Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 320 - On the Shelf for August 2025

Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 17:32

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 320 - On the Shelf for August 2025 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/08/03 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for August 2025.

I have a busy month or so coming up. In about a week I’ll be heading off to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle. Then a couple weeks after that, I’m headed off to New Zealand for my official, if belated, retirement celebration trip.

I have a couple of things to celebrate this year at Worldcon. The most exciting is my Hugo Award nomination in the category of Best Related Work. I’m just finishing sewing my outfit for the awards ceremony and looking forward to being able to fasten the little nominee rocket pin on the lapel.

But the second exiting thing is that after several years of promising myself that I’d get my act together and publish my story collection in time for release at Worldcon, I actually did it this year! The collection is Skin-Singer: Tales of the Kaltaoven and includes all my stories from the Sword and Sorceress anthology series, plus a brand new novelette that finishes off the story arc. Official publication date is August 10 and I’ll have print copies with me at Worldcon. Skin-Singer is not historic fiction, except to the extent that the secondary world it’s set in is very, very roughly inspired by Iron Age Europe, but it does have a low-key sapphic romance that develops across the series. I’ve put a buy link in the show notes, though I’m still working on setting up with a couple of distributors.

Also on the excitement front, the Bella Books collection Whispers in the Stacks, which includes my Restoration-era short story “Bound in Bitterness” was awarded the Golden Crown Literary Society award for best fiction anthology or collection. So all in all, exciting times.

It's the time of year when I need to decide about whether to continue the podcast fiction series for another year. This year is the first time when finances are a consideration, what with the whole retirement thing. Although the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has a Patreon, it doesn’t raise anywhere near enough to cover story royalties, much less narrators’ fees. I’ve never wanted to tie the fiction series directly to fundraising, but I don’t feel able to continue funding it out-of-pocket indefinitely. But here’s the deal. I like round numbers, so I’ll commit to running the fiction series for another two years, to bring it to an even ten. But unless something changes drastically on the funding support, that will be it. I’ll update the Call for Submissions soon, but it will be functionally identical to last year, in case you want to get started.

Publications on the Blog

When blogging publications for the Project, I didn’t quite match last month’s count of 15 separate items, but I did manage 11 this month. After posting the 5 that I currently have queued up, I’m going to take a bit of a break, partly due to the upcoming travel, and partly because I need to spend time on some other writing projects.

This month, aside from a couple of articles on random topics—Ula Lukszo Klein’s “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers,” Tess Wingard’s “The Trans Middle Ages,” and Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History—I fell into a pattern of pairs of related articles. I finished up the research for the Sexology podcast with Allida Black’s “Perverting the Diagnosis: The Lesbian and the Scientific Basis of Stigma” and George Chauncey’s “From Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance.” Then a pair on linguistics: Paula Blank’s “The Proverbial ‘Lesbian’: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical Practice” and an early discussion of a 10th century use of “lesbian” in a homosexual sense, Albio Cesare Cassio’s “Post-Classical Λεσβίας.” Next a pair of articles on 18th century author Eliza Haywood by Catherine Ingrassia: “Fashioning Female Authorship in Eliza Haywood’s ‘The Tea-Table’” and “’Queering’ Eliza Haywood.” And finishing with two items from a special journal volume on the Bluestockings: Nicole Pohl’s “A Bluestocking Historiography” and Susan Lanser’s “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire.”

Book Shopping!

No new book shopping for the Project, though I did pick up a fascinating history of women’s detachable pockets.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

Looking at the new fiction spreadsheet, I have startlingly few books to announce this month. These things come in waves: with some months very full and others not, but I worry that the books are out there and I’m just not finding them through my usual avenues. In particular, I’d expect more indie books than I’m currently seeing, and since I mostly have to rely on Amazon keyword searches for those, I’m concerned that the algorithms may be failing me. Once again, I’ll remind people that dropping me a note about your upcoming book, or pointing me to book you’ve heard about can mean the difference in whether they get included or not.

It appears—maybe—that the flood of cookie-cutter series books that have hallmarks of AI generation has slowed, at least for historicals. A listener helpfully pointed out a couple titles that had made it through my filtering process, which is a hazard of trying not to be overly paranoid. I won’t intentionally promote a book generated using large language models, but we know that there’s no perfect way of detecting it.

So here are the 5 new titles I found since last month.

June gives us The Painter's Palette (The Legacy Lane Series #2) by Gina Everleigh. The series is all queer focused, but this is the only f/f title. The stories have cross-time plots, with the current inhabitants of Legacy Lane turning up evidence of older lives.

When restoration artist Jax Miller returns to his hometown to settle his late aunt’s estate, he expects a quick trip and a quiet goodbye. Instead, he uncovers a hidden mural behind the town hall’s walls—vivid portraits of forbidden love, erased by time and prejudice. As Jax peels away the layers, he stumbles upon something far more personal: a link to his own fractured family history.

With the help of Emma Winters, the town’s historical society director, Jax begins to unravel the mural’s story—and his own. A surprise email from the mural’s mysterious artist, long-lost family secrets, and letters from the 1920s ignite a search for truth that challenges everything Jax thought he knew.

As Jax uncovers the courage of those who came before him, he must decide whether to step into the light of his legacy—or leave it hidden forever.

There’s also one July book that turned up in this month’s search: The Needfire by M.K. Hardy from Solaris Books. I’m not entirely certain of the date of the setting, though the cover art suggests maybe late Victorian, which fits with the gothic mood.

You are afraid of the border places. You are afraid of the fork in the road.

Fleeing her mistakes in Glasgow for a marriage of convenience, Norah Mackenzie’s new home on an estate far in the north of Scotland is a chance for freedom, a fresh start. But in the dim, draughty corridors of Corrain House, something is very wrong. Despite their warm correspondence, her distant, melancholic husband does not seem to know her. She is plagued by ghost ships on the sea, spectres at the corner of her eye, by winding, grasping roots. Her only possible companion, the housekeeper Agnes Gunn, is by turns unnerving and alluring, and harbours uncanny secrets of her own.

As the foundations crumble beneath her feet, Norah must uncover the truth about Corrain House, her husband, Agnes, and herself, if she is to find the freedom she has been chasing.

August gives us three titles. The Worst Spy in London (The Luckiest With Love #2) by Anne Knight is another series where the previous book is not sapphic.

Damaris Dunham doesn't understand what all the fuss about love and marriage is all about. Annette de Morand is aching for a chance to show her love for Damaris, but knows it can never be.

When the two young women discover a secret plot to further Napoleon's cause against the English crown, they band together to defeat the threat. As the conspiracy grows more dangerous, they both realize it's not the only threat--their hearts are on the line, too.

You almost expect a book with “heiress” in the title to be a Regency Romance, but The Unexpected Heiress by Cassidy Crane from Bold Strokes Books is set during the Depression—a time when an inheritance would definitely be a plus.

All Clara Cooper wants is something exciting to happen to her for a change. She chafes against the constraints of her society, which would rather see her married off than achieve her artistic dreams. A surprise inheritance turns her life on its head, opening doors she’d never dreamed of.

Addie Barnes is nothing if not pragmatic. Getting by on nothing but her wits and her looks, she turns her savvy eye to Clara and her secret fortune. If she can become Clara’s companion, she’ll be set for life. She initially sees Clara as a means to an end, but as their connection deepens, she grapples with conflicting emotions.

Amidst the tumultuous backdrop of the Great Depression, can they find redemption and love in the face of adversity?

It feels like there’s quite a fashion lately for books re-telling versions of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter. This Vicious Hunger by Francesca May from Orbit Books is at least very reminiscent of that story about a poison garden and the woman who tends it.

Thora Grieve finds herself destitute and an outcast after the sudden death of her husband, but a glimmer of hope arrives when a family friend offers her the chance to study botany under the tutelage of a famed professor. Once at the university, Thora becomes entranced by a mysterious young woman, Olea, who emerges each night to tend to the plants in the private garden below Thora's window.

Hungry for connection, Thora befriends Olea through the garden gate and their relationship quickly and intensely blossoms. Thora throws herself into finding a cure for the ailment confining Olea to the garden and sinks deeper into a world of beauty, poison, and obsession. Thora has finally found the freedom to pursue her darkest desires, but will it be worth the price?

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading? I could have sworn that I read more than two books in the last month—and one of them more like a novelette. But evidently not. At least they were both sapphic and historical.

The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield is a historic fantasy set during World War II focused around the war efforts of a family with various psychic powers who are connected in some way to the Bayeux Tapestry. Told through multiple viewpoints, the novel gradually builds up a fragmentary picture of how all the parts relate until it all comes together. There’s a fair amount of violence and peril, as one might expect in a wartime espionage story. Heartfield writes dense, twisty books that can take some concentration but I’ve enjoyed every one that I’ve tackled.

Murder by Post by Rachel Ford introduces her detective couple, Meredith and Alec Thatch, set in the wake of World War I in England. Alec is passing as a man in order for them to marry, but is not presented as transgender as far as I can tell. This adds an extra element of risk and danger when the resident of a neighboring flat is found dead with signs of poison. This is a classic cozy-style mystery, with lots of clues and red herrings, allowing the reader to think just one step ahead of the characters. This initial story—really just a novelette—is free on the author’s website. I hope that some day she’ll decide to release the rest of the series more widely than just Kindle Unlimited. It deserves a wider audience.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Upcoming travel and events
My new book
- Skin-Singer: Tales of the Kaltaoven by Heather Rose Jones
Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Klein, Ula Lukszo. 2021. “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers” in Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 edited by Misty Kreuger. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press.
- Wingard, Tess, 2024. “The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality”, The English Historical Review.
- Black, Allida M. 1994. “Perverting the Diagnosis: The Lesbian and the Scientific Basis of Stigma.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 201–16.
- Chauncey, George, Jr. 1982. “From Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance” in Salmagundi 58-59 (fall 1982-winter 1983).
- Blank, Paula. 2011. “The Proverbial ‘Lesbian’: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical Practice” in Modern Philology 109, no. 1: 108-34.
- Cassio, Albio Cesare. 1983. “Post-Classical Lesbias,” The Classical Quarterly, n.s., 33:1, pp. 296-297.
- Ingrassia, Catherine. 1998. “Fashioning Female Authorship in Eliza Haywood’s ‘The Tea-Table’” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 287–304.
- Ingrassia, Catherine. 2014. “’Queering’ Eliza Haywood” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond: 9-24
- Katz, Jonathan. 1978. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. Avon Books, New York. ISBN 0-380-40550-4
- Pohl, Nicole, and Betty A. Schellenberg. 2002. “Introduction: A Bluestocking Historiography” in Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1/2, pp. 1–19.
- Lanser, Susan S. 2002. “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire” in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings: 257-275
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
What I’ve been consuming
- The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield
- Murder by Post by Rachel Ford