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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 258 - On the Shelf for May 2023 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2023/05/06 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for May 2023.

As I’m writing this, a couple weeks in advance of air time, my part of California has very abruptly decided it’s summer now. A week ago it was cold and rainy, now it’s time to turn off the thermostat and start up the irrigation system. Looking out my office window, the bees are buzzing around the apple blossoms, the lemons are hanging heavy on the tree, and the apothecary roses are starting to bloom.

This May is going to be a bit of a landmark month for me, given that I’ll be turning 65. I think at this point I officially get classified as “an old.” You never really know how you’re going to feel about such things. I’ll be celebrating the event with a spa weekend in Napa with my best friend and a three week vacation that also includes two SFF conventions. So I guess you can conclude that I won’t be slowing down.

And if you’ve ever wondered, “What would the host of my favorite podcast appreciate getting as a birthday present?” The answer is always and ever: leave us a review on your favorite podcast site, or talk us up to your friends on social media, or tell people about how the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast has changed your life. Well, ok, don’t go overboard. But be assured that spreading the word about the podcast does make a difference. I can always tell from the listener numbers when people have been talking us up.

Speaking of spreading the word, I have a lead on a very exciting interview prospect that I can’t wait to share with you all. I won’t jinx it by mentioning names before we have the details nailed down, but let’s just say that my response to the query fell somewhat short of being cool, calm, and collected.. There’s nothing quite like being taken seriously as a venue by people you admire in the field!

Book Shopping!

The blog still doesn’t have any new publications up, alas, but I happened to be in Berkeley doing some shopping yesterday and decided to drop by Moe’s Books to browse through the gender and sexuality section and see what I could turn up. I found two new-to-me books on historic cross-dressing, one older and one recent.

Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough have a number of publications on cross-dressing in history and this book Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender includes a rather extensive historic survey through western culture. The articles I’ve read by the Bulloughs tend to feel very outdated, particularly when they address social interpretations of cross-dressing, though that’s not at all surprising given that the publications I’ve covered were written 30 to 50 years ago.

Much more up-to-date is Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past by Peter Boag, which looks at cross-dressing of all types within the later part of 19th century America, and the ways in which that aspect of the American West was deliberately erased from popular history with shifting understandings of sexuality at the turn of the century. Within the last decade, there have been a number of excellent studies around this topic that I’d consider essential reading for anyone contemplating writing a cross-dressed woman in a “Wild West” setting.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

New and recent book listings are a bit more sparse this month than they’ve been lately, but there’s a lot of variety. And—you know that thing I was complaining about Amazon a few months ago, the thing where my “lesbian historical fiction” keyword searches were turning up hundreds of re-issued classic novels with identical generic covers? It looks like just maybe Amazon is doing something about that, because this time the search only included one of those. Though when I posted about it on social media, someone else mentioned that they’d run a search for lesbian romance just a couple days ago and were inundated with “classics spam” as usual. So the jury is still out on whether they’ve found a way to address the problem.

Serendipitously, when I was checking out that person’s search using “lesbian romance” as the keywords rather than “lesbian historical” I turned up an April book that I would have missed. Folks: here’s the importance of proper keywords in your book listings! I can only boost the books that I can find.

That April book is the historic fantasy A Wound Like Lapis Lazuli by Melody Wiklund. The cover copy mentions the baroque era, but not a specific year, and the setting seems to be an invented Italian kingdom.

Ricardo Montero is a painter of great repute, favored by the king of Salandra and chosen by him to paint the ceiling of a temple dedicated to a sea goddess. When he mysteriously goes missing, his friend Beatriz enters a competition to paint the temple in his stead. But when the sea goddess herself gets involved in Beatriz's painting, and in her life, Beatriz finds herself in over her head. Hopefully the woman she's falling in love with can help keep her afloat. Meanwhile, Ricardo has been kidnapped by one of the king's enemies, a woman who claims the kidnapping is purely to spite the king but who seems obsessed with Ricardo himself. Under pressure and learning secrets he never wanted to know, Ricardo fights to maintain his loyalty to the king and control over his feelings and his life.

The May books start off with a story in one of my favorite centuries: The Disenchantment by Celia Bell from Pantheon. I’ve picked up the audiobook for this and it’ll probably get moved to next in line to listen to.

In 17th century Paris, everyone has something to hide. The noblemen and women and writers consort with fortune tellers in the dark confines of their salons, servants practice witchcraft and black magic, and the titled poison family members to obtain inheritance. But for the Baroness Marie Catherine, the only thing she wishes to hide is how unhappy she is in her marriage, and the pleasures she seeks outside of it. When her husband is present, the Baroness spends her days tending to her children and telling them elaborate fairy tales, but when he’s gone, Marie Catherine indulges in a more liberated existence, one of salons in grand houses, forward-thinking discussions with female scholars, and at the center of her freedom: Victoire Rose de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Conti, the androgynous, self-assured countess who steals Marie Catherine’s heart and becomes her lover. Victoire possesses everything Marie Catherine does not—confidence in her love, and a brazen fearlessness in all that she’s willing to do for it. But when Victoire’s passion results in a shocking act of murder, she and Marie Catherine must escape from the tight clutches of Paris’ eager chief of police. As they attempt to outwit him, they are led to the darkest corners of Paris and Versailles. What they discover is a city full of lies, mysticism, and people who have secrets they would also kill to keep.

Jane Walsh is starting a new Regency-era series at Bold Strokes Books with The Accidental Bride (The Spinsters of Inverley #1).

Miss Grace Linfield has resigned herself to life as a lady’s companion as the only path to respectable security. At least it allows her to visit the beautiful seaside town of Inverley with her charge, Lady Edith. Passions flare when botanist Miss Thea Martin whirls into town —and into Grace’s bed for a scandalous night of passion. Disaster looms when Lady Edith elopes with Thea’s brother. Prim-and-proper Grace and wildly outrageous Thea each wish it was anyone else by their side as they race after them to Gretna Green. In the midst of attempting to stop a wedding that will incur the wrath of both their families, they discover their passion for each other is too strong to resist. A chance at a real relationship was the last thing either of them expected. When Grace and Thea return from Scotland, will the honeymoon be over? Or will love finally be in full bloom?

I have a bit of an idiosyncratic prejudice against treating vampire stories as “historical” if the primary story is set in the present day and the historical element comes in only via the vampire’s immortality. But A Long Time Dead by Samara Breger from Bywater Books is set entirely in the early 19th century, so it fits this podcast’s remit more closely.

Somewhere foggy, 1830 . . . Poppy had always loved the night, which is why it wasn’t too much of a bother to wake one evening in an unfamiliar home far from London, weak and confused and plagued with a terrible thirst for blood, to learn that she could no longer step out into the day. And while vampirism presented several disadvantages, it more than made up for those in its benefits: immortality, a body that could run at speed for hours without tiring, the thrill of becoming a predator, the thing that pulls rabbits from bushes and tears through their fur and flesh with the sharp point of a white fang. And, of course, Roisin. The mysterious woman who has lived for centuries, who held Poppy through her painful transformation, and who, for some reason, is now teaching her how to adjust to her new, endless life. A tight, lonely, buttoned-up woman, with kindness and care pressed up behind her teeth. The time they spend together is as transformative to Poppy as the changes in her body, and soon, she finds herself hopelessly, overwhelmingly attached. But Roisin has secrets of her own, and can’t make any promises; not when vengeance must be served. Soon, their little world explodes. Together and apart, they encounter scores of vampires, shifty pirates, conniving opera singers, ancient nobles, glamorous French women, and a found family that throws a very particular sort of party. But overhead, threat looms—one woman who is capable of destroying everything Poppy and Roisin hold dear.

As I mentioned earlier, there have been a number of relatively recent historical studies that look at cross-dressing and transing gender in the American West that can inspire new angles on queer historical stories. Another relatively recent shift has been in how characters who previously would have been characterized as “passing women” are treated in fiction, given contemporary understandings of gender performance. They Ain't Proper by M.B. Guel from Bella Books signals that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the gender of one of the protagonists.

1880s, The Wild West. An easy, solitary life on the outskirts of Ghosthallow is all Lou Ramirez wants. They want to buy their house plans and live their quiet life far from townsfolk’s prying eyes. That plan, however, hits a bump when instead of house plans, a house wife is delivered to their door instead. Florence Castellanos desperately needs a way out from under her family debt, and it seems as though selling her services as a wife is the only way to do it. Expecting a rough, harsh man to be her new husband, Florence is pleasantly surprised to instead be dropped off at the ranch of an equally surprised Lou. Lou would rather Florence leave them to their lonely existence, but Florence is too charmed by the quiet and mysterious rancher to give up. She may have come into Lou’s life easily, but she certainly isn’t planning to leave that way. Undeterred by Lou’s prickly demeanor, Florence is determined to get her reluctant spouse to open up to her. When the past comes back to haunt the pair, the fight for their independence—and their love—may become more deadly than either of them ever expected.

When the first book in the Las Leonas historic romance series came out, I kept trying to figure out why it showed up with a tag for “lesbian,” because the cover copy sure sounded like a male-female romance. So I dropped it from my spreadsheet and chalked it up to over-zealous keywording. But now that the second book in the series is out, I guess they’re just tagging the entire series as lesbian because one of the component books is. I guess? Anyway, Las Leonas book 2, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera from Canary Street Press looks absolutely delicious. It, too, has gone into my audiobook queue.

One last summer. For Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, the invitation to show her paintings at the 1889 Exposition Universelle came at the perfect time. Soon to be trapped in a loveless marriage, Manuela has given herself one last summer of freedom—in Paris, with her two best friends. One scandalous encounter. Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge, is known for her ruthlessness in business. It's not money she chases, but power. When she sees the opportunity to secure her position among her rivals, she does not hesitate. How difficult could it be to convince the mercurial Miss Caceres Galvan to part with a parcel of land she’s sworn never to sell? One life-changing bargain. Tempted by Cora’s offer, Manuela proposes a trade: her beloved land for a summer with the duchess in her corner of Paris. A taste of the wild, carefree world that will soon be out of her reach. What follows thrills and terrifies Cora, igniting desires the duchess long thought dead. As they fill their days indulging in a shared passion for the arts and their nights with dark and delicious deeds, the happiness that seemed impossible moves within reach…though claiming it would cause the greatest scandal Paris has seen in decades.

Considering the thriving community of lesbian romance authors in Australia, there are surprisingly few historic romances set there, but this month we get one more addition to that short list: House of Longing by Tara Calaby from Text Publishing.

Charlotte has always known she is different. Where other young women see their destiny in marriage and motherhood, the reclusive Charlotte wants only to work with her father in his stationery business; perhaps even run it herself one day. Then Flora Dalton bursts through the shop door and into Charlotte’s life—and a new world of baffling desires and possibilities seems to open up to her. But Melbourne society of the 1890s is not built to embrace unorthodoxy. When tragedy strikes and Charlotte is unmoored by grief, she finds herself admitted to Kew Lunatic Asylum ‘for her own safety’. There she learns that women enter the big white house on the hill for many reasons, not all of them to do with lunacy. That her capacity for love, loyalty and friendship is greater than she had ever understood. And that it will take all of these things—along with an unexpected talent for guile—to extract herself from the care of men and make her way back to her heart’s desires.

Kim Pritekel’s Wynter series, from Sapphire Books, includes both contemporary and historic stories, all revolving around the town of Wynter, Colorado. The fifth book in the series, Showing Mercy is only the second book with a historic setting.

Fifteen-year-old Mercy Faulkner is hit with the hardest blow of her young life when her beloved father is killed in an accident. Now, she must leave all she knows to move with her mother, a hard woman that she feels like she barely knows, to the small mountain town of Wynter, Colorado. Her mother has been offered a job there and a place to live and start over for the two. Bethany Wynter, seventeen, gorgeous and the granddaughter of the founder of Wynter and early residents, Justice and Thea Kilkoyne, she has everything going for her. She and her twin brother, Billy are at the top of their game - popular, well-loved in the community and dominate in academics and athletics. But, when the beautiful and shy Mercy shows up in town, a sibling rivalry will begin that will split the twins for the first time in their life. When World War II hits the shores of the United States, everything changes for everyone. Who will go off to war, who will come back, and will any of them ever be the same?

As usual, the new releases this month include a reminder that I can only include the books I know about, and knowing about books either means that they get talked up in the social media I follow, or someone lets me know about forthcoming releases directly, or they have the right keywords to turn up in my searches on Amazon (which, alas, is still the most efficient place to run such searches) and have cover copy that make the sapphic content clear. If you have a book coming out—or know of one—that you think might fall within the scope of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, please drop me a note. I’m sure there are books I miss unintentionally.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been reading lately? It’s been a thin month, in part because I’m writing the show a bit earlier than usual, but in part because life has been hectic. Although I have several books in process, I only completed listening to two audiobooks.

The latest installment in Sherry Thomas’s “Lady Sherlock” series, A Tempest at Sea, follows the pattern set previously with a lot of non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, and revisiting key scenes from different points of view to gradually unlock the story. This particular method of building a mystery story may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s absolute catnip for me. This volume is a sort of locked room mystery on board a ship, with Charlotte Holmes spending the entire story arc in disguise. The various twists are satisfying as identities and motives are sorted out. And, as in previous books in the series, the casual inclusion of historically-appropriate queer characters makes me feel much at home even without any central queer romance.

The second audiobook I completed is more overtly sapphic but comes with a warning for character death. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue is set in Ireland during the Spanish Flu pandemic in the early 20th century. Reading it while still in the midst of Covid is unsettling in the parallels. (The novel was written prior to Covid but was expedited to release once the pandemic started.) The story spans only a few days in the life of a nurse in a combination flu/maternity ward and packs a lot of drama into that short period. One of the many sub-themes is harsh criticism of the treatment of unwed mothers and their children. This was a hard and painful book to read, but pandemics aren’t exactly a bed of roses to live through—or die in.

Fiction

Last week, we aired Catherine Lundoff’s story “The Pirate in the Mirror” and today we have her on the show to talk about that and her other projects.

[Interview transcript will be available at a later date.]

Show Notes

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

• Teaser for a potential upcoming guest
• Recent book shopping
  • Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
  • Bullough, Vern L. & Bonnie Bullough. 1993. Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN 0-8122-1431-5
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • A Wound Like Lapis Lazuli by Melody Wiklund
  • The Disenchantment by Celia Bell
  • The Accidental Bride (The Spinsters of Inverley #1) by Jane Walsh
  • A Long Time Dead by Samara Breger
  • They Ain't Proper by M.B. Guel
  • An Island Princess Starts a Scandal (Las Leonas #2) by Adriana Herrera
  • House of Longing by Tara Calaby
  • Showing Mercy by Kim Pritekel
• What I’ve been consuming
  • A Tempest at Sea (Lady Sherlock 7) by Sherry Thomas
  • The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
• This month we interview Catherine Lundoff and talk about:
  • The historic Jacquotte de la Haye
  • The historic inspirations for the series
  • Media mentioned:
    • ”The Letter of Marque” on Catherine’s Patreon
    • The Four Musketeers: The True Story of D'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis & Athos by Kari L. Maund (aka Kari Sperring) and Phil Nanson
    • The Secret Life of Aphra Behn by Janet Todd
    • ”Born with Teeth” by Liz Duffy Adams (play about Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare)

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
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Catherine Lundoff Online

• Website: catherinelundoff.net
• Website: queenofswordspress.com/
• Mastodon: @Clundoff@wandering.shop
• Twitter: @clundoff
• Facebook: Clundoff

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 257 - The Pirate in the Mirror by Catherine Lundoff - transcript

(Originally aired 2023/04/29 - listen here)

Our fiction episode for this quarter features returning guests—not only a returning author, Catherine Lundoff, but the return of her 17th century spy and pirate duo, Celeste Girard and Jacquotte Delahaye. This is the fourth story of Celeste and Jacquotte that we’ve hosted on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, which is a reminder of just how long this fiction series has been running.

Catherine Lundoff has worked her way through many roles: archaeologist, bookstore owner, author, publisher, and IT professional. As the founder and head of Queen of Swords Press, she publishes—as the website describes it—"swashbuckling tales of derring-do, bold new adventures in time and space, mysterious stories of the occult and arcane, and fantastical tales of people and lands far and near.” Or, as she sometimes puts it, “Stories that feel like Queen of Swords books.”

Her own fiction covers a whole gamut from historicals to fantasy to science fiction to erotica to horror, including a series of soon-to-be-three novels about menopausal werewolves: Silver Moon, Blood Moon, and a forthcoming title yet to be announced.

Catherine lives in Minnesota with her wife who is a bookbinder and artist, as well as with the cats that own them. The best one-stop-shop to find Catherine online is probably queenofswordspress.com, which gives you the opportunity to pick up some books while you’re at it. (I should add the truth-in-advertising disclaimer that this includes my own novella “The Language of Roses” which Queen of Swords published.)

The narrator for today’s story is yours truly. I love the chance to do some of the story narration for our fiction series, especially for stories falling in one of my favorite historical periods.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

“The Pirate in the Mirror”

by Catherine Lundoff

            Celeste Adele Girard glanced up from the letter she was reading, her gaze moving automatically past the slow-moving waves that rocked The Lioness on a leisurely path through the Caribbean to the small huddle of pirates at the rail. Jacquotte Delahaye, their captain, was peering at something on the water through her spyglass and swearing loudly. That alone was not enough to distract Celeste. Jacquotte swore often and heartily and her men often gathered around her when they thought a fat merchant, or that greatest of gifts from the gods of the sea, a lightly guarded Spanish galleon, might be in sight.

            It was not so much that the crew looked worried that captured Celeste’s attention at that moment. No, it was the flash of sunlight on Jacquotte’s red tresses, one that followed a thread of bright silver, that caught Celeste’s eye. It trapped her feelings in a net to realize that this life they led could not last forever and her heart ached at thought of giving up this wild freedom. And even more at the thought of trying again to convince the pirate captain that they must plan for a retirement that might come sooner than later.

            But that was not the stuff of either her letter or of the crew’s concerns and she shook her worries about the future off with an effort. She walked across the swaying deck to the group around Jacquotte. The letter had taken two months to arrive, it could take a bit longer to address. She tucked it away in the pouch at her belt.  “What is it?”

            Jacquotte did not lower the spyglass, but Harcourt, the first mate, gave Celeste a worried look. “There is a ship pursuing us, Mademoiselle. The Captain believes that it may be one of Captain De Graaf’s fleet. Tigress is the one that his lover Anne Dieu le Veut, late of Tortuga, usually commands.”

            Celeste’s blonde eyebrows rose. “Are we not all ‘late of Tortuga’? I thought all the pirates had been driven out. Is there something to fear from this Anne ‘God-Wills-It’ that we should be peering at her ship and swearing about it? I have never heard you speak of her before.”

            Jacquotte’s thin lips twisted up in something like a smile, but wasn’t, not quite and her gaze suggested her thoughts were elsewhere. “If she is here, she has no great love for me. And De Graaf is likely to be not far behind. He would never let her ship sail so far out unescorted.” She handed the spyglass off to Harcourt and took Celeste’s arm. “Walk with me, my dear.”

            Celeste simpered like a court lady and fluttered an imaginary fan in a futile effort to make Jacquotte laugh, but she dropped all pretense at joking once they were out of earshot of the crew. “What are we to do? Is she truly that dangerous?” She murmured the question softly, brushing some dirt off Jacquotte’s jacket collar as if they spoke of nothing significant.

            “Alone, we should be able to outrun her. But it would be a near thing with so little wind. Our best hope,” Jacquotte frowned at the horizon, “is that this is pure chance and she does not recognize the ship.” She glanced down and gave Celeste a long thoughtful look, ice-blue eyes glinting in the later afternoon sun. “I could put you in a boat with a couple of strong men, send you off to Maracaibo. I’m told there is a representative from the King in port; you could ask for sanctuary.”

            Celeste blinked in shock. Jacquotte had never proposed sending her off ship to safety before and she herself had never asked, always supposing the pirate’s strong arm and sword enough to protect both of them at sea.

And then there were her own wits to serve in any situation that didn’t involve an actual battle. Well, where are those wits now? She schooled her features into a blank expression. Her brain whirled, contemplating, then rejecting several schemes in quick succession. A rope snapped in the wind and she glanced upward.

            Jacquotte followed her gaze to the Dutch flag flapping gently in the breeze, hung in lieu of her own fiercer flag to lure in merchant prey. “I’m not sure that being taken as a merchantman is an improvement. We’ll be just as dead if her crew decides to capture us.” She glanced back down. “So perhaps you are thinking of something else? What plot is spinning in your pretty head, my little spy?”

            Celeste narrowed her eyes against the glare of the setting sun, wrinkles for once, far from her mind. “I think there is no moon tonight?”

            The pirate gave the horizon and the ship that followed them a considering glance. “We might be able to pile on enough sail to outrun them until nightfall. If we went quiet and dark and avoided the reefs, we might be able to evade them until I can find a good harbor to hide in.” Jacquotte’s eyes went cold and storm-gray. “Or run them aground in the dark.”

            Her lover tilted her blonde head back and gave her a narrow-eyed stare. “You know her well. What is this about?”

            Jacquotte grimaced. “Later. I swear it,” she added, watching Celeste’s expression shift. “Escape first.”

            “Indeed. Then we must begin at once. I know so little of your past, I would not wish to miss an offered morsel.” Celeste smiled slightly and went aft to talk to the other pirates to persuade them to do as she asked with a pretty word or two.

            Jacquotte watched them gather a pile of expendable items to throw overboard to lighten the ship. She turned to the sails and the helm, barking orders to put on more of the latter and shift the former into the starboard to pick up more of the wind. Pirates tumbled on to the deck from all directions, tossing things overboard, clearing the decks, climbing the rigging.

 It made Jacquotte’s heart sing a little to see it. Her crew. Her ship. And she would yield neither to Anne or De Graaf. She went to consult with her helmsman.

            The Tigress was getting closer. Celeste didn’t need a spyglass of her own to see that. Not within cannon range, fortunately, but gaining in a way that suggested that a pirate captain had noticed prey and was giving chase. Celeste swore softly under her breath and glanced at the quarter deck and watched Jacquotte for a moment.

The captain was tense, angry in a way that Celeste had not seen her before other battles, other pursuits. She thought this chase was personal. Celeste felt a tiny flash of jealousy that made her grimace. For the first time, another woman was the focus of Jacquotte’s attention when she was only steps away. But more than anything, her spy’s brain whirled with questions about what had happened, what had pulled these two together and then, even further apart?

She could think of only a few things that spoke to the hearts of the pirates that she knew: love, revenge, or profit. Celeste tapped her chin thoughtfully. More importantly, what would dissuade an ardent pursuer motivated by all or some of those passions?

In a moment, she was moving swiftly across the deck toward Jacquotte where she stood talking to several members of the crew on the quarterdeck. Celeste asked softly, “May I borrow the captain for a brief conference?”

They looked for a moment as if they might object, but with a certain amount of grumbling, returned to other duties and left them to talk. “Why would Anne Dieu-Le-Veut pursue you at all? No, I don’t want to hear that you will tell me later. I want to know what drives her. We will need other plans if outrunning them in the dark fails.” Celeste crossed her arms and watched Jacquotte’s gaze shift down to her bosom. She bit back a small smile; going corsetless in a lad’s garb had its uses.

But this was hardly the time to be provoking that reaction in her pirate. “You do want me to help, correct? Not just hop in a row boat and go off to safety with crew that you will need if this ship is boarded?” She raised an eyebrow and dropped her arms, stepping up so that her golden-brown eyes met Jacquotte’s.

The pirate gave a wry grin. “For the shortest part: treasure and betrayal. I sailed with De Graaf for a time, years before I met you. I found Anne in Port Royal trying to figure out how to turn whore when she ran out of money after her fiancé turned out to be less appealing than his letters. I liked her spirit so I brought her aboard. We were wild and young and blood-thirsty and even then, Anne stood out. She was beautiful, fierce…and treacherous. We shared ships, crews, captured spoils, and more. I thought of her as the new family I had found here in this strange new world.”

Jacquotte paused and looked away. The sails strained in a newfound breeze and they could all feel The Lioness leap up over the waves with a will. The hands gave a small cheer while Jacquotte turned back to Celeste. “For a time, I fancied myself in love with her.” Here her face tightened. “Until we took the Santa Teresa. So much Spanish gold, chérie, you can scarcely imagine…”

Celeste shifted impatiently. “I can imagine quite a lot of gold. I take it they betrayed you?”

Jacquotte nodded. “They murdered most of my crew and would have done for me as well, but they thought I had drowned and De Graaf and Anne sailed away with the gold. By the time I floated to land and recovered enough to get a new ship of my own, they had a whole fleet and there was little I could do to avenge myself or the others.”

Celeste frowned. “Until now. You don’t want to run. You want to fight. But why does she follow you?”

“She’s hated me for surviving, for being respected in a way that she is not. Also, perhaps, a small issue with me seizing her former ship and marooning her and her crew some four years back. I imagine that she plans to finish what they failed to do before.” Jacquotte grimaced. “Yes, I want to fight. But this is not the ship to take on the Tigress. For that we need all my ships, especially if he comes to save her.”

Celeste glanced toward the cage where the messenger doves were kept. One was missing. The ship rocked starboard, clearly changing course. “You’ve already sent the bird. Is there another plan that you’re not sharing with me?” Celeste frowned.

Jacquotte bit back a smile, knowing how much she hated to be left in the dark. They could not run forever, even if they lost Anne and her crew tonight. De Graaf might be anywhere nearby with more ships. And they were not the only foes Jacquotte had in these waters.

“I need to plan for something that will bring this pursuit to an end, once and for all, leaving us alive at the end of it.”

“And, perhaps, achieve some level of revenge?” Celeste gave her an

appraising look.

 Jacquotte gave a rare, sudden grin. “Perhaps.”

            Celeste tumbled into bed next to Jacquotte well after sunset, hands raw from the ropes. The sliver of new moon was on its up and the wind with it and The Lioness was still making good speed, at least for the moment. The closer they got to the reefs near Hispaniola, the slower they would need to move and the greater the chance that the Tigress would finally catch them.

            Or they would get where they were going, wherever that was. Jacquotte was keeping mum about their specific destination but Celeste had her suspicions. In any case, she was too tired to ask, so she wrapped her arms and one leg around her pirate and sank into a deep slumber.

            In the end, it wasn’t the sound of guns or the scrape of rocks against the hull that woke her. It was still dark and The Lioness was motionless, barely creaking in the waves. Noises from elsewhere in the room told her that Jacquotte was already getting dressed so she rolled over and lit the candle. “What is happening?” she murmured as she rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Where are we?”

            Jacquotte gave her a cheerful, bloodthirsty grin. “We’re in a defensible spot in familiar waters and closer to my ships than we were. So now we wait. If they are foolish enough to chase us into the harbor, the rocks will tear the bottom from them while we rake them with all the shot we have. If they wait outside thinking to trap us, there will be four to one odds some hours hence.”

            “And what of De Graaf’s ships? What if they come too?” Celeste rolled out of bed and began to put her lad’s clothes on again. They were much better for fighting than skirts, if fighting there was to be. She sincerely hoped it didn’t come to that. Spywork had its own perils, but getting skewered on a cutlass or smashed to pieces by grapeshot were not usually among them. She shuddered as she dressed and tucked her weapons into her belt.

            Jacquotte was already out the door bellowing orders. The bosun handed her a cup of ale and some salt fish as she emerged on the deck, not sure what she was going to see. Behind the ship was a wall of greenery that stretched up the tall hill behind them. Celeste could hear creatures moving in the jungle that seemed so close that she could reach and touch the vines. She gnawed on her fish and sighed. Perhaps Jacquotte could be persuaded to visit Paris again after this.

            The seaward view was not prepossessing. The waves dashed hard against sharp rocks lining the edge of the harbor and for a moment, Celeste could not imagine how they had sailed into it unscathed. But beyond that thin shield, was a ship twice the size of theirs, based on what the crew had to say, so she was grateful for what protection it provided.

            “Of course, that’s not the only reason that we’re here.” Jacquotte had a faraway gleam in her eye. “The Santa Teresa’s gold is supposed to be buried on this island.”

            Celeste took a startled breath. “And you know where?”

            “An old man sold me a tale in Tortuga before we left. He may have been too far gone in drink to be reliable, but we’ll see what we can find.”

            “What if Anne simply blockades us in and fires on us from there?” Celeste gestured at the rocky harbor opening.

            “You worry too much, my love. We will fire back. Now, would you like to help me go look for a shiny golden distraction?” Jacquotte’s grin gleamed in the fading light. “We’ll have to go ashore in the dark since we don’t, as you point out, have much time before we’ll be in a battle of one kind or another. She’s bound to send her men ashore too.” She snapped her fingers at a pirate who started to light a torch and he blew out the flame with a muttered curse.

            Celeste realized that the pirates didn’t want to make themselves an easy target. Which meant that she was about to clamber into a longboat and go ashore in the dark to stumble around the jungle with Jacquotte and her crew. She closed her eyes and thought of piles of gold. And Jacquotte’s joy when she triumphed over her enemies. She gave a hearty sigh, tucked her hair up under her hat and made ready.

            In the end, it was just Jacquotte, Celeste and twelve of the more trustworthy pirates who went ashore. Harcourt and the others stayed aboard to watch for Anne, ready to fire the moment a boat was spotted in range. In the meantime, even the metal that gleamed in the moonlight was covered so as not to be a target and not a candle shone where it could be seen from harbor’s mouth.

            Jacquotte closed her eyes, shutting out the boat and the rapidly approaching shore for a moment. It was just as well that none of her companions could see her face right now. She wasn’t bluffing about what the old man had told her, at least not entirely. But even if they found De Graaf’s hidden cache in the dark after fighting their way through the jungle and whoever Anne might send ashore, there might be nothing left.

            The old pirate who had told her about it was far gone with drink and the pox. He had wanted his own revenge on De Graaf and his crew for their past sins and saw Jacquotte as a means to that end. Well, she’d do the old lad proud if she could. Avenging herself and the others on De Graaf and Anne had been long delayed and it dizzied her to see it within reach.

            An idea half-formed, then blew away as the wind picked up and the boat scraped against the shore. She jumped out and walked the last couple yards to the shore, leaving her crew to haul the boat up and secure it. The dark mass of trees ahead of them was relatively quiet, apart from the occasional bird call. The day’s heat was fading, but it was still warm and there was a whiff of rain in the air.

            Jacquotte looked around and oriented herself, letting her memories of what the old pirate had told her tumble into place before she beckoned to Celeste and the others. “That rock, the one up there between the two larger ones. That’s where we’re headed. Ready, my love? Good. Stay close.” She led them along the edge of the trees, hunting for the traces of an old trail that might still be there.

            But if it was, they couldn’t find it. Two of the pirates stepped forward with long knives and began to hack a path through the lush forest growth. Ducking and weaving under vines and around trees, they made their way upwards in the dark. It felt like hours before they stopped to catch their breath and rest just below the top.

            Something caught Jacquotte’s eye and quickly resolved into the gleam of moonlight on metal from behind a rock above them. Celeste must have seen it at the same time and threw herself at her back, knocking her over and rolling her into some prickly short trees and the shelter of darkness. The pirates scattered as a shot split the quiet of the night. More followed and Jacquotte drew her own pistol, trying to see a target in the dark.

            She shoved Celeste away and pointed to a clump of rocks downhill, trying to get her to a safer spot. A woman’s voice rang out from above them, “Red! Come out before I hunt you and your boys down. If you surrender now, I might not kill you all.” Her voice was cold, distant and familiar. There was nothing in her tone that suggested that she wasn’t serious.

            Jacquotte heard Celeste hiss softly between her teeth and utter a soft oath. She grimaced to herself in the dark. Of course, having one plan fail didn’t mean her next one would. Celeste was going to be very angry when she learned that there was a plan that she didn’t know about. Jacquotte looked forward to the argument almost as much as its aftermath.

Putting her fingers to her lips, she gave a sharp, shrill whistle that echoed through the woods around them as the guns of Anne’s men fell silent. It was an eerie sound, like a banshee’s call in the night and Jacquotte gasped a little when she finally stopped.

Then she jumped to her feet, running toward the sound of crashing branches and shouting men. Through it all, one woman’s voice could be heard yelling orders and cursing. Jacquotte followed that sound, pulling her pistol from her belt with one hand and her long knife from its sheath with the other. There would be bloody work tonight.

            Celeste stared after her lover for a few seconds, her mouth dropping open. She’d suspected a trap and had a plan for that all along. But didn’t tell her. Celeste’s eyes narrowed as she, too, scrambled to her feet. If they survived the night, she was going to have a few words with a certain pirate captain.

            She darted behind a tree as a huge pirate came crashing through the dark clearing where they’d been hiding. Was he one of Jacquotte’s men or one of Anne’s? It was hard to tell in the dark and now that the shooting had begun in earnest, the air was filling with smoke.

            Someone charged into the clearing and there was a clash of blades, followed by a whispered, “What found we at Arnold’s Knoll?”

            “Gold and blood,” the other answered and laughed softly. “Come on. The Captain said she’d pay a sack of gold for whoever brought her that redhaired bitch’s head. Let’s go find her and claim our prize.” They lumbered back out into the trees and rocks.

            Celeste bit her lip and looked around. She could follow them, but barring ill-luck, Jacquotte could avoid or kill oafs as clumsy as those. But how many of them did Anne have? And how had a simple tale of betrayal and gold lust turned into a quest for Jacquotte’s head? There was much that she hadn’t been told about tonight’s doings, but there would be time enough to deal with that later.

            She moved in the direction that Jacquotte had gone, listening for the sound of her voice. Or her blade, which seemed more likely. Smoke filled the trees and men ran to and fro, the sound of steel clashing amid the crack of bullets. This was a veritable pitched battle and for a long moment, Celeste thought about fleeing back to the shore and the boat. She was an adequate shot and a decent swordswoman, but neither would be enough to protect her in this chaos.

            A huge hand shot out of the mist and grabbed her shoulder with a bellow. She kicked out hard, aiming for his knees, then slammed her elbow up into his jaw, just like Jacquotte had taught her. He howled in pain, but didn’t let her go until she kicked him again. Heart racing, she twisted, striking out and pulling the knife from her belt in one motion. With a yell, she slashed out, only to have her opponent drop like a stone.

            Celeste squinted at her blade in astonishment. There wasn’t that much blood on it, was there? A motion caught her eye and she dropped into a defensive stance for the attack that was sure to come. A long-jawed, pale face topped with black hair bound in a scarf above burning dark brown eyes stared at her across the pirate’s body. “Come with me if you want to see the dawn.” The woman’s voice was raspy, commanding…familiar. Celeste hesitated and a bullet blew past her, embedding itself in a nearby tree. Her rescuer turned and vanished into the smoky darkness and Celeste followed a moment later.

            The path ahead was a blur of men running and blades clashing right up to the moment that her escort came to an abrupt halt. “Here now, pretty. Where would you be taking my lady?” Jacquotte’s voice had a dangerous singsong croon to it that Celeste had only heard before when she was far gone in the heat of battle and she shivered.

            Anne hissed softly, Jacquotte’s blade at her throat—she’d gotten a cutlass from somewhere, Celeste noted dispassionately—and Jacquotte’s pistol at her head. “I can call them off,” she began, her voice barely audible where Celeste stood.

            Jacquotte laughed. “There’s my Annie! Always one to think you could stop the wind, once it started blowing. I couldn’t stop my own men now. They’ll fight until there’s a winner or there’s gold. Speaking of which, it’s time you told me where the treasure is.”

            Celeste stepped closer and gasped at the sight of the two of them standing face to face in the moonlight. She blinked and the resemblance that had suggested they could be sisters settled into two hard-faced women, glaring at each other over drawn weapons while a battle raged around them. Celeste took the pistol from Anne’s hand and checked to make sure that was ready to fire. 

             “And don’t think to lead me on a merry chase in hopes that De Graaf will turn up. He’s as likely to be drinking and whoring in Maracaibo as he is to remember your grudges and where you’ve taken one of his ships. Tell me what I want to know or I’ll put you in our hold and leave you there until he sobers up enough to ransom you. Do you care to wager on that?”

            “You could just shoot her.” Celeste murmured, suiting her actions to her words and firing at a pirate who was running toward them with a fearsome grimace. When she looked back at the women, they were both watching her, Jacquotte amused and Anne calculating.

            “Yes, Red, you could just do that. But you want that gold more than you want my blood.” Anne gave Jacquotte a feral grin. “Come on then. Up the hill and I’ll show you where we buried it.” They turned and began walking.

            So easy…Celeste bit back the thought before it crossed her lips. There was a game being played here, one that began on the sea and that might not end here. She knew that she could wait where she was to see what transpired. But her curiosity would never allow it. With a sigh, she scrambled after them.

            Jacquotte stifled a flash of murderous rage. Betrayal, murder, theft and yet, somehow, the only person not to blame for that was Anne herself. Her litany of blamelessness was a low hum that got louder as they got further from the battle behind them.

            “If you don’t stop whining, I’ll take your ear off,” she growled as Anne stumbled to a halt on a flat rock ledge. “Now, unless you chiseled into the stone itself, I don’t think this is the place.”

            Jacquotte watched as Celeste walked cautiously past them to examine the stone wall in front of them. It appeared to be solid rock until she pulled back some of the shrubs and revealed a dark hole in the stone. A cave entrance, it had to be. Her heart raced and she reined in her imagination from picturing what that much gold could buy them. Far too soon for that.

            “I think I found something.” Celeste leaned over, then slipped down into the dark space with a cry. Jacquotte winced but she looked back at them from the cave mouth a moment later as Anne laughed mockingly. Celeste’s eyes widened, visible even in the dim light. “Get down, Jacquotte!’

            Jacquotte didn’t hesitate, throwing Anne to the ground and landing on top of her. The other pirate twisted hard and broke free just as a cannonball smashed into the rocks above their heads. Anne laughed again, the sound wild and echoing, as she scrambled to her feet, kicking away Jacquotte’s grasping hands as she ran to the edge of the cliff and the trail down.

            Jacquotte cursed loudly and crawled over to the dark hole where Celeste had vanished. From below, she could hear a soft murmur of: “No snakes, please God. No snakes.” wafting up from below despite the noise and chaos around her.

            “Can you reach my hand, chérie? Reach up and I will pull you out.”

            “I think I’m better off down here.” Another cannonball whistling by overhead drowned out her next words. Celeste shouted up a moment later, “Come down here! It’s safer and likely to be more profitable.”

            At the word “profitable,” Jacquotte slid into the opening, bracing herself for a sharp drop into the darkness below. “I’m coming down!” To her surprise, it was only a few feet.

            She blinked until she could see Celeste outlined in the moonlight. “What have you found?’

            “Not what you hoped, but enough to be useful, I think.” She guided Jacquotte to a couple of small chests tucked against a rock wall, well out of sight if one was looking down into the cave. As the noise escalated outside, she shot at the lock with the spare pistol that she pulled from Jacquotte’s belt.

            The chest fell apart with a clang, spilling a few bags of coins, some jewelry and other valuables. Jacquotte grinned. “Not the full treasure by any means, but enough to buy us all a few comforts for our old age.” She glanced up. “Those of us who last that long.”

            “I have an idea.” Celeste grabbed a bag of coins and scrambled back to the cave entrance. Jacquotte gave her a leg up and she stood up on the ledge with a mighty yell, “This bag of gold to the man who captures Captain Anne Dieu le Veut alive before Captain De Graaf blows us to bits! She is our ticket off this island if you stop her!”

            The men on the mountain below bayed like a hunting pack. Celeste grabbed Jacquotte’s arm and tugged her up and out of the cave, and they ran off the ledge together. They darted down the slope in a wild rush, tumbling out into a sea of men and smoke and the occasional body, all yelling over the cannon fire, many of them still fighting each other, others looking wildly for Anne. Jacquotte grabbed a few of them and led them down the slope, heading towards the harbor, Celeste at her side.

            Three days later, The Lioness sailed out of the harbor and they watched the Tigress make for the open sea. Celeste and Jacquotte watched her sail off, the latter with a distant thoughtful look on her face. “She’s not half the pirate that you are.” Celeste said finally, giving her a nudge with her shoulder as they leaned on the rail.

            “I’m not half the pirate captain I was,” Jacquotte grimaced. “We’re fifteen men down, between the dead and wounded, and the rest barely fit to sail. If it wasn’t for my other ships, we’d be in irons in Anne’s hold. To have two plans fail is hardly a thing to be proud of.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t think there’s enough of the gold left to buy me a governorship like Sir Henry, but perhaps a small estate? We could settle down, raise sheep and chickens.”

            Celeste laughed. “What did we know about sheep and chickens? An inn on the coast, gossip and news, smuggling on the side, some spywork when we feel like it—that’s the life for us. But not before we’re done with this one. She’ll be back, especially since we have the treasure now, and we’ll need a plan to deal with her then.”

            Jacquotte squinted at the horizon, then glanced at her. “For now, let’s go home. I want to hear more about this inn of yours.” She leaned down to kiss Celeste and something crackled. The spy gave an odd frown and reached into the pouch in her shirt.

            She held out a letter with a sigh. “I’m afraid I’ll have to tell you about it when I return from Paris. It’s a summons from the Cardinal. He says that the King’s life is in danger and I need to honor my oath to protect him.”

            The pirate groaned and handed the letter back. “And I still have your letter of marque and sail under the French flag. Upon occasion. To Paris, then, with a stop at Saint Martin to refuel and bring on more hands. We may hope that your cunning fox of a Cardinal has more plans up his sleeve for saving the King than recalling you.”

            Celeste nodded and kissed her. “I’ve been wanting to show you Paris. We had to leave so quickly last time. For now, let’s go talk about inns and smuggling.” They both laughed as Jacquotte gestured at the pilot to sail eastward.

Show Notes

This quarter’s fiction episode presents “The Pirate in the Mirror” by Catherine Lundoff, narrated by Heather Rose Jones.

A transcript of this podcast is available here.

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
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Links to Catherine Lundoff Online

• Website (Queen of Swords Press): https://queenofswordspress.com/
• Twitter: @clundoff
• Instagram (Queen of Swords Press): @qospress
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clundoff

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 255 - On the Shelf for April 2023 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2023/04/01 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for April 2023.

It’s been a long, wet winter here in California and—though I always do the knock-on-wood type of deflection of bad luck by saying “of course, we need the rain”—I have to confess I’m thinking very fondly ahead to summer. Even the hot days. Maybe especially the hot days.

I’m also, increasingly, thinking fondly ahead to something else. I don’t tend to talk about my day-job doing failure investigations on this show much because there’s very little overlap. That is, there’s actually a lot of philosophical overlap between my writing and my day-job, but it takes a bit of explaining. Having a day-job means that I can be blithely oblivious to questions of monetizing this podcast. But more and more, my day-job has been crowding out the time and attention I have for my creative work: writing fiction, and the blog and podcast. In part it’s because I’ve been accumulating more managerial duties in addition to my investigation work. In part it’s because my department’s headcount keeps getting squeezed and we all have bigger workloads. So in addition to the increasing frequency of working evenings and the occasional weekend, it means that when I do close the corporate laptop, I often don’t want to do anything involving “braining” or staring at computer screens.

But there is an end in sight. If you ever spot me concluding a social media post with something like “2 years, 1 month,” it’s the countdown to my target retirement date. It’s depressing to think that I may not get back to serious fiction writing until I retire. But we all have our choices and priorities, and in the capitalist hellscape we live in, it would be a difficult choice to give up that sweet, sweet corporate paycheck and retirement fund for the laughably thin income of a lesbian historical fiction novelist. So I hang on, and I look ahead, and I scramble to keep this presence going so that I have some hope that people remember who I am and what I’m giving to the world. Some days, that’s the only thing that keeps the podcast going: the thought that it’s my only current way of saying “I exist, I matter, I am here" to the larger lesbian community.

Publications on the Blog

But this is all to say that I’ve spent the second month in a row without reading anything new for the blog. Which also means that the Gothic Fiction episode is going to get pushed out again.

Book Shopping!

But in the meantime, the book shopping came through and I have two new books (plus several downloaded articles) in preparation for that show. The most focused of these is Paulina Palmer’s Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. It looks primarily focused on relatively contemporary gothic novels, though some with historic settings. The second new acquisition is The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature edited by E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, which includes the article “The Gothic Novel and the Negotiation of Homophobia” by Steven Bruhm, although I’ll clearly want to cover the entire collection of articles on the blog. Looking through the table of contents, I see a lot of familiar names.

Fiction

This month will see the first fiction episode of this year’s series, which will be Catherine Lundoff’s “The Pirate in the Mirror,” another story in her Celeste and Jacquotte series.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

And speaking of fiction, let’s look at new and recent sapphic historical fiction. There are several March books that only just caught my eye, all of them set in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Violet Cowper has put out another book in the Ladylike Inclinations series. Her Venetian Beauty doesn’t have a series number on the cover, but it looks like it should be number 4.

A fiery beauty and a scholarly spinster... together, will they find the happy ending they deserve? Alexandra Craven has a secret dream to escape the trap of the genteel birth and earn her independent living as a writer. She thinks that accompanying her brother on the Grand Tour would provide her with enough material. However, when her brother falls ill in Venice, she is left without a guidance - and has to look to the timid daughter of their noble host, Veronica Zanotti, for help. Veronica Zanotti, a young lady of more learning than charm, has no secret dreams at all. She is seemingly content to be left alone in her father's library while her sister enjoys the spotlight. However, when a ravishing Englishwoman asks for her assistance, she is plunged into a whirlpool of perilous adventures...

Another Regency-era novel, The Enemy Within by Stein Willard, seems to assume that the casual shopper will be familiar with the series the book belongs to, as the descriptive cover copy is very slight. So your guess is as good as mine on this one.

With their goal of receiving official pardons from the Crown finally in sight, Hirsh and her band of pirate sisters are actively planning for the future. Vows are made and new friendships are formed as the family continues to grow.

We get a lot more information on setting and characters for Eight Strings by Margaret DeRosia from Simon & Schuster.

Ever since her grandfather introduced her to eight-string marionettes, Francesca has dreamed of performing from the rafters of Venice’s popular Minerva Theater. There’s just one problem: the profession is only open to men. When her father arranges to sell her into marriage to pay off his gambling debts, Francesca flees her home. Masquerading as a male orphan named Franco, she secures an apprenticeship with the Minerva’s eccentric ensemble of puppeteers. Amid the elaborate set-pieces, the glittering limes, and the wooden marionettes, she finds a place where she belongs—and grows into the person she was always meant to be: Franco. The past threatens to catch up with Franco when his childhood friend Annella reappears and recognizes him at the theater. Now a paid companion to an influential woman, Annella understands the lengths one must go to survive, and she promises to keep Franco’s secret. Desire sparks between them, and they find themselves playing a dangerous game against the most powerful figures of Venice’s underworld. With their lives—and the fate of the Minerva—hanging in the balance, Franco must discover who is pulling the strings before it’s too late.

Moving up to the early 20th century, we have Her Female Husband (The Kendallville Librarian #1) by Julieanne from Western Michigan Publishing.

While many women in 1908 accept their lot in life to marry, rear children, and run a household for their husbands, Sarah, the Kendallville Librarian lives with her own private reasons to resist such a path. Despite having moved to Kendallville to "find a husband" alongside her best friend, Lydia, she has yet to allow any of the local men her favor. For her own reasons, Lydia also avoids tying herself to a man. While she yearns to do a "man's job" of being a journalist, and for a fair wage, she faces rejection at every turn. That is, until the day she overhears whispers of a woman in another city doing the unthinkable… living as a man. She can't possibly. Or can she? When the notion of donning men's clothing and pursing her dreams won't leave her mind, Lydia begins scheming, much to Sarah's simultaneous shock and burgeoning hope. Sarah, however, soon finds herself thrust into the center of local murder investigation. With everything at stake, will Sarah and Lydia get their happily ever after together? Will the Kendallville Librarian survive her perilous endeavors and finally find peace with her female husband?

I frequently take note when characters in a story fall in the ambiguous territory between gender disguise and transgender identity. When the first couple of books in L. Dreamer’s Heart series came out in 2020, I wasn’t sure how to categorize the relationship. Now that the third and final installment has come out, Heart’s Home, the author has confirmed that he views the story as a lesbian romance. The previous books were originally published under the author’s former name but have now been reissued with the byline L. Dreamer.

In the final installment of the Heart Series, join Thomas, Rachel, TJ, Charlotte, and all of your favorite side characters as they continue to navigate the highs and lows of the lives they’ve created. Follow their adventures through the years, from the Great War to the Great Depression and beyond as the family charts their own paths while learning the true meaning of love, loss, hard work, and family. This collection of short stories and novellas picks up a couple of years after Heart Sings and finishes off the Heart Series with new challenges, triumphs, heartbreaks, and joy.

Another series that recently wrapped up is Cameron Darrow’s “Ashes of Victory” supernatural stories set between the two world wars. The author asked me to let people know that the entire series is now available as a boxed set under the title From the Ashes of Victory.

The First World War is over, the old world shattered and overturned. But one didn't need to be anywhere near the fighting to have everything stripped away. Families, homes, identities lost, the witches of the clandestine group EVE were left at war's end with only two things: their magical gifts and each other. From the ashes of Allied victory and the Russian revolution, this group of survivors will forge for themselves something altogether new in a time when women aren't even allowed to vote, let alone openly practice magic in public. Or love one another. But not all threats to their budding coven come from without. Secrets, lies and the lingering trauma they've suffered could tear them apart as easily as the war tried to do, and they will have to overcome--and embrace--all that they are to ensure the peace is a lasting one, and that the horrors of a world war are never repeated.

The April books are a fascinating spread of themes and settings, starting with a mythic Norse tale, Legacy of the Valiant (Tales from Norvegr #2) by Edale Lane from Past and Prologue Press.

Humble Kai aspires to become more than the petite, inconsequential young woman her community sees. Persistence pays off when the village holy leaders reveal a prophecy. Kai might actualize her dream of being a hero if she completes three seemingly impossible tasks. Princess Solveig, descendant of the famous shieldmaiden Sigrid the Valiant, believes she was born to accomplish great things, but her poor eyesight, weak constitution, and lack of physical expertise hold her back. Convinced she can never realize her ambitions, Solveig settles for living vicariously through her warrior girlfriend. The appearance of a dangerous jötunn wreaking havoc in the kingdom brings the two would-be champions together. Solveig feels both threatened and skeptical when Kai arrives in her father’s great hall with a “magic” sword, claiming she’s there to save the day after more promising protectors have failed. With many lives at stake, will rivalry push Solveig and Kai apart, or will they inspire each other to realize the greatness both women desire to achieve and to survive the coming battle?

Well-known lesbian romance author Karin Kallmaker has only rarely dipped her toes into historical settings, but a current loosely linked series includes this medieval tale: Knight of Nights (The Coin of Love #2) from Romance and Chocolate Ink.

Left in charge of clan and lands while menfolk ride away to the Crusades, Lady Kirstine breaks with tradition by coming to the aid of the local green woman whose medicines once saved Kirstine's life. She's surprised to find the old woman already ably defended by a knight - a knight with no flag. A knight like no other Kirstine has ever met.

I dithered a bit about whether including this next book in the podcast is being true to the identities of the characters, but as usual I tend to err on the side of inclusivity and as long as there is sapphic content it needn’t be the central relationship. But I like readers to know what to expect, so in the case of Something Spectacular (Something Fabulous) by Alexis Hall from Montlake, the podcast relevance is that there is a romantic backstory between a female character and a non-binary but assigned female character, however the central romantic plot of the book involves both of those characters matched with a castrato opera singer. So: make of that what you will.

Peggy Delancey’s not at all ready to move on from her former flame, Arabella Tarleton. But Belle has her own plans for a love match, and she needs Peggy’s help to make those plans a reality. Still hung up on her feelings and unable to deny Belle what she wants, Peggy reluctantly agrees to help her woo the famous and flamboyant opera singer Orfeo. She certainly doesn’t expect to find common ground with a celebrated soprano, but when Peggy and Orfeo meet, a whole new flame is ignited that she can’t ignore. Peggy finds an immediate kinship with Orfeo, a castrato who’s just as nonconforming as she is―and just as affected by their instant connection. They’ve never been able to find their place in the world, but as the pair walks the line between friendship, flirtation, and something more, they may just find their place with each other.

When an author has a historic romance series that includes various gender pairings, it’s fairly rare for there to be more than one f/f romance, but Renee Dahlia has done just that in her “Desiring the Dexingtons” series with The Widow's Modiste.

A bored widow, an incredible dress, and a modiste with a secret. Jacinda Dexington wants to take her modiste shop to the haut ton, so when a client gives her tickets to the Soho Club’s Contrary Gods masquerade ball, she wears the outfit herself. It’s a sensation and everyone wants to know who created it. But only one person offers her refreshments… and a little bit more. Lady Merryam, widowed and bored, only attends the Soho Club’s latest ball to help raise funds for her son’s orphanage. The last she expects is a one night stand with the mysterious woman wearing ‘that’ dress. Could spending more time with her be the answer to her ennui?

The last April book has a somewhat experimental structure with a cross-time plot: The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Two women, connected across time, edge toward transgression in pursuit of their desires. A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, apprenticed herself to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own. In 1855, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. She is a thief, and she must find new ways to use her hands. If only the woman she loves weren’t on a boat, with a husband. But love isn’t always possible. She logs 420 species. Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses―medical, agricultural, culinary―these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women’s lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been consuming since last month? In general, it’s been books by authors I’ve enjoyed in the past, which perhaps indicates that I’m not in an experimental mood. I finished reading Meg Mardell’s latest holiday romance Christmas Masquerade, which is a bit of a comedy of manners, country-house story in which everyone thinks they’re playing matchmaker while also being matched by others. I’ll give away that the conclusion involves pansexual polyamory, just in case that affects people’s inclination to try it. This one didn’t grab me as solidly as Mardell’s previous books, but I admire that she’s telling stories that are so expansive in terms of identities and outcomes.

My other read was Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo, which is the third novella in her Singing Hills series, set in an alternate China with light fantasy. The central character is a collector of stories, and as with the previous books, the telling of stories, and the way those stories interact with the framing action, form a complex structure that offers a slow reveal of hidden secrets. I liked that in this story, that final reveal was so subtle I had to page back to check on a point where I’d made an unsupported assumption that led me off track. The series continues its tradition of including normalized queer relationships among the characters.

Moving over to audiobooks, we have C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, another historic fantasy that employs an alternate version of an actual historic setting—in this case, colonized French Algeria—and a light overlap of fantasy—just enough to keep you guessing about possible plot twists, and is full of normalized queer relationships, including between the two female protagonists. I loved the worldbuilding and the romance, but I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I hoped due to the bodycount and a fair amount of gory body horror. That doesn’t make it a flawed book, just one that I’m not the target audience for.

And finally, my other audiobook is K.J. Charles’ latest, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, which matches up a newly-inherited Regency baronet, who has abandonment issues, with the head of a clan of smugglers, who is overburdened with a sense of responsibility. This book has the sort of K.J. Charles plot that I love: very individual characters whose romantic conflict comes from their personal flaws, even as they both try to be good people doing responsible things. I can wholeheartedly understand why they’re attracted to each other and why they have to struggle to get their happy ending. That hasn’t always been the case in my recent reading, so it cheers me up greatly.

What’s been cheering you up in your recent reading? I’d love to hear about it.

Thoughts

When adding upcoming titles to my database, I once again was struck by the geography of sapphic historical fiction. These thoughts aren’t meant to poke at any particular author or book, but at a cumulative pattern that emerges. And specifically a pattern that some historic settings seem to exist primarily in a mythic space, as far as sapphic historicals are concerned.

I can back this up with data from my cumulative spreadsheet. One of the settings I want to highlight is Greece. With the sole exception of a series of WWII-set stories by Mary D Brooks, the titles I’m aware of are set in the Classical era or earlier. And of those 16 books with classical Greek settings, only 2 don’t appear to have overtly fantastic elements, primarily involving the concrete appearance of the pantheon of gods, or movement between the mortal world and that of the immortals. The two exceptions are a fictionalized biography of Sappho, and a story set in Sparta that stretches historic plausibility but doesn’t include any supernatural elements.

I think you could probably include the Brooks WWII series as having fantasy elements—and perhaps even Classical connections—because, as I understand it, the series was originally Xena “Uber” fan-fiction, so there’s a premise of reincarnation, and at least one book includes psychic phenomena. But they don’t fit the more general pattern on a surface level.

Now, I will grant you that—with the exception of Sappho herself—researching sapphic themes in Classical Greece is a bit tricky, although now that we have an English translation of Sandra Boehringer’s Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome there’s a bit less friction to the process. Given that mainstream histories of classical Greece tend to surrender to the imbalance of information on male versus female lives, often making one wonder if women existed at all outside of myth and legend, it makes me sad that historical fiction authors seem to have swallowed that illusion. The pattern here is two-fold: that Greece has no significant history after the Classical era, and that sapphic stories can only exist in the world of mythic fantasy, and not among ordinary lives.

There is, perhaps, less of an excuse on the research side for the similar pattern we see for historic stories with Scandinavian settings. The spreadsheet has 18 stories set either in specific Scandinavian countries or nebulously in the region of Scandinavia. All but 3 of them are set either overtly or implicitly in an early-medieval or mythic “Viking era”. (The 3 exceptions include 2 in the 17th century and 1 in WWII, none of which have fantasy elements.)

But this is not the early medieval Scandinavia of the history books. Fourteen of the 15 stories feature warrior women. The 15th is a cross-time story. Ten of the stories also feature gods, monsters, or magic. Now, the question of women’s participation in warfare in Viking-era Scandinavia is complex. Women warriors definitely featured in Norse sagas and myths, regardless of whether they were part of ordinary life. But what is interesting is how strongly the motif seems essential to sapphic historical fiction with this setting. In many cases, the motif isn’t presented as a woman taking on a cross-gender identity, but rather that warrior women are normalized as part of the fictional culture of the setting.

As with the Classical Greek stories that bring in gods and mythic Amazons, within the fictional geography of sapphic historical fiction, the actual historic cultures of these settings have been erased and replaced with a mythic fantasy. Mind you, I have no problem with mythic fantasy stories! But I do feel uncomfortable around the way they become the only landscape to the exclusion of the realistic.

The presence of mythic or fantasy stories isn’t quite as overwhelming in some other settings. Of the books set in Egypt, only 2/3 have fantasy elements. There are similar numbers for those set in China or a clearly China-based culture. Compare to stories set in France where only 1/3 have fantasy elements. Compare to stories set in Canada or Germany or Russia which are almost devoid of fantasy. (The only reason I’m not tackling the statistics for stories set in the British Isles or in the USA is because I have a lot of gaps in the coding for this aspect and I don’t have time to fill them in enough to do the calculation.)

What does it mean that our imagined version of specific times and places is so heavily overlaid with myth? What does it mean that we seem to find it hard to imagine women loving women in some contexts unless we make those women stand outside the limits of ordinary life? And what does that say about our ability to see people in those cultures as whole, complex human beings? Each book stands alone on its own merits. But in the aggregate, those patterns ask questions that we should ponder.

Show Notes

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

• Why the blog has been thin lately
• Historic settings and mythic fiction
• New Books for the Blog
  • Palmer, Paulina. 1999. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. Cassell, New York. ISBN 0-304-70154-8
  • McCallum, E.L. & Mikko Tuhkanen, eds. 2014. The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge University Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-107-03521-8
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • Her Venetian Beauty (Ladylike Inclinations #4) by Violet Cowper
  • The Enemy Within by Stein Willard
  • Eight Strings by Margaret DeRosia
  • Her Female Husband (The Kendallville Librarian #1) by Julieanne
  • Heart's Home (Heart Series #3) by L. Dreamer
  • From the Ashes of Victory - Box Set by Cameron Darrow
  • Legacy of the Valiant (Tales from Norvegr #2) by Edale Lane
  • Knight of Nights (The Coin of Love #2) by Karin Kallmaker
  • Something Spectacular (Something Fabulous) by Alexis Hall
  • The Widow's Modiste (Desiring the Dexingtons #3) by Renee Dahlia
  • The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith
• What I’ve been consuming
  • Christmas masquerade by Meg Mardell
  • Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo
  • The Unbroken by C.L. Clark
  • The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by K.J. Charles
• Some thoughts on historic settings where myth and fantasy has replaced realistic history

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
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 253 - On the Shelf for March 2023 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2023/03/04 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for March 2023.

I feel like I have very little to discuss this month, but the extensive list of recent books makes up for that in content. And I felt inclined to ramble a bit in the “what I’ve been consuming” section, to make up a little for how far behind I am in posting book reviews.

News of the Field

I do have another podcast I’d like to direct your attention to. I can’t say a “new” podcast because evidently they’ve been broadcasting for five years or so at this point, but new to me, at least. The show is “Queer as Fact” and is based out of Australia. Their content tends to be relatively modern topics (that is, “modern” from the point of view of my interests), but the most recent episode caught my attention because it’s on women loving women in Classical Rome—a topic my own show has tackled. There’s a link to the podcast in the show notes. If you enjoy it, drop them a note to let them know where you heard about it.

Publications on the Blog

I’ve managed to get through February without reading anything new for the blog. This wasn’t my intent, but other aspects of life have been a bit intensive. Not all of them bad! I spent a lot of time in February processing my overly abundant Seville orange crop and now have the year’s supply of marmalades, candied orange peel, and other preserved items put away. Nature has a habit of reminding us that the seasons turn as they will and you need to get with the program and catch up.

Book Shopping!

I did acquire one new book that I may mention in the blog, though the queer content is extremely minimal. This is The Once and Future Sex by Eleanor Janega, subtitled “Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society” from which you may understand that it’s a popular-oriented work on women’s history in the middle ages. It appears to be a collection of material from the author’s blog and looks very readable, if you’re in the market for some basic grounding in the subject. But it only has a couple pages of content touching on same-sex issues, and is very basic on that topic.

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

The meat of this episode is going to be the new book releases. The list has some catching up to do, not only because the Harper Collins strike has been settled and I’m finally doing their books from the last few months, but also because I turned up some titles that I missed or had mis-categorized. So we’ll start with a couple of December books.

A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar from Harper Collins appears to be something of a girl-gang heist story, using a setting that seems to attract stories like a magnet.

Josefa is an unapologetic and charismatic thief, who loves the thrill of the chase. She has her eye on her biggest mark yet—the RMS Titanic, the most luxurious ship in the world. But she isn’t interested in stealing from wealthy first-class passengers onboard. No, she’s out for the ultimate prize: the Rubiyat, a one of a kind book encrusted with gems that’s worth millions. Josefa can’t score it alone, so she enlists a team of girls with unique talents: Hinnah, a daring acrobat and contortionist; Violet, an actress and expert dissembler; and Emilie, an artist who can replicate any drawing by hand. They couldn’t be more different and yet they have one very important thing in common: their lives depend on breaking into the vault and capturing the Rubiyat. But careless mistakes, old grudges, and new romance threaten to jeopardize everything they’ve worked for and put them in incredible danger when tragedy strikes. While the odds of pulling off the heist are slim, the odds of survival are even slimmer…

Evil's Echo by Jane Alden from Desert Palm Press seems to blend romance with a noir detective story.

In her heart, Eleanor “Butch” Tracy is a crime reporter. Her city editor at the Gazette doesn’t see it that way. He believes women should be covering society parties and fancy weddings, not chronicling murder victims and evildoers. Butch gets her shot at the crime beat when a mysterious killer chooses her to narrate his cold-blooded serial execution of prominent New York citizens. To fully report the crimes and prove herself up to the opportunity, Butch must find the connection among the victims. She partners with the striking NYPD detective Christine Carr to discover the link between the deaths of a judge, a billionaire, and a plastic surgeon. Will they be in time to prevent the final murder? The answer lies buried in the Gazette’s clippings morgue, deep beneath the streets of New York City.

There are several January books to catch up on, both new discoveries and those previously held back. We’ll start with the first of two French-language novels I turned up this month.

Aimer Mathilde self-published by Laurence Tardi is a romance set in Victorian-era Montreal.

Montréal, 1865, deux femmes, un amour... possible? Mathilde Hébert, une jolie blonde enjouée de 19 ans, fille de notaire, rencontre par hasard Elizabeth Rice, 25 ans, immigrante irlandaise vivant seule en chambre dans un quartier industriel. Mathilde est plus que ravie d’avoir enfin rencontré une jeune femme qui s’intéresse à autre chose qu’au mariage et à la mode. Leur sentiment l’une pour l’autre naîtra dans le décor d’un Montréal en plein développement, pourtant encarcané dans une rigidité de mœurs toute victorienne. Leur amour pourra-t-il trouver sa place ? Comment accueilleront-elles leurs propres sentiments ? Comment leur entourage réagira-t-il ? Comment, dans ce contexte, pouvoir aimer Mathilde ? C’est là toute l’histoire de ce roman.

Montreal, 1865, two women, one love...perhaps? Mathilde Hébert, the pretty, cheerful, blonde 19-year-old daughter of a notary, has a chance meeting with Elizabeth Rice, a 25-year-old Irish immigrant, living alone in an industrial district rooming house. Mathilde is delighted to meet a young woman interested in something other than marriage and fashion. Set in Montreal, their feelings for each other emerge hemmed in by rigid Victorian morality. How can they find a place for their love?

When We Lost our Heads by Heather O'Neill from Penguin Random House is—quite by coincidence—also set in 19th century Montreal. With the contrast of careless privilege and civic unrest, it seems the protagonist shares much with her namesake, as alluded to in the title.

Marie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At age twelve, with her pile of blond curls and unparalleled sense of whimsy, she’s the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, the affluent strip of nineteenth-century Montreal where powerful families live. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly and brilliant, moves to the neighbourhood. Marie and Sadie are immediately inseparable. United by their passion and intensity, they attract and repel each other in ways that set them both on fire. Marie, with her bubbly charm, sees all the pleasure of the world, whereas Sadie’s obsession with darkness is all-consuming. Soon, their childlike games take on the thrill of danger and then become deadly. Forced to separate, the girls spend their teenage years engaging in acts of alternating innocence and depravity, until a singular event unites them once more, with devastating effects. After Marie inherits her father’s sugar empire and Sadie disappears into the city’s gritty underworld, the working class begins to foment a revolution. Each woman will play an unexpected role in the events that upend their city—the only question is whether they will find each other once more.

Your Goyle and Mine (The Magickal Underground #1) self-published by Nan Sampson mashes up several historic eras, thanks to a sprinkling of magic.

It’s 1921. The Great War is finally over, but trouble is again brewing for Paris’ most defiant witch. When Father Dominic knocks at Celeste Bérenger’s door asking her to find Eddie, one of the last living gargoyles, she jumps at the chance. For the last fifty years, she and her life partner, Astrid Tollefsen, have run an apothecary shop on the border between the hidden Magical Quarter with its cornucopia of magical denizens and the mundane streets of post-war Paris. Fifty years of punishment for a devastating natural disaster that wasn’t entirely Celeste’s fault. But this is her chance to feel useful again. Helped by her friend, the undead Lord Byron, Celeste’s hunt for Eddie leads her from the casinos and brothels of the Magical Quarter to the Bohemian intelligentsia of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday salons, and into a devious web of danger woven just for her. To protect Byron, save Astrid, and rescue Eddie, Celeste must defy the rules again and draw on forbidden magic…before time runs out for all of them.

The boundaries between fantasy set in history and fantasy with the flavor of a historic setting can be very fuzzy indeed. And as I’ve noted previously, I struggle to be consistent in what I include or exclude with these listings. The Daughters of Izdihar (The Alamaxa Duology #1) by Hadeer Elsbai from Harper Voyager could have gone either way. The setting is strongly based on recent Egyptian history, though set in a fictional land. You’ll just have to accept that sometimes I include books that are purely fantasy on a whim.

As a waterweaver, Nehal can move and shape any water to her will, but she's limited by her lack of formal education. She desires nothing more than to attend the newly opened Weaving Academy, take complete control of her powers, and pursue a glorious future on the battlefield with the first all-female military regiment. But her family cannot afford to let her go--crushed under her father's gambling debt, Nehal is forcibly married into a wealthy merchant family. Her new spouse, Nico, is indifferent and distant and in love with another woman, a bookseller named Giorgina. Giorgina has her own secret, however: she is an earthweaver with dangerously uncontrollable powers. She has no money and no prospects. Her only solace comes from her activities with the Daughters of Izdihar, a radical women's rights group at the forefront of a movement with a simple goal: to attain recognition for women to have a say in their own lives. They live very different lives and come from very different means, yet Nehal and Giorgina have more in common than they think. The cause--and Nico--brings them into each other's orbit, drawn in by the group's enigmatic leader, Malak Mamdouh, and the urge to do what is right. But their problems may seem small in the broader context of their world, as tensions are rising with a neighboring nation that desires an end to weaving and weavers. As Nehal and Giorgina fight for their rights, the threat of war looms in the background, and the two women find themselves struggling to earn--and keep--a lasting freedom.

Now we move on to three February books. A Defiant Devotion (A Truth Universally Acknowledged #2) self-published by E.B. Neal rather transparently advertises one of its inspirations in the series title. Although this is the only volume (so far) featuring a female couple, the series as a whole is very diverse in terms of race and gender. I get a little bit of a sense that the author is trying to capture the dynamics of the Bridgerton tv series.

The year is 1812, and Miss Katherine Knight has no desire to debut, let alone find a husband. An independent, feisty young woman, Katherine prefers hunting and horseback riding to dining and dancing, and spends most of her time eavesdropping at closed doors. When her eldest brother, Lucas, jeopardizes their family’s already precarious future, Katherine uses her talents and intellect to do what she thinks will save her family from ruin. But all her plans threaten to unravel when she meets Lady Rebecca Alwyn, a mysterious and captivating young woman from Amsterdam whose family’s meteoric rise in British society arouses suspicion. Katherine and Rebecca fall headfirst into a deep and intimate friendship, testing the bounds of propriety and morality as they sink ever-deeper into an attachment that might be their undoing. Together, they must tackle their complicated family legacies and come to terms with the actions they take in order to protect the ones they love most — including each other.

Our second French-language title this month is La Femme Falaise self-published by Hélène Néra.

Alice est tombée éperdument amoureuse de Lucia, son amie d’enfance. Leur liaison orageuse a bien failli provoquer un immense scandale dans la haute société anglaise du début des années 1920. Les proches d’Alice, pressés de mettre fin aux rumeurs, l’ont forcée à quitter Londres et à s’installer à Paris où elle tente tant bien que mal de panser ses plaies et de surmonter la perte de Lucia. Après deux années d’une existence solitaire et morose, Alice fait la rencontre de la princesse Sonia de Malanset, une figure du Tout-Paris qui semble prête à lui ouvrir les portes des cercles mondains. Alice tombe très vite sous le charme de Sonia qui l’entraîne dans un tourbillon de fêtes et de musique dans le Paris des Années folles. Mais malgré la promesse d’un nouveau départ, Alice demeure hantée par le souvenir de Lucia et de leur amour sacrifié.

Alice fell madly in love with Lucia, her childhood friend. Their stormy affair threatened a scandal in the high society of 1920s England. To suppress the rumors, Alice's relatives sent her from London to Paris, where she struggles to recover from the loss of Lucia. After two lonely, gloomy years, Alice meets Princess Sonia de Malanset, who seems ready to draw her into Parisian society. Alice falls under Sonia's spell amid a whirlwind of parties and music in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. Despite this new beginning, she remains haunted by the memory of Lucia and the love they lost.

The Librarian of Burned Books by Brianna Labuskes from William Morrow Paperbacks goes a little bit overboard in setting up the backstory in the book’s cover copy. So bear with me.

Berlin 1933. Following the success of her debut novel, American writer Althea James receives an invitation from Joseph Goebbels himself to participate in a culture exchange program in Germany. For a girl from a small town in Maine, 1933 Berlin seems to be sparklingly cosmopolitan, blossoming in the midst of a great change with the charismatic new chancellor at the helm. Then Althea meets a beautiful woman who promises to show her the real Berlin, and soon she’s drawn into a group of resisters who make her question everything she knows about her hosts—and herself. Paris 1936. She may have escaped Berlin for Paris, but Hannah Brecht discovers the City of Light is no refuge from the anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathizers she thought she left behind. Heartbroken and tormented by the role she played in the betrayal that destroyed her family, Hannah throws herself into her work at the German Library of Burned Books. Through the quiet power of books, she believes she can help counter the tide of fascism she sees rising across Europe and atone for her mistakes. But when a dear friend decides actions will speak louder than words, Hannah must decide what stories she is willing to live—or die—for. New York 1944. Since her husband Edward was killed fighting the Nazis, Vivian Childs has been waging her own war: preventing a powerful senator’s attempts to censor the Armed Service Editions, portable paperbacks that are shipped by the millions to soldiers overseas. Viv knows just how much they mean to the men through the letters she receives—including the last one she got from Edward. She also knows the only way to win this battle is to counter the senator’s propaganda with a story of her own—at the heart of which lies the reclusive and mysterious woman tending the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books in Brooklyn. As Viv unknowingly brings her censorship fight crashing into the secrets of the recent past, the fates of these three women will converge, changing all of them forever. Inspired by the true story of the Council of Books in Wartime—the WWII organization founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors to use books as “weapons in the war of ideas”—The Librarian of Burned Books is an unforgettable historical novel, a haunting love story, and a testament to the beauty, power, and goodness of the written word.

Finishing up with six March books, this may be the longest collective list I’ve ever included. Starting chronologically, we begin with a pair of books set in ancient Greece—a Greece that, as usual, includes a heavy overlay of mythic fantasy.

Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood from Harper Teen.

Each spring, Ithaca condemns twelve maidens to the noose. This is the price vengeful Poseidon demands for the lives of Queen Penelope’s twelve maids, hanged and cast into the depths centuries ago. But when that fate comes for Leto, death is not what she thought it would be. Instead, she wakes on a mysterious island and meets a girl with green eyes and the power to command the sea. A girl named Melantho, who says one more death can stop a thousand. The prince of Ithaca must die—or the tides of fate will drown them all.

As is often the case, that description doesn’t give any indication of the book’s sapphic content, so you’ll have to trust in the tags in Goodreads. The second Greek book is a bit more forthcoming: Now the Wind Scatters by J Donal from Asteria Press.

Iphigenia seems to have it all. As the eldest daughter of the House of Atreus and princess of Mycenae, Iphigenia has had an idyllic childhood despite her family's bloodstained history. She is the darling of the people of her city, and at her side are her endearingly annoying sister Electra and adorable baby brother Orestes. As she comes of age, however, that fragile peace is threatened by strange, burgeoning feelings for her handmaiden. Amidst this crisis of identity, another looms as an ancient goddess only Iphigenia can see simmers beneath the surface of reality. All of this falls to the back burner when war with the Trojans looms high on the horizon, and Iphigenia's father summons her with a proposal of marriage she would go to the ends of the earth to avoid. In a desperate attempt to circumnavigate her fate, Iphigenia discovers a dark truth: the altar her father intends for her is sacrificial rather than matrimonial. It is only by an act of divine intervention that she survives, and it is by divine retribution that she will have her revenge. It is from the desecrated shores of Aulis that Iphigenia will embark on a journey that will take her from the furthest reaches of the ancient Mediterranean to the underworld itself. Amidst romances with goddesses and her own terrifying deification, Iphigenia plots. Despite the pleas of everyone around her, she vows that blood will soon stain the marble halls of the House of Atreus once again. Vengeance is sweet, but as Iphigenia soon discovers, it comes at a price that could cost her everything.

When Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt from MIRA turned up in my search terms, it had all those vague queer-coded descriptions like “the secret wishes of her heart.” Fortunately I was able to confirm with the author that it definitely has sapphic content.

Nantucket in 1846 is an island set apart not just by its geography but by its unique circumstances. With their menfolk away at sea, often for years at a time, women here know a rare independence—and the challenges that go with it. Eliza Macy is struggling to conceal her financial trouble as she waits for her whaling captain husband to return from a voyage. In desperation, she turns against her progressive ideals and targets Meg Wright, a pregnant free Black woman trying to relocate her store to Main Street. Meanwhile, astronomer Maria Mitchell loves running Nantucket’s Atheneum and spending her nights observing the stars, yet she fears revealing the secret wishes of her heart. On a sweltering July night, a massive fire breaks out in town, quickly kindled by the densely packed wooden buildings. With everything they possess now threatened, these three very different women are forced to reevaluate their priorities and decide what to save, what to let go and what kind of life to rebuild from the ashes of the past.

Some real women from early Hollywood inspired Well Behaved Women by Caroline Lamond from One More Chapter.

When Maybelle Crabtree, a God-fearing farm girl from Kentucky, has a chance encounter with a charismatic stranger, her life changes forever. With an invitation to join the infamous Alla Nazimova and her Sewing Circle, Maybelle’s eyes are opened to a life of decadence and glamour. Able to freely discover her own sexuality, Maybelle embraces all that Hollywood has to offer in the hedonist roaring twenties. But both Maybelle and Alla have secrets that threaten to bring their gilded lives crashing down. Hearts will be broken, careers destroyed and friendships shattered because what happens behind closed doors, doesn’t stay hidden forever… A compelling story inspired by the real life of silent movie icon, Alla Nazimova.

World War II is a popular setting for sapphic romances, but usually more in the European theater. To Meet Again by Kadyan from Bold Strokes Books takes up the wartime setting in south-east Asia.

London, 1938. Evelyn has only one dream: to become a singer. Fleeing an arranged marriage, she leaves for Singapore in pursuit of a future brighter than the conventions of society could offer her. Evelyn performs in a Chinatown cabaret to survive, where she meets Joan, a young Australian doctor and avid fan. Little by little, Evelyn and Joan form a close bond that leads to a love stronger than either has ever known. But history has other plans. The Japanese army invades Singapore, and Evelyn must flee while Joan refuses to leave her patients. From prison camps to the deep jungle, through encounters and tragedies, Evelyn and Joan struggle to survive and to find each other again.

Gothic novels are all about atmosphere, and A Dark, Cold Touch by Megan E. Hart from Howling Unicorn Press has it in plenty. What it doesn’t have is a clear indication of where or when the story is set, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

The position of lady’s companion at the grand, isolated Hemford House was meant to save Estelle Glass from the scandal of her own making. But when she arrived at the mansion and was greeted by the stern, mysterious and intimidating Mrs. Blackwell, Estelle began to see what had been meant as a punishment might possibly become more like a reward…if only she could manage to find her place in the dreary household and the service of Mrs. Virginia Hemford, the childlike beauty Estelle had been sent to serve. Soon the secrets of Hemford House begin to reveal themselves, one by one, as Estelle tries her best to take care of Ginny and avoid her confusing feelings for the intimidating Mrs. Blackwell. Estelle finds herself caught up in a web of rules designed to keep Ginny “safe”…but safe from what, exactly? Or from whom? What accident claimed the life of Ginny’s previous companion? Why does Mr. Hemford avoid his wife’s company, no matter how charmingly she tries, and fails, to seduce him? And who’s reaching to take Estelle’s hand in the night with that dark, cold touch? Only when Estelle learns the deadly secret everyone at Hemford House has been keeping can she truly understand what it means to take care of Ginny Hemford…or to be cared for by Rachel Blackwell. Can the women of Hemford House escape the hauntings of its ghosts, or will the past consume them all?

That feels like a good set-up for the special show on sapphic gothic stories that I hope to do this month.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been consuming lately? Although I’m currently in the middle of reading two titles in print, the works that I’ve finished in the last month were all audiobooks, dominated by going on a K.J. Charles spree. K.J. Charles, who specializes in gay male historic romances, sometimes with a fantasy element, might seem an odd obsession for someone like me who is focused so strongly on sapphic fiction. But the simple fact is that K.J. Charles is an amazing writer—she has an ability to create vivid and nuanced characters that fit their historic settings and yet are recognizable, and varied, “types” that resonate with this modern reader. And she finds ways for her same-sex couples to be together despite the challenges of the times. All of which makes me rather disappointed that the couple of times she’s written female couples, she just doesn’t seem to have found them as interesting to write about.

But another interesting aspect of reading KJ’s work is that, because I find her writing itself so satisfying, the books provide me with a useful way to define and calibrate how I feel about degrees of sexual content in historic romances, and various types of relationship dynamics. Overall, KJ’s books have far more sexual content, and it’s far more central to the story, than I’m interested in. It isn’t even a matter of the gender of the people involved—I’d feel the same way about that level of sexual content for a female couple. I’m willing to put up with it for the sake of the characters and story, in the same way that I’m willing to put up with boring fight scenes in superhero movies for the sake of the underlying story and characters.

But that means that when the relationship in question doesn’t work for me, the premise that the characters are fated to end up together because of their mutual sexual desire isn’t enough to make it believable. Or perhaps, “believable” isn’t the right word, because I’m quite willing to believe that people end up in bad relationships because the sex is good—I’ve seen it in real life among people I know. But it means that I become much less invested in the story because, for me, great sex isn’t sufficient motivation. So, for example, the central relationship in books 2 and 3 of the Magpies series (A Case of Possession, and A Flight of Magpies) is like pebbles in my shoe. The two characters profess their love for each other despite conflicting goals, lack of trust, and poor communication, based solely (as far as I can tell) on the fact that their sexual kinks are complementary. Mind you, I love the fantasy worldbuilding in this Victorian-set series, with its magically-based thriller/mystery plots. But I’m simply not invested in the couple.

There’s a similar theme in Spectred Isle, another fantasy-infused romantic thriller, this time set between the world wars. The protagonists not only deal with the legal persecution of gay male relationships, but with deep personal distrust of each other and very little in common other than being drawn into the same plot. So, in order to bend the plot to a romance, it’s necessary for sexual desire—unrelated to affection or admiration—to be an overwhelming force. That dynamic works better for me in The Henchman of Zenda, KJ’s alternate take on the classic novel The Prisoner of Zenda, because the central characters are not framed as a romantic couple, but as rivals, possible adversaries, and only incidentally fuck-buddies. (The listen inspired me to check out a couple of video versions or the original story, and I have to say, I love KJ’s spin on the “true story” much better.)

So aside from my immersion in gay male historicals, I listened to two audiobooks that cheered me up in their inclusion of incidental, casual queerness in genres that are only gradually allowing the reader to expect that as a possibility. Court of Fives by Kate Elliott is a YA historic fantasy, inspired significantly by the social and political dynamics of Greco-Roman Egypt. The protagonist is marginalized due to her mixed-class heritage and gender, but hopes to find fulfilment in a ritualized athletics competition. Personal and high-level political upheavals disrupt that plan but her training gets put to good use. The book puts a number of interesting plot developments in train for the sequels. In the background, we see how the same socio-political dynamics disrupt her sister’s sweet romance with another girl, and I’m looking forward hopefully to see if they’re allowed a reunion.

The queer elements in Lucy Holland’s Sistersong are much more overt. Inspired by a cross-over between Britain in the midst of the Saxon invasions, and the folk song about a murdered sister who is converted into a harp that sings her fate, we follow three very different sisters with magical connections to the land: one whose disfigurement makes her hungry for love, one whose self-centered spite brings disaster, and one who is destined to cross gender boundaries and become king. It’s a complex story with many twists and turns, revealing key elements of the past and present in a gradual fashion. (I did spot some of those keys in advance, which added to my enjoyment of the book.) The story was slow at first, and the conflict between Christian and non-Christian elements was a bit overdone, but the story picked up as it went along.

I’m not sure why I felt inspired to be more talky about my reading for this month. I guess I miss being in the habit of doing reviews regularly. Maybe I’ll go back and comb through these podcast notes and do something more formal. I hope your reading is giving you something to think about, too!

Show Notes

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

• Podcast: Queer as Fact
• Book Shopping: The Once and Future Sex by Eleanor Janega
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar
  • Evil's Echo by Jane Alden
  • Aimer Mathilde by Laurence Tardi
  • When We Lost our Heads by Heather O'Neill
  • Your Goyle and Mine (The Magickal Underground #1) by Nan Sampson
  • The Daughters of Izdihar (The Alamaxa Duology #1) by Hadeer Elsbai
  • A Defiant Devotion (A Truth Universally Acknowledged #2) by E.B. Neal
  • La Femme Falaise: Romance historique by Hélène Néra
  • The Librarian of Burned Books by Brianna Labuskes
  • Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood
  • Now the Wind Scatters by J Donal
  • Daughters of Nantucket: A Novel by Julie Gerstenblatt
  • Well Behaved Women by Caroline Lamond
  • To Meet Again by Kadyan
  • A Dark, Cold Touch: A Gothic Romance by Megan E. Hart
• What I’ve been consuming
  • A Case of Possession by K.J. Charles
  • A Flight of Magpies by K.J. Charles
  • Spectred Isle by K.J. Charles
  • The Henchman of Zenda by K.J. Charles
  • Court of Fives by Kate Elliott
  • Sistersong by Lucy Holland

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
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)