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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 306 - On the Shelf for February 2025

Saturday, February 1, 2025 - 07:00

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 306 - On the Shelf for February 2025 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/02/01 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2025.

One of my holiday projects was to start the massive reorganization of my personal library, which means that the books on queer history are now comfortably spread out into two bookcases, rather than being crammed double-stacked into one. I’ve also moved them to the bookcase directly in front of the library door, since they’re the volumes I access most frequently. What this means is that I’m now free to buy more books! Though, as it happens, I haven’t done so this month.

Since it’s February, that means that submissions are closed for this year’s fiction series. But since it’s February 1st, that means I haven’t read them yet and made my selections. So watch the blog or my social media for the announcement of this year’s line-up. Submissions were very sparse for the first half of the month and I confess I was freaking out just a little bit, but they picked up later and we ended up with about our usual number. My usual practice is not to read any of the submissions until they’re all in, to avoid the possibility of bias based on receipt date. But from the log-in process I can tell that we once again have a very diverse set of submissions, both in terms of settings and authors. And, as always, I’m proud that the authors have entrusted me with their work, whether it ends up on the podcast or not.

Publications on the Blog

I’ve kept my New Year’s Resolution to try to keep up a more regular blogging schedule for reviewing and summarizing publications. At the time of recording, I’ve blogged five new items. I followed up last month’s review of Stephen Turton’s study of queer vocabulary in English dictionaries with a related article by him “The Lexicographical Lesbian: Remaking the Body in Anne Lister’s Erotic Glossary.” Working my way through articles I have uploaded in my iPad, I followed it with Theresa Braunschneider’s “The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman: Configuring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse,” which looks at the context of this anatomical myth in 18th century medical writing. I finally blogged two collections of poetry that I’ve been mining for my poetry podcasts: The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present edited by Domna C. Stanton and Poems Between Women: Four centuries of love, romantic friendship, and desire, edited by Emma Donoghue. Finally, I expressed my disappointment with the article collection Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, which managed to avoid including anything on female homoeroticism at all.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

The new fiction, however, will never disappoint. There’s a belated January book that I hadn’t realized was historical: Distant Thunder by Peggy J. Herring from Bella Books.

Leo yearns to be free—to ride the vast empty spaces of the open West and escape the endless drudgery of running a farm. It’s a hard life, and every night she tumbles into bed exhausted to dream of freedom.

When free-spirited Cordy rides into her life, Leo both resents and envies Cordy’s freedom. Not to mention the strange feelings that Cordy seems to have awakened in her—feelings she can’t explain or comprehend.

Soon Cordy leaves to join Leo’s father as a train robbing outlaw. But the memory of the kiss they share sends Leo on a journey to find the other woman—and her own self-discovery.

I’m holding off on one of the February books because it doesn’t seem to have a live buy link yet, so I’ll catch up on that one next month. That leaves five more new releases—an unusually low number, especially since February is often a popular month for romance releases. But maybe they’ll show up in my searches next month.

Minas (Dying Gods #4) by Elisha Kemp is a spin-off from a series set in ancient Greece, focusing on two minor characters from that series. The author notes that it can be read by itself but does include spoilers for the main series. The cover copy is exceedingly brief, so let’s see if I can make this dramatic.

Britomartis: I have always been the perfect second-sister: dedicating my life to my people, to my goddess, and to my mother, the Minas of Thera. Now, I’ve betrayed a goddess, commandeered a stolen fleet, and am taking my people into battle against my mother’s orders. For Sira.

Sira: Some women are born to rule. Others carve out their thrones from the bones of their sisters, their mothers, their friends. I was never destined for such a throne. I was never meant to be Minas.

Benefactor to the Baroness by Melissa Kendall from Dragonblade Publishing looks like it has a Victorian setting. The wordiness of the cover copy makes up for the previous title. This book is third in a series, but they appear to be unconnected, with independent characters, and this is the only sapphic entry.

In a world of rules, surrendering to love is the only rebellion that matters.

Plagued by survivors’ guilt after escaping her impoverished childhood selling matchsticks, Fontaine Shepherd, the Dowager Lady Kerry, uses her position on the board of a charitable foundation to relocate starving orphans to the new world—until contact with the new office is abruptly lost. Fearing the foundation will discover she’s been clandestinely using funds to bribe workhouse owners to release children, she decides to travel across the ocean and re-establish communication herself.

Except the only captain who can transport her in time insists that she not travel alone.

Facing a lonely life after marrying off her nieces, Rosemary Summersby reluctantly agrees to attend a ladies’ charity group. There, she meets the vivacious Lady Kerry, who challenges her long-held beliefs of how a lady should look and act. Compelled by a desire to experience the excitement of which her niece often speaks, Rosemary accompanies the dowager baroness to a workhouse and witnesses the cruelty of poverty firsthand.

Then Lady Kerry stumbles into Rosemary’s cottage one night with an outrageous request: to travel across the ocean as her companion and help her uncover the mystery behind the missing orphans.

Unable to convince the dowager baroness of the dangers of her plan and remembering the sense of responsibility that drove her to accept three orphans into her life fifteen years prior, Rosemary decides to join Lady Kerry on her trip. But as the vast ocean and a noble mission stretches before them, a shared purpose and a single bunk ignite an unexpected passion that makes both women question what they truly want for themselves.

This next book has a sapphic protagonist, but it isn’t clear that she has a central romance within the story. There is a secondary gay male couple who are also central to the action. The book is Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith from Bloomsbury USA.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents' dull, limited life. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants-not least because, more interested in men himself, Oscar will leave Vivian to tend to her own romances with women.

But Vivian's plans require capital, so the two pair up with Squire Clancey, scion of an old American fortune. Together they found Clancey & Schmidt, a preeminent manufacturer of soap, perfume, and candles. When Oscar and Squire fall in love, the trio form a new kind of partnership.

Vivian reaches the pinnacle of her power building Clancey & Schmidt into an empire of personal care products while operating behind the image of both men. But exposure threatens, and all three partners are made aware of how much they have to lose.

Penny Mickelbury’s books are always worth snapping up. Her current release is Payback, from Bywater Books

World War II ended less than 10 years ago, and the Korean War less than one. But no one has recovered from wartime privations, especially the Colored soldiers who fought a ruthless enemy on foreign lands, expecting to return home with all the rights and privileges of American citizenship.

But those rights and privileges remain few and far between, and Mickelbury’s cast of characters find themselves reflecting on the Harlem they call home: they are educated and unschooled; wealthy and desperately poor; committed to improving circumstances for Negroes and abjectly hopeless. They create a family of and for themselves—women, men, children, gays, and the proudly self-named. They commit themselves to helping create a world to benefit their people based on hard work, artistic expression, and faith in their community.

They have learned to live in the larger world by two guiding principles: Each One Teaches One, and Harm to One is Harm to All—because in this neighborhood, payback will always be swift and painful.

Sheridan LeFanu’s sapphic vampire story Carmilla has inspired a lot of variations from modern writers. The latest in this tradition is Hungerstone by Kat Dunn from Zando.

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

What Am I Reading?

I’ve only read three books this month—all audiobooks, as usual. I was exploring some sale books to see if I could find any interesting historic mysteries and thought that Murder in an English Village by Jessica Ellicott looked interesting. It’s set between the World Wars and involves two old school chums—one an English spinster and one an American adventuress—who stumble into several mysteries. It’s a pleasant enough mystery, though I was unwarrantedly hoping for a touch more sapphic subtext, along the lines of Miss Buncle’s Book.

That same audiobook sale led me to pick up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own about the difficulties of being a woman writer. Pair this classic with Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Women’s Writing and then sink into a deep depression about how little has changed since those books were written.

I finished up the month with Emma Denny’s sapphic medieval romance All the Painted Stars. This book is a follow-on from her previous one which focused on a gay male couple. The two stories are connected by family ties. I found it to be a nice, well-written romance, but I had to suppress my historian’s reflexes a bit too often for comfort. It wasn’t a matter of large inaccuracies, but of a constant flow of small details that kept distracting me from the endearing main characters.

And that concludes the show for this month. I have a couple feelers out for upcoming interviews, but didn’t manage to fit one into my schedule this time. If you’re an author with a book coming out that fits into this podcast (and if I haven’t already interviewed you on the show), I’d love for you to reach out and ask.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

  • Submissions for the 2025 fiction series are closed and results will be announced shortly
  • Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
    • Turton, Stephen. 2022. “The Lexicographical Lesbian: Remaking the Body in Anne Lister’s Erotic Glossary” in The Review of English Studies, vol. 73, no. 310: 537-551.
    • Braunschneider, Theresa. 1999. “The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman: Configuring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse” in Textual Practice 13, no. 3: 509-32.
    • Stanton, Domna C. 1986. The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present. The Feminist Press ISBN 0-935312-52-8
    • Donoghue, Emma. 1997. Poems Between Women: Four centuries of love, romantic friendship, and desire. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-231-10925-3
    • Burger, Glenn & Steven F. Kruger eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-81669-3404-1
  • Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
  • What I’ve been consuming
    • Murder in an English Village by Jessica Ellicott
    • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
    • All the Painted Stars by Emma Denny

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

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