(Originally aired 2024-11-02 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2024.
Even here in sunny California, November means that summer is well and truly over. We’ve just barely turned our air conditioners off and now it’s time to turn the heaters on. For me, it also means time to have a pot of home-made soup simmering on the stove, and perhaps for many of you it’s time to hunker down with a mug of cocoa and a good book. Good books are what we’re all about here. (Here in the USA we’re also angsting over a significant election that won’t have happened yet when this episode comes out, so I’m just going to skip that topic for the moment.)
With the end of the year coming up, it’s also time to spread the word about the submissions period for next year’s fiction series. The detailed call for submissions is up on the website and is functionally identical to last time. So encourage all the authors you know—including yourself, if that applies—to create a sapphic historical story for our consideration. Submissions will be open in January and I hope, once again, to have a difficult time narrowing the field down to our four picks. As a reminder, submissions are limited to 5000 words and the pay rate is 8 cents per word. Please read the call for submissions carefully so you’re familiar with the other requirements.
Publications on the Blog
For the blog, I’ve been working on a summary of Caroline Derry’s Lesbianism and the Criminal Law in preparation for an episode on legal aspects of lesbianism across the centuries. I’ll probably get the first few chapters up by the time this goes live. I have a few more articles earmarked for that episode, which I need to get working on. But the podcast episode itself will be scheduled for January at the earliest because I did some rearranging of the schedule to fit in an interview that expanded from the brief spots I include on this show to a full-length podcast episode. More on that later.
No book shopping this month, alas. Not that I have any scarcity of research books to work on.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
Thankfully, there’s always new fiction. And what do we have that’s new and recent? I found 3 October releases that I hadn’t spotted previously.
Redway Acres: Grace by Trish Henry Green is a Regency-era novel about love and family legacies. This is part of a larger series revolving around families in a particular community, but it appears to be the only sapphic book in the series.
How can a woman, with a legacy usually inherited by a man, fulfil her obligations when only taught to be a ‘Lady’?
Lady Grace Bainbridge watches helplessly as Bainbridge Hall falls into disrepair after a rift cut her off from family aid. Attending a cousin’s wedding gives her hope of mending bridges, but the advice received is that she must marry.
Uncertain of her fate, Grace’s wish to remain at Bainbridge and her mother’s shocking behaviour further limit her choice of a husband.
Complicating matters is Dowager Baroness Beatrice’s return to society with her husband. Grace emboldens his sister, Olivia, to stand up to Beatrice, the consequences of which spark questions about a shooting accident some years prior.
As the costs of Beatrice’s revenge play out, Grace begins to doubt her reliance upon her friend’s advice. Meanwhile, her newfound empathy for another’s plight jeopardises Grace’s financial reprieve.
Last month we had Nicole Kotoman’s somewhat generically-titled A Victorian Tale of Life and Love, and this month the sequel follows: Another Victorian Tale of Life and Love (Victorian Tales #2). This story follows the same characters, later in their lives.
Madeline and Andrea are back, along with their close-knit family and friends. Cassandra, one of their daughters, falls in love and embarks on an adventurous journey abroad. Will her newfound love withstand the trials that await? How will her family react to her runaway and decision to dress like a man?
When Hearts are True by L.J. Corelli from QTT Publishing is described as a reimagined, feminist take on the classic Victorian novel Beatrice by H. Rider Haggard. Haggard’s book is about the star-crossed love between Beatrice and an unhappily married London barrister. Corelli’s story gender-flips the love interest, making it the barrister’s wife who falls in love with Beatrice.
The story explores the unexpected friendship that blossoms between Beatrice, a beautiful, impoverished Welsh school teacher and Lady Georgina, the independent and unhappy wife of a London barrister. Their fates are sealed by a near death experience on the shores of Bryngelly in Wales. Drawn to one another by a love that surpasses the physical realm, their thrilling journey is filled with passion, danger, jealousy and the discovery of true love in a world that refuses to accept it.
Now, while I have no idea just how reimagined Corelli’s book is, I feel I should note that Haggard’s story is a tragedy with significant numbers of the central female characters dying by the end. So, reader beware.
The November books start off with a reprise of one I incorrectly scheduled as a July book: The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3) by Tasha Suri from Orbit Books had been rescheduled from July to November, but I hadn’t double-checked the release date when I included it earlier this summer. I’ve really enjoyed this historically-inspired fantasy series which grapples with the conflict between love and duty.
Malini has claimed her rightful throne as the empress of Parijatdvipa, just as the nameless gods prophesied. Now, in order to gain the support of the priesthood who remain loyal to the fallen emperor, she must consider a terrible bargain: Claim her throne and burn in order to seal her legacy—or find another willing to take her place on the pyre.
Priya has survived the deathless waters and now their magic runs in her veins. But a mysterious yaksa with flowering eyes and a mouth of thorns lies beneath the waters. The yaksa promises protection for Ahiranya. But in exchange, she needs a sacrifice. And she’s chosen Priya as the one to offer it.
Two women once entwined by fate now stand against each other. But when an ancient enemy rises to threaten their world, Priya and Malini will find themselves fighting together once more – to prevent their kingdoms, and their futures, from burning to ash.
Medieval settings are uncommon for sapphic historicals, so if that’s your jam, you might want to check out All the Painted Stars (14th Century Oxfordshire #2) by Emma Denny from HQ.
Oxfordshire 1362
When Lily Barden discovers her best friend Johanna’s hand in marriage is being awarded as the main prize at a tournament, she is determined to stop it. Disguised as a knight, she infiltrates the contest, preparing to fight for Jo’s hand. But her conduct ruffles feathers, and when a dangerous incident escalates out of Lily’s control, Jo must help her escape.
Finding safety with a local brewster, Lily and Jo soon settle into their new freedom, and amongst blackberry bushes and lakeside walks an unexpected relationship blossoms. But when Jo’s past catches up with her and Lily’s reckless behaviour threatens their newfound happiness, both women realise that choices must always come at a cost. The question they need to ask is if the cost is worth the price of love…
Time travel is the basic premise of Time and Tide by J.M. Frey.
When Sam’s plane crashes catastrophically over the Atlantic, it defies all odds for Sam to be the sole survivor. But it seems impossible that she’s rescued by a warship in 1805. With a dashing sea captain as her guide, she begins to find her footing in a world she’d only seen in movies.
Then Sam is betrayed. At the mercy of the men and morals of the time, and without the means to survive on her own, she’s left with no choice but to throw herself on the charity of the captain's sisters. She resigns herself to a quiet life of forever hiding her true self. What she doesn't expect is that her new landlady is Margaret Goodenough—the world-famous author whose yet-to-be-completed novel will contain the first lesbian kiss in the history of British Literature, and a clever woman. Clever enough to know her new companion has a secret.
As the two women grow ever closer, Sam must tread the tenuous line between finding her own happiness in a place where she doesn’t think she’ll ever fit in, and possibly (accidentally) changing the course of history.
This seems to be the month for less usual settings, as we see in the historic fantasy Monsoon Queen (The War Between Cedar and Oak #1) by Jo Carthage from NineStar Press.
Twenty-year-old Noor has been hiding her magic and biding her time in the spice markets of 1812 Tajoura as she and her neighbours wait for the ravenous British Empire to sail into their homeport, cannons blazing. But when the HMS Victory arrives, so does the chance of a lifetime to join a found family in the Yemeni resistance. Noor finds herself caught up in the fight against the Empire’s battle mages and Rami, the dark prince who leads them.
In a case of mistaken identity, Noor heals Rami before a decisive battle. She sees the good in him, and her heart is torn.
Noor’s new friend Razan—a brilliant and beautiful inventor for the resistance—has no such qualms. She hates Rami for his role in the raid that killed her parents. Razan has found a way to harness Noor’s power to defeat the British, and the two women grow ever closer. On a perilous camel ride to the coffee roasting city of Mocha, Rami strikes, kidnapping Noor and taking her back to his cruel master on the HMS Victory.
In order to survive, Noor will need to call on everything she learned in the spice markets and the Yemeni resistance.
Rebels, mages, lovers. With the final battle looming and the resistance struggling without her, Noor must keep her eye on the prize: saving Yemen from the British Empire. If she can keep Razan in her bed and save Rami from the Empire, she will have the future she’s always dreamed of. But first, Noor has to survive the storms to come.
I’ve done a bit of trimming of the cover copy for A Pearl Enraptured by Andrea K. Stein from Muirgen Publishing, LLC. The original text was a bit hard for me to follow, so once I got it sorted out, I wanted to help the book put its best foot forward. This book is part of a series “Five Pearls for the Earl” each featuring one of the several mistresses of the Earl of Framlingwood and her romance with someone who is not the Earl. So be aware that these are not conventional romance novels and probably have a relatively high erotic content.
Lord Framlingwood’s fifth mistress, Margot Fauchette, has a secret. She and her lady’s maid, Gabrielle Tamaryn, have lived the good life for several years, moving amongst the wealthy, sensuous men and women of the ton, flitting from one benefactor to the next. Margot prays none of her protectors discover that her lady’s maid is also her true love. Their light-hearted lifestyle crashes back to reality when Gabrielle’s dour brother, Captain Jameson Tamaryn, returns to London after a long voyage for the East India Company.
He’s incensed to find Gabrielle has disappeared from their family home in Surrey and that she’s apparently run off with her unconventional lover, Margot. He’s determined to end their “unnatural” alliance and see his sister safely married. But Gabrielle Tamaryn has no intention of giving up her carefree existence of endless sybaritic soirees and salons.
Margot and Gabrielle no more than put their heads together to figure out how to outwit Captain Tamaryn than they’re confronted by the prospect of unwanted guests in their townhouse. The Earl of Framlingwood insists that a Bond Street draper and his partner move in so that Margot’s townhouse can be re-decorated.
The women are wary but agree. How long could it take to re-decorate a compact townhouse that’s already well turned out? What possible harm could there be?
Outlaw Hearts by Lori G. Matthews from Bella Books is a fairly straightforward Western romance.
Outlaw Elle Barstow spends her days robbing stagecoaches with her gang, bedding women and, most importantly, keeping her heart safely locked away. Into her chaotic world slides entrancing Isabella “Izzy” Collins. Banished by her family, the feisty suffragette from Boston is on her way to marry a man more than twice her age. Elle stumbles upon Izzy’s stagecoach being robbed, rescues her, and is urged by Izzy to teach her how to survive on the land. Except Elle’s far more interested in stringing her along and collecting a reward for her safe return. There’s one hitch with that plan: Elle’s growing feelings for the beautiful woman.
The mysterious object found in an antique store or curio shop has long been a staple of imaginative fiction, leading the characters into a quest through time. This is the central trope of Timeless by Nicole Pyland from Pyland Publishing.
Quinn has no idea why a short trip to a small town turned into her moving there and buying an antique shop, but after five years of waiting, her answer walks right through the shop’s door.
Leaving the big city, Abby Brennon, a best-selling author, moves back home after looking for the quiet calm that comes from living in a small town but also something else that she can’t quite describe even to herself. When she walks into the antique shop and sees Quinn Jordan, things start to make sense.
A photo of two women from the 1930s inspires Abby to write a book about the two women in it, but the story doesn’t feel like fiction to her. That photo has both Quinn and Abby curious about its origin, and soon, they’re having visions of a shared past that feel so familiar, they must be real. Another photo of two other women brings about more visions, and it doesn’t take Quinn and Abby long to realize that these are visions of their past lives together.
Over centuries, they have found each other time and time again. They’ve fallen in love and passed that love onto the next version of themselves until they’re standing in that antique shop, wondering if they’re drawn to each other now because of their past, or if there is something real between them today.
Taiwan Travelogue by Shuang-zi Yang (translated by Lin King) from Graywolf Press has quite the literary background. The publicity says, “Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.”
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.
What Am I Reading?
And what have I been reading in the last month? It’s been all audiobooks, as it often is. Especially since I did a bit more commuting that usual due to some audits at the day job.
Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout, translated by Laura Watkinson is a literary novel with serious Freudian leanings, envisioning experiences that could have inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. The story follows two timelines, the summer in 1816 when the Shelleys, Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, and others challenged each other to write ghost stories (while engaging in complex intertwined love lives), and a summer four years earlier that Mary Shelley spent in Scotland with family friends, and her confusing and sometimes frightening adventures with Isabella Baxter. While the writing is evocative, the underlying moral seems to be “adolescent girls have hysterical fancies, which complicate the real trauma they experience from the unwanted attentions of predatory men.” There is a passing sapphic relationship between Mary and Isabella that contributes to Mary’s sense that everyone who ought to love her will abandon her.
On a much lighter and more positive note, in The Duke at Hazard, K.J. Charles has written a delightful homage to Georgette Heyer’s The Foundling, featuring a naïve young duke and his quest to prove himself competent and independent. While the adventures and characters parallel many of the same beats as Heyer’s book, they are reshaped by placing a gay male romance at the heart of the story, complete with the legal and class complications inherent in the times. Once again, what really grabs me about the relationship is that the characters care deeply about each other and do everything necessary to make things right when they screw up. Plus a side plot of a truly nasty villain who gets his comeuppance in a way that ties all the character threads together.
I made good use of a week of commuting to listen to Margaret Vandenburg’s Craze in order to finish it before recording an interview with her. The book is a bit of a hybrid of slice of life novel and history lesson, with the viewpoint character experiencing queer New York City in the 1920s. It isn’t exactly a romance novel, though there is a romance threading through it. Rather it’s a fictional biography of a time and place, filtered through a character who has a tendency to over-analyze her life and feelings (which benefits the reader’s understanding of the times). I was going to include the interview with Vandenburg as part of this episode, but 10 minutes into recording it was clear that we were having far too much fun talking and the interview needed to be its own episode. So look forward to listening in on that conversation in December.
I’ve been using some of my audiobook time to check in on authors and books that my friends all rave about but that I missed the first time around. This time it was The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells—the first book in her Raksura fantasy series. I have to say that the worldbuilding is amazing, but once again I kept getting put off by the extensive blow-by-blow battle sequences—a problem I also had with the one Murderbot book I read. This is definitely a “it’s not you, it’s me” thing and I wish I’d enjoyed it more.
Finally, I listened to Jeannelle M. Ferreira’s collection of poetry and short stories, The Fire and the Place in the Forest, including the story “Your Fingers Like Pen and Ink” which first appeared on this podcast. Listening to the collection as a whole, I had a bit of an epiphany that everything Ferreira writes—regardless of the purported literary form—seems to be want to be read as poetry. The prose has the same lyrical, impressionistic quality as the works that advertise themselves as poems. Seen that way, some of the narrative structural oddities of her novel The Covert Captain fall into place as part of a unified stylistic whole. If your brain works well with audiobooks, I highly recommend enjoying The Fire and the Place in the Forest that way (narrated by Violet Dixon) due to the poetic content.
Focus on 1920s Books
It’s been a while since I did a topic-based book appreciation segment, but I’ve been noticing what appears to be an increase in sapphic historicals set in the 1920s, and in preparation for my interview with Margaret Vandenburg, I thought I’d check out if I was imagining it. So I pulled out my spreadsheet—because I’m just a spreadsheet sort of gal. Sure enough, when I looked at the period when I’ve been tracking new releases, there’s a clear jump in the number and proportion of books set in that decade. Between 2015 and 2020, books set in the 1920s run about 3% of the total titles that I’ve found. But starting in 2021 to the present, stories with 1920s settings are running around 10% of the whole.
But why? I doubt it’s as simple as an anniversary—though it’s likely that returning to the ‘20s makes people a little more aware of what was happening a hundred years ago. And sometimes the dates have a direct connection. Several sapphic reimaginings of The Great Gatsby, such as Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful or Sarah Zane’s Beautiful Little Fool were only possible when the original passed into the public domain in 2021.
In my interview with Vandenburg we tossed around some thoughts about this trend, such as the unsettling parallels with a worldwide pandemic and the rise of fascism. Check out our discussion when that show goes live in December for more thoughts.
But for now, I thought I’d look at some of the themes and motifs that show up in current books set in the Roaring Twenties. Several major social trends intersected in that decade, contributing to the nickname. In the recoil after World War I, a generation of younger people—both in Europe and the US—seemed to want to drown out the memories of that horror with music, parties, and sexual license. The era is associated with jazz music, with the flappers who rejected conventional feminine modesty, and often with a sense of frivolous aimlessness that led some to call it the “lost generation,” especially in Europe.
In the US, of course, the ‘20s were dominated by Prohibition and its consequences. Rather than enforcing abstinence and sober propriety, Prohibition turned a substantial fraction of the population into lawbreakers, simply for the pleasures they engaged in. And once you’re a criminal for one of your pleasures, it’s harder to take seriously the legal consequences of your other pleasures. Speakeasies provided cover for all manner of technically illegal activities—like same-sex dancing—and glamorized intersections of class and race that were still unthinkable in daylight. All of these factors provide a backdrop for characters engaging in illicit adventures, forbidden romance, and the thrill of danger.
The intrigues of urban speakeasies set the scene for Alyssa Linn Palmer’s Midnight at the Orpheus, Brandy T. Wilson’s The Palace Blues, Katharine Schellman’s Last Call at the Nightingale, and Margaret Vandenburg’s Craze, while the supply side of bootlegging provide the backdrop for Missouri Vaun’s Whiskey Sunrise and Stacy Lynn Miller’s “Speakeasy” series beginning with Devil’s Slide.
The Harlem Renaissance was another rising movement in the 1920s, providing a vibrant cultural experience by and for Black Americans. Many prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black music scene fall within the definition of queer.
Books with this setting include Anne Shade’s Masquerade, Ava Freeman’s The Sweetest Taboo, and Nekesa Afla’s three book series beginning with Dead Dead Girls,
Although it features less prominently in the books I’ve cataloged, the cabaret culture of 1920s Berlin has some of the same hedonistic abandon as America’s speakeasy culture, both carrying the same sense of impending doom, such as Kip Wilson’s The Most Dazzling Girl in Berlin.
But there’s another more sober strand of queer fiction set in the 1920s. Especially in stories with English settings, the liberty that young women experienced doing work during the war had its echoes in post-war careers. Ambulance drivers and nurses worked side-by-side often in all-female groups, experiencing the heightened emotions of wartime and sometimes emerging with new visions of how they wanted to spend their lives—and with whom.
Some stories with this theme include April Yates’s Ashthorne, A.L. Lester’s The Fog of War, and Charlotte Anne Hamilton’s Of Trust and Heart.
These are only a few of the titles set in the 1920s, and there are plenty of stories that don’t fit within the preceding themes. But if you have a hankering to read about sapphic lives a hundred years ago, these books give you a place to start.
In this episode we talk about:
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online