he really want to know the truth? With war closing in, Cyrus and Haydn must decide whether to risk everything in the quest for knowledge. The mystery of the Chateau des Miroirs reverberates through the generations, connecting two souls that are destined to find each other.
The second title is even a bit more marginal as a historical, relying on magic and reincarnation: As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel from William Morrow Paperbacks.
1592. Cybil Harding is a First Daughter. Cursed to bring disaster to those around her, she is trapped in a house with a mother paralyzed by grief and a father willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of magic.
Miriam Richter is a creature of shadow. Forged by the dark arts many years ago, she is doomed to exist for eternity and destined to be alone—killing mortals and consuming their souls for sustenance. Everything changes when she meets Cybil, whose soul shines with a light so bright, she must claim it for herself. She offers a bargain: she will grant Cybil reincarnation in exchange for her soul.
Thus begins a dance across centuries as Miriam seeks Cybil in every lifetime to claim her prize. Cybil isn’t inclined to play by the rules, but when it becomes clear that Miriam holds the key to breaking her family curse, Cybil finds that—for the first time in her many lives—she might have the upper hand. As they circle each other, drawn together inescapably as light and dark, the bond forged between them grows stronger. In their battle for dominance, only one of them can win—but perhaps they can’t survive without each other.
What Am I Reading?
And what have I been reading? I’m back to mostly audiobooks and coming to rely more and more on what I can borrow from Libby.
I had started reading Angel Maker by Elizabeth Bear in print but kept getting slowed down by the dialect-heavy writing style. As with poetry embedded in stories (like Tolkien) I find I have to sub-vocalize dialect in order to parse it, which is an entirely different reading style than usual. So I switched over to audio and enjoyed this fun romp through alternate history with all the steampunk bells and whistles but that addresses real historic social issues as well.
In general, I’m not a fan of horror, so even though T. Kingfisher is an auto-read for me, I sometimes shy away from the titles marketed as horror. But although A House with Good Bones is pervaded with a sense of growing menace, it never felt too scary for me. There is artful depiction of the everyday awfulness of ordinary people.
I’ve been continuing my read-through of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. This month I listened to Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, and Fugitive Telemetry, finally catching up to re-listen to Network Effect. On re-listen, I think my original impression of Network Effect was skewed by listening to it out of order, because a lot of the interpersonal stuff made far less sense when I was coming in at the middle of the series. On the other hand, my impression stands that the story is very heavy on the blow-by-blow combat descriptions, which just isn’t my thing.
I’ve also started a re-read of my own Alpennia series to help get my brain in the right space for working on Mistress of Shadows.
Author Guest
As mentioned previously, this month we’re happy to welcome Anbara Salam to the show.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Setting up context for this month’s fiction episode
- Additions to the website
- Progress on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project book
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Pelliccia, Hayden. 1995. “Ambiguity against Ambiguity: Anacreon 13 Again” in Illinois Classical Studies, Vol. 20: 23-34.
- Davidson, J.F. 1987. “Anacreon, Homer and the Young Woman from Lesbos” in Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 40, Fasc. 1/2: 132-137.
- Petropoulos, J.C.B. 1993. “Sappho the Sorceress: Another Look at fr. 1 (LP)” in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 97: 43-56.
- Devereux, George. 1970. “The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 LP as Evidence of Her Inversion” in The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1: 17-31.
- Lardinois, André. 1994. “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho's Poetry” in Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 124: 57-84.
- Most, Glenn W. 1995. “Reflecting Sappho” in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 40: 15-38.
- Skinner, M.B. 1989. “Sapphic Nossis” in Arethusa 22:5-18.
- Blondell, Ruby and Sandra Boehringer. 2014. “Revenge of the Hetairistria: The Reception of Plato’s Symposium in Lucian’s Fifth DIalogue of the Courtesans.” Arethusa 47: 231-64.
- Book Shopping
- The A to Z of Charles II’s London 1682
- The Whitehall Palace Plan of 1670
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- No Love for an Outlaw by Kerri Reeves
- Twin Flames of Namwon: The Reimagined Love Story of Chunhyang and Cheong by Velis Aenora
- Neon Nights by William Ellison
- Raised for the Sword by Aimée
- The Salvage by Anbara Salam
- A Lady for a Highwayman (from Lovers and Liaisons) by Dani Collins
- My Mother's Spear by Ishtar Watson
- Phoenix (Intertwined Souls #9) by Mary Dee
- Ophelia by S.M. Namkoong
- Between Two Silences by Shanon O'Brien
- The Secret War (Hattie James #3) by Stacy Lynn Miller
- The Duke by Anna Cowan
- My Darling Clementine (Clementine #1) by Genta Sebastian
- Where There's Room for Us by Hayley Kiyoko
- Other Titles of Interest
- What I’ve been reading
- Angel Maker by Elizabeth Bear
- A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
- Murderbot Series (various titles) by Martha Wells
- Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones
- Call for submissions for the 2026 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
- This month we interview Anbara Salam and talk about:
- What grounds a story in a specific place and time?
- Isolation, claustrophobia, and “things that should be gone but aren’t” as the essence of gothics
- Researching queer sexuality in the mid-20th century
- Exploring sapphic longing
- The importance of not making the central conflict about queerness
- The Salvage by Anbara Salam
- Belladona by Anbara Salam
A transcript of this podcast is available here. (Interview transcripts added when available.)
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)
Links to Anbara Salam Online
- Website: anbarasalam.com
- Instagram: @anbarasalam
Major category:
LHMPMonday, October 27, 2025 - 09:00
As this article points out, historians of sexuality put a lot of weight on the depiction of women-loving-women in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans #5, simply because of the scarcity of references to female homoeroticism in the classical era. But Lucian's fictional episode can't be read as a realistic description of anything and must be interpreted through multiple layers of context, symbolism, and cross-reference. These can make it even more valuable as a piece of data, but much more difficult to read as a mirror of historic f/f sexuality.
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LHMPFull citation:
Blondell, Ruby and Sandra Boehringer. 2014. “Revenge of the Hetairistria: The Reception of Plato’s Symposium in Lucian’s Fifth DIalogue of the Courtesans.” Arethusa 47: 231-64.
This article considers the position that Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, and in particular the 5th dialogue, should be read as satire of philosophical literature. Or perhaps, satire as philosophical literature, specifically, the Platonic dialogue as comedy due to being assigned to non-elevated characters. Though, as the authors note, Plato himself drew on comedic elements. In Lucian, the dialogue format itself is one cue to the audience to look for philosophical resonances.
One aspect of Lucian’s dialogues that isn’t always emphasized in articles discussing them is that they are a form of “historical fiction.” Lucian, writing in the 2nd century CE, set his dialogues within an imagined demimonde of Plato’s time (5-4th c BCE). That is, they are intended as a fictional low-culture mirror to the symposiums that Plato depicted. The current article argues that this is essential context for understanding the purpose of the Dialogues. To do this, it begins by reviewing ancient understandings of same-sex desire especially as depicted by Plato, then there is an exploration of the role of “philosophical eros” as depicted in the 10th Dialogue, finally the article returns to the 5th Dialogue and draws thematic parallels with Plato’s Symposium.
The first section points out that the paiderastic relationships presented in the Symposium was itself an idealized debating ground for his philosophical theories, rather than reflecting actual everyday practice in Athens. For example, the symposium features a celebration of age-matched adults and downplays physical eroticism in favor of philosophical bonds. Indeed, within the context of philosophical study, the Symposium depicts Socrates as being simultaneously erastes and eromenos: the older mentor and at the same time the courted, desired object. In the speech assigned to Aristophanes about the “other half” origins of human desire, the philosophical structure that the story proposes again does not map to actual Athenian culture. (E.g., it depicts fixed gender-based orientations, rather than the hierarchical active/passive role-based structure that prevailed.)
One unusual connection between Plato and Lucian is that Plato’s dialogues are the only classical Athenian texts that reference sex between women, and the earliest record of the word hetairistria, which it is generally believed that Plato invented—the next known occurrence being the 5th Dialogue. Due to the word's rarity, it’s difficult to determine its intended meaning. (Boehringer 2021 has a detailed analysis of the possibilities.) One strong theory is that it means “a woman with immoderate desire for a woman” rather than any and all same-sex desire. [Note: If true, this would imply that there was a concept of "a woman with moderate and appropriate desire that included women" as a contrast. An interesting possibility to ponder.]
This brings us back to the Dialogues. First we look at Dialogue 10, in which one courtesan complains to another that her lover has been forbidden to visit her by his philosophy teacher who considers their relationship to be incompatible with “the pursuit of virtue.” A different explanation for the prohibition is offered: that the philosopher sexually desires his student and wants to warn off female competition. The dialogue is packed with allusions to themes from Plato. But what Lucian’s philosophy teacher desires is very different from the supposedly high-minded relations depicted in Plato. Excluding women of any sort from the sphere of philosophy is one thing (and “normal”) but the courtesan can get her revenge by spreading the gossip that the teacher is ”corrupting” his pupil. The dynamics of philosophical instruction are satirized by viewing them from the point of view of outsiders with whom we are led to identify.
The Platonic connections of the 5th dialogue are more complex. It, too, involves a conversation between two courtesans about a sexual relationship one experienced (that appears to be ongoing), initiated at a party where she was hired to entertain two women who revealed that they were “married” and had a sexual relationship. The courtesan was drawn into a three-way with them and describes details of the experience to her friend, stopping just short of specific sexual techniques. The depiction of the couple doesn’t correspond to any known Athenian demographic. They are not courtesans themselves but rather hire courtesans. They are rich, though no occupation or source of the wealth is noted. This article considers the scenario to be utterly fictional and intended to be unbelievable.
The “Platonic dialogue” aspect of the story is in the structure of how the one courtesan attempts to elicit details of the encounter from her friend by asking a series of questions and offering hypothetical framings for understanding the events. Because of the rarity of references to sex between women in classical sources, a great deal of scholarly weight has been put on this depiction, but this article points out that even taken at face value it doesn’t present a clear or coherent picture. One could view Megilla/us as representing a hierarchical, active/passive, heteronormative model of sex between women (or some subset of these features), but each interpretation is contradicted by other elements of the scenario. (More on this below.) Instead, it is proposed that it represents a parody of a philosophical debate regarding what makes someone “manly” without ever providing a conclusive answer.
But aside from the specific content, the structure of Dialogue 5 mimics that of the Symposium in using a conversational framing narrative that encloses an inner story. Furthermore, an unconventional drinking party (symposium) is a key setting. But Lucian’s all-female symposium features multiple elements that Plato’s specifically excludes: women, music, drunkenness, and sex. Like Dialogue 10, it involves those normally excluded from philosophy engaging with the forms and topics of philosophy and claiming their right to do so. And in Dialogue 5, women are doing this in a way that shows men to be irrelevant to the experience.
Perhaps the final key connection between Plato’s Symposium and Lucian’s Dialogue 5 is the appearance of the word hetairistria, but unlike Plato, whose character provides no clear definition for it, Lucian’s character explains that there are such women in Lesbos who aren’t willing to have sex with men but prefer to associate with women as men do. This is part of a speculative explanation by the friend, rather than a description of the symposium couple by the courtesan they hired, so the word isn’t definitively applied to the couple.
Contrary to some interpretations of Megilla/us as transmasculine (which is supported by some of the things she says) the dialogue doesn’t depict her as presenting as masculine. The courtesan doesn’t perceive her as masculine until she removes her wig showing an “athlete-like” shaved head. Further, her partner Demonassa is not described as being either physically or behaviorally “masculine” and yet also engages in sex with the courtesan, contradicting a heteronormative framing. The sexual encounter—to the extent that it is described—doesn’t consistently follow a hierarchical active/passive model. And the intensity of pleasure experienced by Megilla/us aligns more with stereotypes of feminine excess than masculine experience. Overall, the sexual scripts involved here are not coherent with the expected models for Greek (or Roman) society. As it cannot be read as a simple gender role reversal, it also cannot serve as an answer to the question “what makes someone manly?”
The article ends by reiterating that neither Plato’s Symposium nor Lucian’s Dialogues present a realistic or coherent picture of sexual practices and categories of the time (in Lucian’s case, either his time or that of his setting), but rather are using the forms of philosophical discussion in a satiric way to provide entertainment.
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Saturday, October 25, 2025 - 10:00
We know, in the long term, that Sappho left a reputation as a poet. And much of what we have of her work is because it was quoted and cited by other authors--primarily male authors. But in Nossis we have evidence that other women poets of ancient Greece not only considered her great, but found her an inspiration for their own work.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Skinner, M.B. 1989. “Sapphic Nossis” in Arethusa 22:5-18.
Nossis was a female poet of the Greek Hellenistic period (approximately 2 centuries after Sappho), 11 of whose poems have survived. This article discusses how her work reflects a self-conscious identity specifically as a female poet and as one who sees herself as following in the tradition of Sappho.
Two of the poems are believed to be end-pieces to what was originally a collection of her work. The first uses literary allusion to invoke Sappho while the second calls her out by name. Other of her poems emphasize Nossis’s function within female traditions of poetry and religious performance. Skinner considers the body of work to offer evidence for a homoerotic understanding of the lost body of her love poems, emphasizing the sweetness of eros.
(Note: This article works on the assumption that its audience will not need to have any of the Greek translated, so some of the evidence for the arguments can be hard to follow.)
There is an extensive examination of the metaphors of poems as roses, or as honey that emerges from the poet’s mouth, as well as comparisons of the sweetness of eros to that of honey. In this, Nossis positions herself within the tradition of feminine poetry, exemplified by Sappho, which concerned itself with the celebration of beauty and love, in contrast to the themes of male-authored poetry.
The poem considered a conclusion to Nossis’s collection is a mock funerary inscription, asking the reader, if they sail to Mitylene in Lesbos to be inspired by Sappho’s work, to tell people there that Nossis, too, loved (philia) Sappho and the Muses.
Although the “bookends” of the collection indicate that its contents focused on eros, the other surviving poems do not reflect this. They are, however focused on female activities, especially the dedication of votive offerings to Aphrodite. The female maker or subject of the offering is praised for skill, beauty, or grace, and the poems indicate that the expected audience of them poems is female. All these themes find parallels in Sappho’s work.
Ancient writers with access to a greater surviving corpus of Nossis’s work described it as strongly female-oriented, even more so than typically expected as a woman poet. This is one basis for Skinner proposing that the lost erotic epigrams are likely to have been addressed to women (similarly to Sappho). In turn, this hypothetical content is suggested as a reason why her love poetry was not preserved through the ages, as literary opinions were beginning to turn against female homoeroticism in poetry, affecting even Sappho’s reputation. And similarly to Sappho’s fate in Athenian comic theater, Nossis was turned into a comic character in theater who rejected heterosexual relations.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 - 09:00
When an article is primarily about the later reception of a historic figure, often it isn't that relevant to the Project. But when that "later" falls solidly in our scope, and the "reception" is concerned with the historic figure's queerness, then the discussion is solidly relevant, as in this article.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Most, Glenn W. 1995. “Reflecting Sappho” in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 40: 15-38.
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
In the 18th century, the primary “facts” associated with Sappho were Ovid’s story of her failed romance with Phaon and her subsequent suicide. This is exemplified in various novelizations of her life, including Alessandro Verri’s 1781 work, among others. Verri’s text specifically denies any homoerotic elements to her life, claiming they were slanders by poetic rivals, while other 18th century treatments don’t bother mentioning this topic at all.
Beginning in the early 19th century, a hypothesis arose to account for the conflict between the content of Sappho’s poetry (including its homoerotic themes) and the treatment of Sappho as a character in Athenian comedy (as heterosexually promiscuous), alleging that by the time of the comic treatment, nothing was remembered about Sappho’s work except that she was a famous poet, and the comic persona was simply invented to attach to that reputation. (This has the obvious problem that there’s plenty of evidence for Sappho’s body of work being very well known during that era.)
Skipping back to the image of Sappho during antiquity, the problem is complicated, including not only the content of her poetry, but the attribution of a husband (identified as “Kerkylas from Andros”, i.e., “Penis from Man-land”), a daughter, various brothers, many female companions (some of whom were specifically identified as her lovers), a number of male lovers, and a failed heterosexual relationship that led to her suicide. Over the centuries then and following, several strategies have attempted to make sense of these themes via “duplication, narrativisation, and condensation.”
Duplication solved the problem of incompatibility by positing two women of the same name who later became conflated. (This theory is found as early as the 3rd c BCE.) The usual division is into the poet Sappho, with the specified family members and female coterie, and a prostitute named Sappho, who takes ownership of the many male lovers and inspires the comedic character. Other divisions also appear. An 11th c Byzantine version of her biography separates out only a harp-playing Sappho who died for the love of Phaon, and assigns all the other attributes to another Sappho, include the highly detailed account of her family members and list of female lovers and pupils. The reduplicated Sappho continues to appear in Renaissance interpretations, though there is little coherency in how her characteristics are divided.
A minority approach among ancient authors (not included in the three themes mentioned above) was to reject certain details as fictional. More common was the “narrativization” approach, which organized the elements chronologically in such a way that they could all happen in a single lifetime. Ovid’s treatment in the Heroides is the earliest known version of this, where the poet Sappho has long since lost or become estranged from her family, has left the love of women behind, and late in life falls for Phaon to her detriment. A few Renaissance scholars adopted this approach but it came to dominate the discourse in late 17th century France, as in the biographical prefacy to Madame Dacier’s edition of Sappho’s poetry. In this version, Sappho’s homoerotic encounters might be dismissed or ignored according to the preferences of the biographer (and their concern for her reputation). Madame Dacier’s father, Tanneguy LeFevre, had imagined a rather more licentious Sappho, not having the handicap of literary identification that Dacier felt. But even those who included the homoerotic elements in this era, focused solidly on the heterosexual plot.
The primary logical flaw in following Ovid’s version of Sappho’s life is that Ovid also downplayed her poetic accomplishments, presenting her literary efforts as mediocre verses inspired by her doomed love for Phaon. This presented the contradiction of a famous poet who came to poetry late and badly.
The condensation strategy was seized on in the early 19th century by the Romantics, who re-centered Sappho’s poetry and envisioned her specifically as a Romantic poet, talented by tormented and doomed to tragedy because her fragile feminine nature was not capable of supporting the magnitude of her genius. Her sexuality is sidelined. At the same time, other writers take up the challenge of touching on her homoerotic reputation only in order to establish her innocence. (An interesting tactic given that her homoeroticism had scarcely been part of the debate in the previous century.) Earlier versions of Sappho as libertine were discredited in favor of “Sappho the schoolmistress.” This movement did tackle the task of tracing all the individual elements of her reputation back to their sources in order to refute the undesirable ones, but it also brought in an element of duplication: the poet Sappho versus the fictional character in Attic stage comedy. The “schoolmistress” theory required the reinterpretation her Sappho’s erotic language as idealized and non-sensual (an approach that aligned with the rise of romantic friendship culture).
The re-focusing on Sappho’s poetry (rather than the Phaon fiction) led, later in the 19th century, to a re-acceptance of the poetry’s homoeroticism, positioning Sappho as the banner-bearer and namesake of female homosexuality. [Note: This is one of the aspects where I feel Most is leaving out some essential chronology. Most says “we should remember that [the idea that Sappho was a female homosexual] was never widespread before our century,” but here I feel he’s overstating the case because references to Sappho as an icon of f/f sexuality occur regularly from at least the 16th century, even when other narratives were also popular.]
In conclusion, Most notes that while the complexity and contradictions of the source materials have contributed to the shifts in the dominant narratives about Sappho, those shifts have also reflected “contingent and temporarily fashionable prejudices about the nature of women, of sexuality, of poetry, and so on” which I think has solidly been demonstrated. It has been difficult to ignore the intensity of the emotion expressed in her poetry, even though much of the corpus has been lost, but the highly personal focus of the poems has made it possible to question the target of those emotions, either in general (men vs women) or in specific (her feelings about specific named persons). The aspects of her poetry that contributed to her popularity also made it easier for later ages to reinterpret those poems according to their own circumstances, and reinvent their own version of Sappho in parallel.
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Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 10:00
I always love articles like this that dissect in detail the evidence for largely unanswerable questions, yet still come to conclusions (even if ones that other scholars might dispute).
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LHMPFull citation:
Lardinois, André. 1994. “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho's Poetry” in Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 124: 57-84.
Lardinois (who several years earlier wrote an excellent article digging into the actual known facts about Sappho’s life, and their likely interpretation – Lardinois 1989) examines the evidence for the context in which Sappho’s poetry was performed and the likely composition of her audience. In particular, he is responding to Parker 1993 (I have a copy but haven’t blogged it yet) who argues that rather than the received theory that Sappho’s audience/context was young, unmarried girls, that she was performing at banquets for adult women (i.e., in a symposium-like context). In addition to addressing this claim, Lardinois considers other popular paradigms: that Sappho taught at a formal school of some type, that she was the instructor of a girls’ chorus, and then she lead a thiasos (a religious association that participated in various ceremonies).
The first category of evidence under consideration are the “testimonia”, something like biographies, which include references to Sappho associating with young women (using various words that have a default understanding of young, unmarried women). The objections to this evidence are primarily that they were written about six centuries after Sappho’s lifetime and largely involve constructing biography out of the content of her poetry. However Lardinois notes that, unlike modern scholars, the authors of the testimonia had a much more complete corpus of that poetry available to them. One of Parker’s suggestions is that, in the testimonia, these biographers re-wrote the context of Sappho’s life into one more parallel to male pederastic relationships, substituting age-differentiated language for references to more egalitarian and age-matched relationships. Lardinois objects—not only on the basis that there’s no positive evidence for this—but that other authors in the same era as the testimonia had no trouble imagining and writing about f/f relations between mature women (albeit they wrote negatively about them). If the available evidence they worked from had indicated a mature audience, then Sappho would have been associated with representations like those in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, rather than being “translated” into an age-differentiated version.
This analysis doesn’t contradict the issue that later biographers often assumed that all ancient Greek poets were writing autobiographical poems. Sappho is not the only author whose works have been assumed to involve the poet speaking their own experience in their own person. One example that we know is the case, though even more clearly fictional, is how Ovid’s story about Sappho and Phaon was treated as truth and autobiography in later ages, aided by the fact that Sappho did write about Phaon (and Adonis) in the context of Aphrodite, sometimes writing in the goddess’s voice.
Trying to interpret which of Sappho’s poems might represent a personal, solo voice and which were compositions intended for (third-person) choral performance is not necessarily obvious. Some have argued that there is a clear metrical distinction, but Lardinois demonstrates that this is not the case, either for Sappho’s work or for her contemporaries. In a very few (surviving) cases, Sappho’s name appears in a poem, suggesting a more personal voice. Further, he points out, we can’t be absolutely certain that Sappho herself is a historic figure, rather than a poetic persona to whom work was attributed (as is a popular theory about Homer). But for the remainder of the article, Lardinois accepts that Sappho was a real historic figure and that, with the exception of poems clearly identifiable as “wedding songs” she is the “speaker” in the poem, though not necessarily the actual performer.
The significant time-gap between Sappho’s life and the composition of the testimonia does raise the question of whether they contain anachronisms. For example, there is no evidence for anything resembling formal schools for women in Sappho’s era. Young women might receive ad hoc instruction in songs and dances performed in ceremonies, and there is some evidence for instruction in reading and writing within the home, but the organized schools for girls found in later centuries (and indicated in the testimonia) had no parallel. Therefore references to Sappho as a “schoolteacher” in the testimonia is most likely an anachronistic fiction, leaving open the possibility that she did participate in instruction and leadership of choral groups.
The most substantial body of evidence for Sappho’s context is the poetry itself. In this section, Lardinois regularly notes that he’s analyzing the works that are not wedding songs, biographical poems (of other people), or mythological references. Within this, references indicating the age of the women she is singing to or about all use vocabulary normally associated with young, unmarried women (kore, pais, parthenon). (But at least one of the later testimonia makes a linguistic distinction between Sappho’s “pupils” (mathetriai) and the “companions and friends” (hetairai) who were responsible for her sexual reputation.) A few references are ambiguous, as when the poem says, “I love you once Atthis, long ago” which could be interpreted as referring to a time when they were both young women.
Moving on from the age of Sappho’s subjects/audience, Lardinois considers what her relationship was to them. It is clearly established that she wrote songs that other women/girls performed. It is also clear that Sappho expressed desire for some specific women (though it can’t always be determined whether they were part of the audience for the work’s performance). References to Atthis frame her as both a beloved and a performer. An unnamed addressee is reminded of a variety of sensual (and possibly erotic) activities they partook together, at a time when the addressee is leaving her. This is, perhaps, the most solid evidence of an erotic relationship between Sappho and a member of her chorus (who, presumably, is now leaving for marriage?).
The article moves on to consider various possible historic parallels for Sappho’s cultural context. Given that ancient Greek societies were not homogeneous, this can be tricky but Lardinois looks specifically for parallels to “expressions of desire for young women” and “composing songs for girls’ choruses.” This include Plutarch’s reference to noble women of Sparta having erotic relationships with young, unmarried women (parthenoi) similar to those that men had with boys. The poet Alcman uses the femining “aitis” in parallel with masculine “aitas” for the “beloved” in a pederastic relationship, and while there is not explicit reference to the gender of whom the girls are beloved by, the sexual logic of the day suggests that this was not a heterosexual relationship. In Alcman’s “wedding songs” voices representing the girls chorus express desire for their choral leader. A vase painting from Thera dating to Sappho’s era shows two women making an inviting gesture that, between a man and boy or between a man and woman, would indicate a sexual context. Taken all together, these suggest that there may have been a general Greek culture of female mentorship that included erotic relations.
For the second theme, there is extensive evidence in the archaic Greek period that the composer of choral songs for young women’s performance also trained them and led the performances. And there are some anecdotal examples representing one member of an adolescent group having an erotic relationship with a mentor and forming a connection to the group as a whole. (Tenuous, but possibly useful context.) Therefore one need not posit that Sappho had erotic relationships with all of her “students” but only that it was a context in which such relationships might be expected.
The article finishes by summarizing pros and cons for the four modern framings of Sappho: school teacher, chorus leader, thiasos leader, and symposium performer. Of these, Lardinois concludes the evidence is most congruent with chorus leader.
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Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 326 - Speculative Fiction and Sapphic Plots - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/10/18 - listen here)
When I get ideas for podcast episodes, I set up an empty folder to remind myself of the topic. Last month I was doing some file housekeeping to remove place-holder folders for topics I’d covered in some fashion and found this script—nearly complete and never used. I’d even assigned it an episode number, back three years ago. I have no idea at this point why I left it sitting. It does overlap with material from some other episodes. I worry about repetition sometimes, but then I remember that you, my audience, don’t live with all this information packed into your brains like I do. And there’s no point in letting the script go to waste, so I thought I’d finish polishing it up and offer it to you.
Introduction
For contemporary writers of lesbian and sapphic characters, the field of fantasy and science fiction offers wide open spaces to envision identities, lives, and societies that differ from the ordinary. Speculative literature embraces stories that are limited only by imagination, whether they choose alternate worlds as a setting, explore what science and technology might offer, or incorporate forces or beings that are not a part of our everyday lives.
For the most part, we don’t need speculative fiction as a medium for telling engaging, sympathetic, positive stories of women who love women. We write speculative fiction because we enjoy it for its own sake, and we write queer characters because they’re part of the world we live in, expressing a whole range of stories and personalities.
In past centuries, it wasn’t quite as simple to create stories in which women who loved women could be presented as ordinary, as sympathetic, and as positive role models. Oh, you could do it if that love were depicted as sisterly, or platonic. You got a lot more push-back if their love was clearly romantic or sexual.
But there was one big escape clause. People did enjoy stories about women who loved women; they just got a bit uncomfortable if you implied those stories took place in the here and now. If you set the story in the mythic past? If you told wonder tales about other worlds? If you took your readers or listeners through a doorway into an imagined adventure of heroes, gods, fairies, and magic? Then you could have your heroines kiss each other. Maybe.
There’s a regular theme running through lesbian history that societies try to deny the existence of love between women in the here and now. It’s something that people did a long time ago. It something the people in foreign lands do. Women in the here and now who didn’t keep the sexual aspects of their love invisible or disguised could face condemnation and punishment. But at the very same time, people were relatively accepting of fictions of female same-sex love, and were willing to find such characters honorable and even admirable. As long as they remained fictions.
The more removed the stories were from everyday life—the more they belonged to the fantastic and imaginary—the more free the characters were to have openly sapphic relationships. This means that early versions of fantasy and science fiction can offer some of the more positive and affirming stories about women loving women, or at least ones in which lesbian representation is present and not outright condemned.
The genre labels of “fantasy” and “science fiction” are modern inventions of course, but we can define some general definitions of what type of literature we’re talking about. We’re talking about stories that are explicitly not realistic. They aren’t depicting the everyday world and the sort of events and people in it. They may be set in an alternate geography—a place that is entirely invented, or that is a fictional adaptation of a real-world place, such as King Arthur’s Britain, or the China envisioned in tales from the 1001 Nights. The story may use a setting peopled with magical or supernatural beings, such as classical gods, or the inhabitants of Faerie. It may involve unexplainable events, such as transformations, visions, or magical journeys. The distinction between what we would define as fantasy versus science fiction isn’t always clear, and there’s more material that leans toward the former than that latter. But stories that take the form of a traveler’s tale, exploring a previously unknown land and society, often feel rather science-fictional.
In this brief survey, we’ll be looking at some characters and stories from historic literature that fall in the intersection of speculative fiction and sapphic plots.
All-Female Societies
One of the most obvious opportunities for sapphic stories would be woman-only societies, though the romantic possibilities aren’t always acknowledged. In the earliest classical stories of the all-female Amazons, the possibility of same-sex desire tends to be ignored. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the sex lives of Amazons were most relevant in their occasional encounters with men. But in medieval and Renaissance stories involving Amazons, they were often shown engaging in homoerotic encounters, or at least open to the possibility. In Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the Amazon Emilia is mourning her dead girlfriend and rejects the idea of marriage out of loyalty to her. While there is no explicit indication that it was a sexual relationship—as opposed to a very intensely romantic one—a sexual reference would be at odds with the tone of the work.
In a less familiar 17th century play The Female Rebellion, we are shown both platonic and sexual bonds within the mythological Amazonian setting. The Amazon Queen Orithya is being plotted against by her generals, but supported by the loyal Nicostrate who infiltrates the rebels. The rebels believe (and are allowed to believe) that the bond between Nicostrate and Orithya is sexual, so a lovers’ spat is invented to motivate Nicostrate’s supposed betrayal. The villainous Amazon generals are portrayed as openly erotic with each other, so perhaps this isn’t the best example of fiction excusing lesbianism.
In several chivalric romances, an Amazonian warrior character becomes the object of female desire due to gender confusion, but I’ll cover that motif separately in a little bit. In Philip Sidney’s mythic adventure Arcadia, a character pretending to be an Amazon uses the sapphic reputation of Amazons as a ploy when courting a woman, though in this case the fake Amazon is a man. But the episode establishes the literary motif of lesbian relationships being normalized among Amazons.
Another fantasy setting involving an all-female society comes from the classical myths of Artemis or Diana, goddess of the hunt, who required that her female followers reject relations with men. While not all literature depicting Diana’s band depicted sexual relations among the women, many works do—or at least involve erotic play, including an entire genre of mildly erotic artwork with this motif. Ovid’s story of Callisto’s seduction by Jupiter in disguise as Diana necessarily relies on the idea that Callisto would be open to a sexual relationship with the goddess. This motif appears in a number of Renaissance works that feature Diana and her followers in Arcadian fantasies, such as William Warner’s play Albion’s England and Thomas Heywood’s The Golden Age in which Diana’s followers are paired up in monogamous same-sex couples.
Aside from works playing with classical mythology, fiction about all-woman societies really begins to appear in the late 19th century. Most female-authored utopian novels of the 19th and early 20th century that depict all-woman societies reflect the gender stereotype prevalent at that time of women as being elevated, cultured, but non-erotic beings. In works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, or the much more obscure 1890 work Mizora by Mary E. Bradley, an event in the past has eliminated all the men in an isolated region and the women became able to reproduce via parthenogenesis. Sexual desire, however, is assumed to be absent from these societies and the authors may not even feel the need to explain this point. Mizora is a rather fascinating science-fictional “hollow earth” story, and the female explorer who narrates the story both has a past romantic friendship with a woman and develops an intensely romantic friendship with one of the women she meets there, though this isn’t depicted as a natural consequence of the single-sex nature of the society.
Stories of Long Ago and Far Away
Popular ways to create a fantasy setting for a story include setting it in the mythic past (as we saw in Amazon stories) or in a distant land. Setting aside genuine travelers’ tales, such as the flood of descriptions of the Ottoman Empire that became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, describing lesbianism as prevalent in a land far away—whether real or fictional—not only removed the ability for the audience to fact-check it, but made the idea less threatening.
The 2nd century author Iamblichos wrote a soap-opera-like tale, the Babyloniaka, set in a mythic earlier Mesopotamia. Perhaps not so far away as some fantasy settings, but definitely not intended as a contemporary story. Among many other characters and events, it includes a romance between Bernice, the Queen of Egypt, and a woman named Mesopotamia. Depending on how one translates certain key vocabulary, the two women either got married or simply had sex. The situation is presented in a positive light, though the 10th century summary which is our only source for the text may have been a bit more disapproving.
On the more satirical side, Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans also represents a 2nd century Greek author setting tales in a fictional antiquity. When his courtesan tells of being hired to be part of an all-female threesome, there may be an implied expectation that his contemporary audience will find this shocking, but within the story itself, the women’s relationship and actions are presented as merely odd.
The fully separate secondary world is often a feature of philosophical or satirical writing—a means in general of being able to comment on contemporary society with plausible deniability. This is the case for Delariviere Manley’s late 17th century roman à clef Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediteranean. I’d tend to classify this as a science fictional work, as it uses the motif of a separate society in the lost land of Atlantis, though mirroring Manley’s contemporary world closely. Her Atlantean society features an all-female secret society, the New Cabal, whose members reject the love of men and enjoy passionate pair-bonds with other women of the club. While Manley’s work strays a little from the theme of positive depictions, the satire is light and fairly gentle—gentler than her treatment of same-sex desire in her more realistic writings.
Secondary Worlds and Crossdressing Romances
Fantastic literature that includes female cross-dressing creates a doubly-distanced context for permitting the neutral depiction of same-sex desire. Cross-dressing alone doesn’t license lesbian relations in the eyes of society—as we can see in the legal history where prosecutions for female same-sex relations almost always are triggered by one member of the couple cross-dressing. But in an imagined secondary world, cross-dressing is often used as a gateway to depicting lesbian desire.
Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe not only created a neutral depiction of female same-sex desire (conveniently situated in an ancient past) in his original 1st century work, but inspired regular reworkings of the material throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Unlike some cross-dressing romances where a female-presenting character falls in love with a masculine-presenting one, the cross-dressed Iphis falls hopelessly in love with her childhood friend, though the author writes her as considering her love to be in vain. The love itself is not condemned, only the possibility of its fulfillment is denied until divine intervention restores heteronormativity.
Later authors who took up the tale, perhaps having the cushion of even greater conceptual distance from a mythic ancient Greece, were a bit more generous, sometimes allowing the two women a wedding night before the divinely-mediated sex-change. Or, as in the 17th century play Gallathea, concluding with the two women reaffirming their love for each other as women, before the off-stage resolution that allows them to marry, as all good theatrical protagonists must.
In general, the early modern fashion for mythic pastoral settings involving the presence of classical deities was generous to the possibility of female homoeroticism. Several versions of the story L’Astrée or Astræa include erotic scenes between the followers of the goddess Diana, plus the stratagem of a man only being able to win a woman’s romantic attention by cross-dressing. Something of a reversal of the usual cross-dressing romance plot.
Amazon romances are not confined to depictions of all-female Amazon societies, as in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, both of which involve positive depictions of female same-sex desire, mediated by mistaken gender or gender disguise. While one could argue that such gender-confusion plots don’t involve actual homoeroticism, the possibility of that desire is depicted in a neutral or positive way, even when the confusion is resolved.
Conclusion
These are only a selection of the historic literary works in which a fantastical or science-fictional setting created a space in which female fictional characters were allowed to experience same-sex desire without condemnation or punishment. The motivations were different from those of modern authors. Today, we may want the freedom to create positive depictions without directly violating what we consider to be the constraints of actual history or current society. (As well as the freedom to tell stories that break free of realistic fiction in other ways.) Authors of the past probably had a variety of motivations, not all of them admirable. Representations of lesbianism may have been done for titillation, in a context where a realistic depiction would have provoked moral outrage. Most of these depictions, however neutral in context, still included heteronormative resolutions in some fashion. But they all speak to the scope of what could be imagined, once the imagination was liberated from the here and now.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Historic “speculative fiction” as a context for neutral depictions of sapphic characters
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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LHMPTuesday, October 14, 2025 - 12:51
My new approach to structuring my "working time" is to focus on one project for a week, then move to a different focus the next week. This is as contrasted with trying to work on multiple projects every day, or doing one-day focuses. So far, I feel like it's being productive. The week timeframe means that I have a chance to get my feet underneath me, get into a deep-focus zone, and get substantial work done.
I had one previous fiction week where I picked a random in-process short story and got it through to a finished draft. (It's currently "aging" for a while before I touch it again.) This week I opened up the files for Mistress of Shadows, Alpennia #5. Monday, I read through the first two chapters of existing material, doing the sort of light edits that you always do when re-reading something. I also made some notes for different directions I wanted to go than my current outline notes. (Minor stuff. Mostly I decided that I really did need to kill off a side character who only shows up in the first chapter. I tried to avoid killing her, but I need to traumatize my protagonist, and also she's partially based on a real historical figure who was murdered.)
Today I started seriously working on new text in the first chapter. This involved a fair amount of going back and checking my research notes. Things that had previously been embedded in my consciousness have faded and I think I need to really dig into the background material again. But I also needed to pin down some concrete facts. Because in this scene (which is backstory set in 1815, before we jump to the "current" timeline of the books) I need my character to encounter the anti-Bonapartist riots in Marseille, the week after Waterloo, which turned into anti-immigrant riots (specifically, anti-Egyptian), giving her the impetus to agree to a devil's bargain for safety for her family that structures the rest of her story arc.
For that, I needed to figure out the most likely locations and progress of the riots relative to other relevant sites, specifically the Egyptian community on Cours Goffé, and a reason for her to be in the downtown area. A fish market--that's a good excuse for her to be there with her mentor. Yes, that works. Ok, where would the major fish market have been located in 1815? And does that location work for what I need to happen?
Two hours later...
This week I hope to get the first chapter solidly drafted. (Chapter 2 is already complete.) And maybe also review the detailed outline, since I've made some philosophical changes to how I want to handle point of view. All the previous books have been told from a specific set of points of view, one per chapter, always limited to the central protagonists. But that has gotten unwieldy. I need to show some things that none of my central characters are present for. And I simply can't manage the logistics of one-viewpoint-per-chapter at this point.
Once I've immersed myself in the outline and existing research, I expect things will progress more quickly. I hope.
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Mistress of ShadowsPages
