Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 293 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 14a: Actresses and the Stage

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 293 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 14a: Actresses and the Stage - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/08/17 - listen here)

This episode is part of the series “our f/favorite tropes,” examining how popular historic romance tropes work differently for female couples than for mixed-gender couples. As used in discussing romance novels, a trope is a recurring literary device or motif—a conventional story element that is used regularly enough that it carries a whole context of meaning, and connects the story to other works that employ the same trope. The trope could be a character type, like the knight in shining armor; it could be a situation, like the moment when the detective reveals the murderer; it could be a mini-script, like “experienced mentor trains novice to be an expert.”

One subset of tropes particularly popular in contemporary romance are those focused on specific careers or jobs. In historic romance, you’re more likely to find tropes based on social roles than professions, but occupational tropes are still a feature.

When I started thinking about doing a show based on actresses, I realized that the situation was more complicated than simply talking about the dynamics of a romantic relationship involving a particular profession. Dramatic performance—especially the aspect of playing out roles with other people—adds in a whole other angle to romantic relationships, especially when those relationships aren’t well represented in ordinary society. It can overlap the “fake relationship” tropes, except that the fakeness of the relationship is overt. But it also overlaps hidden identity or masquerade tropes, except—again—the masquerade aspect is overt.

So this trope episode is split into two parts representing those different aspects. This first episode will look at various ways in which dramatic performance can create space for same-sex female relationships. The second episode will look at the history of women in theater and the points at which the profession of actress intersected with the experience of sapphic relationships, whether in the popular imagination or in the lives of specific people.

Dramatic performance can create spaces for same-sex desire in several different ways. The most obvious one is by depicting women loving women in the script. But even if sapphic desire isn’t written in to the story, the use of cross-gender casting can bring it on stage, as the distinctions between the performer and the role become blurred and overlaid on each other. This may happen in contexts where all the performers are women, but the roles involve heterosexual romantic relationships. But some of the most exciting contexts come with the rise of what came to be called “breeches roles”—that is, when women in mixed-gender acting companies deliberately took on male roles on stage, deliberately taking on a character who romanced women, and becoming an object of desire for male and female spectators alike. And apart from these contexts that create the image of desire between women on stage, there is the opportunity for self-discovery, when an actress who takes on a cross-gender role finds that the situation resonates more strongly than she expected. We’ll take a look at each of these in turn.

Same-Sex Romance in the Script

One of the most obvious ways that theater can enable same-sex romance is to tell women that such a thing exists and can be imagined. There are depictions of same-sex desire in prose and poetry, but those are often limited in terms of who has access to them. Theater is usually aimed at a general audience. Sometimes the stage is more private, and sometimes it’s open to all viewers—or at least anyone who has the admission price.

That isn’t to say that all portrayals of same-sex desire on the stage are positive, much less that they have what we’d consider a happily-ever-after ending. But if you want to give your protagonists the idea that love between women is imaginable, then these plays can be their first step.

The most common motif that enables same-sex possibilities on stage is some sort of gender bending. The structural framework of the relationship appears to be heterosexual, but the supposed man is a woman in disguise. A strong runner-up is situations where we are shown what appear to be two women in love…but one of them is actually a man in disguise, thus offering propriety a way out. Far more rarely does a play show us two women in love as women.

Several philosophical principles lie behind the ways same-sex love was presented. One was a belief that beauty—and so attraction—is not necessarily gendered. This might be thought of as the principle that everyone is potentially pansexual. A beautiful person will be loved and desired by everyone, and if someone is attracted to beauty in the same gender it can be understood and forgiven, especially if they have the plausible deniability that they thought they were falling in love with the opposite sex. Related to this is the idea that women are prone to fall in love with someone, and if men are not present, then they will fall in love with each other.

A second principle is that like tends to attract like. That it’s natural and understandable for someone to desire a person who is similar to them in some way, potentially including similar in gender. But acting in concert with these philosophical principles is the safety valve of situating same-sex desire somewhere other than the here and now. It might take place in the distant past, or in a far-off land, or in a fantasy world. There are exceptions, but for the most part, sapphic desire on stage is deliberately distanced from the world the audience inhabits.

At the other end of the scale, same-sex desire may be played for laughs or derision. The idea of women loving—or simply making love to—each other may be treated as a joke, or be used to shock, or to satirize some group of people by associating them with lesbianism. The tone of the dramatic work will affect which of these options are used. Is it a high-minded drama? A fun-loving pastorale? A low-brow farce? Each has its motifs and stock characters.

To explore the range of material, let’s take something of a geographic tour. The material I’m discussing is largely from the Renaissance and early modern eras, which isn’t to say that we don’t find sapphic themes in more recent centuries. As I’m drawing from materials covered in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog, there is also some skewing toward English material. But many of the themes—indeed often the plays themselves—were shared across Europe. In some cases, this is due to adaptations of plays from one language to another, but theatrical plots based on female cross-dressing seem to have become generally popular across western Europe in the early modern period, even when no direct connection can be traced.

Classical Greek & Roman

The available material is also constrained by whether the scripts of plays—or at least descriptions of the plot—were recorded for posterity. For the most part, this means we’re looking at a small amount of medieval material, then primarily the 16th century and later. But there are two records of classical-era plays that have suggestive content.

One of the sources for the early roots of the myth of Callisto and Artemis is a 4th century Greek comedy by Amphis that makes explicit the fact that Callisto believes she had sex with the goddess. The matter is played for laughs as the character protests naively that she has become pregnant by a woman.

Somewhat more obscurely, in a classical Roman play, Truculentus, a character puns on two similar-sounding words to suggest that a female character “fuck your mistress”, though the bit is a passing joke rather than a significant plot element. But the joke would not have landed without the audience considering the possibility of the action.

Italy

Several Italian plays of the 16th century have a central element where a woman cross-dressing as a man attracts the romantic interest of another female character. In La Calandria by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, published in 1513, and based on a play by the Roman author Plautus, the romantic comedy centers around male and female twins, separated in their youth. Santilla has been living disguised as a boy since she was 6 years old and has taken on her lost brother’s identity. Her brother, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a married woman and takes on Santilla’s identity to seduce his love without her husband’s knowledge. The real Santilla (in male disguise) is tapped to marry the daughter of the man who has become her patron. Both of these contexts create either the illusion or the reality of a woman expressing desire for another woman.

Slightly more familiar is the Commedia dell’Arte play Gl’Ingannati (published in 1531) which is considered the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As in Twelfth Night, a female twin takes on her brother’s identity and finds herself being the go-between for the man she loves with the woman he loves, who then falls in love with her (in disguise).  I’m going to talk about both the Italian and Shakespeare plays together, because the contrasts are interesting.

The Italian play is far more overt about the possibility of the disguised heroine standing in for her brother sexually as well as socially. Where Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines often emphasize their conventional feminine natures and desires, the Italian heroines focus more on the social constraints and expectations of gender roles, and the potential legal consequences of carrying the role into another woman’s bed. The homoerotic tension in this genre of play is resolved via the “convenient twin brother” motif, but also by creating a familial bond between the two women, typically mediated by marriage of one to the other’s relative. Homoerotic desire is not repudiated, but is diverted to an acceptable form.

When Gl’Ingannati was first performed in Italy, it would have been by an all-male company, but commedia troupes were incorporating women across the later 16th century and by the time Shakespeare’s play was written, an Italian equivalent would have had actresses playing the female parts.  The original performance of Gl’Ingannati was produced and dedicated to a primarily female audience. From this, we must assume that depictions of female homoeroticism must have been expected to entertain and please women. And some scenes in the play imply that sex between women might be accepted and excused.

Frequently, in plays with this motif, the women initially cross-dress for the safety and mobility it affords them, or even in support of heterosexual desire, which gives them a realistic and excusable motivation. The plays embrace both tragic and comedic potential in the motivations and consequences. The desiring women of the Italian plays express more physicality, whereas Shakespeare’s heroines feel a more diffuse, romanticized yearning. In Gl’Ingannati, Isabella, in her desire for the disguised Lelia, is described as being “in heat” and masturbating when thinking of her beloved.

While female homoeroticism is treated more openly in Italian theater than on the English stage, it was more closely policed in Italian culture and law, which provided a clear vocabulary for such acts. English society and law expressed anxieties about cross-dressing and gender roles, but shied away from overtly acknowledging female homosexuality, and had no laws addressing it.

Another difference is that Shakespeare’s Olivia has far more social power and freedom than her Italian counterpart. Olivia has power over her potential suitors, while Isabella (in Gl’Ingannati) is under others’ control and seeks her goals through deceit. In the Italian play, the cross-class nature of the forbidden relationships is more highlighted than the cross-dressing. Thus Italian cross-dressing comedies are “translated” for an English audience in a variety of ways, while still retaining the central motif and ambiguous sapphic desire.

Another Italian play that was exported multiple times to other cultures was Il Pastor Fido by Giovanni Battista Guarini (published 1590) and translated into English by Richard Fanshawe in 1647 as The Faithfull Shepherd. One minor incident involves the shepherd Mirtillo, who has disguised himself as a woman in order to gain access to Amaryllis, the woman he desires who is hiding out with an all-female group of nymphs. The nymphs decide to hold a competition to see who is the best kisser, which Mirtillo wins. Thus we have a set-up for women engaging in passionate kisses with the escape valve that the best kisser is actually a man.

France

Ovid’s myth of Iphis and Ianthe, in which gender disguise leads to two girls falling in love, thus requiring a divinely-mediated sex change to enable their marriage, shows up in medieval literature in a number of forms, including the medieval French chivalric romance of Yde and Olive. But the latter was also adapted in the 14th century as a miracle play. The main character (here named Ysabel) takes on male disguise to escape from her father's incestuous advances and becomes distinguished as a knight in the court of the emperor of Constantinople. The emperor requires Ysabel to accept his daughter's hand in marriage. Ysabel reveals her secret to her bride on the wedding night, who promises to keep the secret and to honor and cherish Ysabel as she would a husband. All is well until an eavesdropper betrays them to the emperor who demands that the pair take a bath before him in the garden to confirm or deny the accusation. The miracles involve Ysabel’s several narrow escapes from detection, but not—contrary to the earlier versions of the story—a magical sex change. Instead there’s a rather awkward resolution in which both women marry each other’s father.

Iphis and Iante, in its original form, was adapted as a play in the 17th century by Isaac de Benserade. Benserade was writing for a libertine audience (both male and female) and dares to depict happy lesbian relations. The two are allowed a happy wedding night as women—and Iphis’s secret is known and discussed by many characters before the wedding—but a sex-change is still required to validate the marriage. In contrast with Ovid’s original, which considered love and marriage between women to be impossible, Benserade’s play is clearer that it is social rules, not rules of nature, that stand in the way.

Spain

In 17th century Spain, desire between women was depicted on stage using several different framings. The real-life story of Catalina de Erauso, who ran away from a convent, took on a male identity, and went adventuring in South America, was fictionalized in Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s 1626 play La Monja Alférez (The Lieutenant Nun). Somewhat in contradiction to the events documented in Erauso’s own memoirs, Monalbán centers his plot on a romance between Erauso and a woman named Ana. Erauso’s desire is depicted as hopeless, and Ana ends up with a man, but the love is depicted as genuine and self-sacrificing.

Alvaro Cubillo de Aragón’s play Añasco el de Talavera (written around 1637) depicts lesbian desire without the mechanism of male disguise, though through a lens of female masculinity. The butch Dionisia’s desire for her female friend Leonor is an open topic of discussion within the play. Dionisia complains about the restrictiveness of female gender roles and has a serious case of “not like other girls”. She specifically expresses the desire to be touched sexually by Leonor and says she loves her. Leonor is uncertain about the concept, but Dionisia presents her argument in terms of platonic love, and argues for the supremacy of same-sex platonic love over heterosexual desire. The dialogue acknowledges that women may “sin” together, making it clear that that Dionisia is proposing a sexual relationship. Leonor, alas, is irredeemably heterosexual.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca wrote a 1664 play, Afectos de Odo y Amor, based on the life of the Swedish Queen Christina. He gave a wink and nod to Christina’s sexual reputation by naming her lady in waiting in the play “Lesbia.” The character in the play is defending her right to rule as a woman, in conflict with the antagonist Casimiro. The play sets up a bait-and-switch marriage plot in which Queen Christina agrees to marry Casimiro’s sister (that is, within the play this is overtly a same-sex marriage plan). But after the marriage is contracted, the sister substitutes her brother Casimiro and Christina rather inexplicably capitulates.

England

Late 16th and early 17th century English drama is rather rich in depictions of female homoerotic desire—a noteworthy feature even though the plays overwhelmingly have heteronormative resolutions. In general, the plays presented desire between women as suspect and threatening, but simultaneously as tolerable and pleasurable, particularly if viewed through the lens of friendship and homosociality rather than implying sexual activity. In general, expressions of explicit sexual desire are presented negatively while depictions of romantic love are most accepted.

I already discussed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night when talking about its Italian roots. Here is a brief summary of other plays with notable female same-sex desire, listed roughly chronologically.

John Lyly’s 1585 Gallathea is yet another spin-off From Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe, but with the spin that both women are cross-dressing, both initially believe they have fallen in love with a man, and both hold to that love as they come to realize that they love a woman. The conclusion of the play confirms their love and, although a magical sex-change will be required for their marriage, it falls outside the action of the play.

Two plays interpret the Greek myth of Callisto and Diana, in which Jupiter disguises himself as Diana in order to seduce Callisto, but Callisto believes herself to be loved by the goddess. William Warner’s 1586 Albion’s England and Thomas Heywood’s 1611 The Golden Age both portray Diana’s band of nymphs as engaging in same-sex erotics, setting up the context for Jupiter’s trick. Thus, within Diana’s band, the “chaste” opposite of heterosexuality is not an absence of sexual activity, but an embracing of lesbian sexuality.

In The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (published 1610), fictions of the stage intersect with real-life personalities in the character of Moll Cutpurse, a gender-bending character who alludes to the possibility that she engages in sex with both women and men. The character’s namesake was probably in the audience and regularly wore a combination of male and female clothing, though it’s unclear whether she had any sapphic leanings.

Both pretended and sincere desire between women is depicted in The Female Rebellion by H.B., published 1659. Using a mythological setting with warring Amazon groups, the play associates genuine lesbian desire with the villains while the heroines only pretend to a sexual relationship as a strategic trick.

In Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, written 1668, a group of aristocratic women go on a women-only retreat—no boys allowed. Gendered role-playing and romantic play are evidently part of their activities and a newcomer enthusiastically begins to court the central figure, Lady Happy. Their courtship progresses to kisses and embraces and pledges of love…at which point it is revealed that the newcomer is a man who disguised himself to infiltrate the retreat. Unlike many similar disguise plots, the audience is not clued in to the gender-disguise motif until this reveal, thus they would have been shown a genuine and convincing love story between women, only given a heteronormative resolution at the very end.

Even plays that don’t make apparent same-sex desire a central motif either introduce or reinforce the knowledge that women can engage in sex together. In Aphra Behn’s 1681 The False Count, a character acknowledges this potential, saying, "I have known as much danger hid under a petticoat as a pair of breeches. I have heard of two women that married each other.” The 1684 libertine play Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery (attributed to John Wilmot) has sexually frustrated women using dildoes on each other.

Theatrical opportunities for female homoeroticism also included a fashion for assertive female characters who—as part of the script—seized on excuses to cross-dress for extended periods and to flirt with other female characters in this guise. Less formal theatricals, such as masques, were another context where cross-dressing might lead to same-sex flirtation and more, and several early 18th century pamphlets warned against the practice for exactly this reason.

Cross-Gender Roles in Single-Sex Contexts

Homoerotic content in the scripts of the plays themselves is the most obvious way for audiences of plays to “get ideas” about sapphic possibilities, but just as gender-disguise plots were a mechanism for introducing those possibilities to the characters, performers in cross-gender roles could create similar possibilities—for both players and audience—even when the script itself was utterly heterosexual.

As we’ll discuss in the second part of this episode next month, women emerged as professional actresses at different times in different countries, largely during the 16th and 17th centuries. But women acted in non-professional contexts across a much wider span of time, whether it was local religious pageants, private entertainments, or formal masques at court and in the houses of the aristocracy.

When plays were staged by all-female groups, it would naturally fall out that male roles would also be played by women. There is plentiful evidence for plays being staged in convents. The 12th century abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a prolific writer and composer and wrote at least one play. Spanish convents of the early modern period staged plays not only for their own entertainment, but for invited guests and visitors, with the nuns performing the roles. In pre-Reformation England, the evidence for plays staged in convents includes the occasional condemnation of them.

Convent theatricals tended to lean towards morality plays, rather than the sort of romances that might include suggestive interactions. A more fertile ground might be court masques and private theatricals. Masques were a stylized type of performance, usually to commemorate a special event, but that often served a secondary purpose of propaganda or political persuasion. The “story” would be told via narrative poetry and song, while the cast acted it out with dance and gesture. They might involve elaborate costumes and sets, and a constant motif was that the players wore thematic masks that were understood to conceal their identity—usually members of the court and even the presiding royalty.

In the 17th century, English masques became more narrative in style and both Queen Anne of Denmark (queen to James VI and I) and Queen Henrietta Maria (queen to Charles I) were frequent sponsors and directors of court masques, performing in them with their ladies in waiting. As the style shifted to something more like a play than a tableau, classical stories and chivalric adventures were favorite sources to draw on. These provided ample opportunity for romantic encounters between the characters, all of which were typically played by women.

Somewhat different in tone were private theatricals staged as seasonal entertainment, or to entertain an important guest. There are records of plays performed for royal progresses, where the aristocratic host family contributed part of the cast. Or of girls’ schools staging a play for an important patron.

All these contexts provide opportunities for a romantic storyline to be staged with women playing both members of the romantic couple. Both the cast and the audience could be aware of the potential double-meanings at seeing one woman wooing another on stage, even with the excuse that all the roles were played by women.  It’s particularly worth noting that masques and private theatricals are a context where women of the upper classes are participants, making theatrical-based romance tropes available beyond the professional performer class.

Breeches Roles on the Mixed-Gender Stage

But with the introduction of actresses into professional, mixed-gender companies, a new phenomenon arose of great interest to our examination of same-sex romance tropes. More or less as soon as women began participating in mixed-gender acting troupes, we find the phenomenon of the “breeches role,” that is, when a male character is portrayed by a female performer even though male performers are present and available. Here the character on stage is meant to be understood as male, but the audience is fully aware that a woman is playing the part, dressed in male clothing and interacting with the other characters as a man. Breeches roles were especially popular for characters meant to be young romantic heroes, as a woman was considered to be better able to portray the androgynous beauty of youth.

Somewhat ironically, even as women playing male roles on stage increased in popularity, the previous fashion for boys playing female roles on stage all but disappeared, except for characters meant to be parody.

Due to the theatrical context, it wasn’t necessary for an actress to be able to pull off the masquerade perfectly—in fact, a certain amount of the appeal lay in the audience’s awareness of her gender, while relating alternately to the masculinity of the role or to the femininity of the performer. Theater historians often suggest that a driving motivation behind this phenomenon was the ability to put female bodies on display without resorting to undress. And the idea that women wearing masculine garments and styles signaled moral looseness—or at least a disdain for propriety—had already been circulating. But actresses in breeches roles were not simply passive objects of the male gaze, and they became romantic icons for female spectators as well as male ones.

Breeches roles attracted criticism from moralists for the same reasons that women wearing masculine-coded styles off-stage attracted criticism. It blurred gender boundaries and signaled that women might want to claim other male privileges as well.

Theatrical female cross-dressers were often described by contemporaries in ways that indicated that a large part of the appeal was the chance (for men) to appreciate women in form-fitting lower garments, or the frisson of an androgynous sexual appeal. But while male fans of female beauty might be offered a visual spectacle, the possibilities offered to a female audience were even more daring. Breeches parts frequently included romantic male heroes, creating a scenario where women were openly courting (and winning) women on stage and audiences (of both men and women) were expected to enjoy seeing them do so. Some have argued that the increasing anxiety about female homoeroticism in the later 18th century was part of why breeches parts fell out of fashion, but if so, it was a brief lull because there were plenty of women playing male parts on stage throughout the 19th century and later.

We can look at what writers were saying at the time about the phenomenon. In Delarivier Manley’s early 18th century satire The New Atalantis (something of a roman a clef featuring identifiable women in English and French society) she describes how one aristocratic woman “fell in Love with one of the Comedians, when she was acting the Part of a young Lover and a Libertine.” The woman courts the actress with presents and tries unsuccessfully to seduce her, just as a male theater patron might. A theater-goer’s memoir written in 1766 notes, with regard to a cross-dressing actress, “It was a most nice point to decide between the gentlemen and the ladies [of the audience], whether [the actress] was the finest woman or the prettiest fellow.”

Reactions to women in breeches roles were not always overtly sexual. One reviewer, after seeing 19th century actress Charlotte Cushman playing Shakespearean romantic leads, suggested that Romeo should only be played by a woman, because two women together could best portray passionate love “without suggesting vice.” (Cushman’s personal life indicates that “suggesting vice” was definitely a bonus for her with respect to her adoring female fans. But I’ll get into that more in the second episode on this topic.)

The dramatic fiction that cross-dressing actresses were “men” in their roles gave license for women to find them desirable, as well as for others to deny the same-sex aspect of that desire. In some cases, the actresses’ male performance was also available as a way to solicit or signal (or engender) same-sex desires in other women, whether indirectly in the audience or via general public awareness.

Self-Realization on Stage

The use of actresses to play male romantic roles on stage not only has the potential to “give women ideas” about erotic possibilities, as well as creating a context for an erotically-tinged, but socially acceptable, admiration of female stage icons, but for women performing in cross-gender roles, the experience of performing a romantic or erotic relationship opposite another woman—with the social sanction of it being “just a play”—could be the context for recognizing one’s romantic interest in women offstage as well.

Theatrical performances at all-female schools and colleges in the 19th and early 20th century played a part in many a school crush developing into an off-stage romance. As a mechanism in a historic romance for a character to take the first experimental steps toward expressing her love—always with plausible deniability in case it doesn’t work out—the play rehearsal offers rich possibilities. In a recent episode on 19th century poetry about love between women, I included the poem “Private Theatricals” by American author Louise Guiney, written in 1884, where she depicts the experience of playing the romantic lead opposite the woman she loves and contemplating how much of their actions and reactions were only “in the play” or might be true.

Conclusions

In conclusion, The ways in which theatrical performances played with gender—whether in the script, in the staging, in the casting, or in the relationship between cast and audience—provide multiple opportunities for women to learn about same-sex desire, to experience it vicariously, to recognize their own desires, and to act them out in a safe framework. While the specific forms and opportunities varied by time and place, western culture has reliably offered some version of this trope since the middles ages, and at times even celebrated it.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

• Historic romance tropes on stage
  • Plays that include or suggest f/f desire
  • Contexts for women playing romantic roles opposite women
  • Breeches Roles and f/f desire
• Bibliography
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  • Velasco, Sherry. 2000. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso. University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-78746-4
  • Velasco, Sherry. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. ISBN 978-0-8265-1750-0
  • Velasco, Sherry. 2014. “How to Spot a Lesbian in the Early Modern Spanish World” in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature ed. E.L. McCallum & Mikko Tuhkanen. Cambridge University Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-107-03521-8
  • Wahl, Elizabeth Susan. 1999. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, Stanford. ISBN 0-8047-3650-2
  • Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3

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)