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Tuesday, October 21, 2025 - 09:00
When an article is primarily about the later reception of a historic figure, often it isn't that relevant to the Project. But when that "later" falls solidly in our scope, and the "reception" is concerned with the historic figure's queerness, then the discussion is solidly relevant, as in this article.
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LHMP View comments (0)
Full citation:
Most, Glenn W. 1995. “Reflecting Sappho” in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 40: 15-38.
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
In the 18th century, the primary “facts” associated with Sappho were Ovid’s story of her failed romance with Phaon and her subsequent suicide. This is exemplified in various novelizations of her life, including Alessandro Verri’s 1781 work, among others. Verri’s text specifically denies any homoerotic elements to her life, claiming they were slanders by poetic rivals, while other 18th century treatments don’t bother mentioning this topic at all.
Beginning in the early 19th century, a hypothesis arose to account for the conflict between the content of Sappho’s poetry (including its homoerotic themes) and the treatment of Sappho as a character in Athenian comedy (as heterosexually promiscuous), alleging that by the time of the comic treatment, nothing was remembered about Sappho’s work except that she was a famous poet, and the comic persona was simply invented to attach to that reputation. (This has the obvious problem that there’s plenty of evidence for Sappho’s body of work being very well known during that era.)
Skipping back to the image of Sappho during antiquity, the problem is complicated, including not only the content of her poetry, but the attribution of a husband (identified as “Kerkylas from Andros”, i.e., “Penis from Man-land”), a daughter, various brothers, many female companions (some of whom were specifically identified as her lovers), a number of male lovers, and a failed heterosexual relationship that led to her suicide. Over the centuries then and following, several strategies have attempted to make sense of these themes via “duplication, narrativisation, and condensation.”
Duplication solved the problem of incompatibility by positing two women of the same name who later became conflated. (This theory is found as early as the 3rd c BCE.) The usual division is into the poet Sappho, with the specified family members and female coterie, and a prostitute named Sappho, who takes ownership of the many male lovers and inspires the comedic character. Other divisions also appear. An 11th c Byzantine version of her biography separates out only a harp-playing Sappho who died for the love of Phaon, and assigns all the other attributes to another Sappho, include the highly detailed account of her family members and list of female lovers and pupils. The reduplicated Sappho continues to appear in Renaissance interpretations, though there is little coherency in how her characteristics are divided.
A minority approach among ancient authors (not included in the three themes mentioned above) was to reject certain details as fictional. More common was the “narrativization” approach, which organized the elements chronologically in such a way that they could all happen in a single lifetime. Ovid’s treatment in the Heroides is the earliest known version of this, where the poet Sappho has long since lost or become estranged from her family, has left the love of women behind, and late in life falls for Phaon to her detriment. A few Renaissance scholars adopted this approach but it came to dominate the discourse in late 17th century France, as in the biographical prefacy to Madame Dacier’s edition of Sappho’s poetry. In this version, Sappho’s homoerotic encounters might be dismissed or ignored according to the preferences of the biographer (and their concern for her reputation). Madame Dacier’s father, Tanneguy LeFevre, had imagined a rather more licentious Sappho, not having the handicap of literary identification that Dacier felt. But even those who included the homoerotic elements in this era, focused solidly on the heterosexual plot.
The primary logical flaw in following Ovid’s version of Sappho’s life is that Ovid also downplayed her poetic accomplishments, presenting her literary efforts as mediocre verses inspired by her doomed love for Phaon. This presented the contradiction of a famous poet who came to poetry late and badly.
The condensation strategy was seized on in the early 19th century by the Romantics, who re-centered Sappho’s poetry and envisioned her specifically as a Romantic poet, talented by tormented and doomed to tragedy because her fragile feminine nature was not capable of supporting the magnitude of her genius. Her sexuality is sidelined. At the same time, other writers take up the challenge of touching on her homoerotic reputation only in order to establish her innocence. (An interesting tactic given that her homoeroticism had scarcely been part of the debate in the previous century.) Earlier versions of Sappho as libertine were discredited in favor of “Sappho the schoolmistress.” This movement did tackle the task of tracing all the individual elements of her reputation back to their sources in order to refute the undesirable ones, but it also brought in an element of duplication: the poet Sappho versus the fictional character in Attic stage comedy. The “schoolmistress” theory required the reinterpretation her Sappho’s erotic language as idealized and non-sensual (an approach that aligned with the rise of romantic friendship culture).
The re-focusing on Sappho’s poetry (rather than the Phaon fiction) led, later in the 19th century, to a re-acceptance of the poetry’s homoeroticism, positioning Sappho as the banner-bearer and namesake of female homosexuality. [Note: This is one of the aspects where I feel Most is leaving out some essential chronology. Most says “we should remember that [the idea that Sappho was a female homosexual] was never widespread before our century,” but here I feel he’s overstating the case because references to Sappho as an icon of f/f sexuality occur regularly from at least the 16th century, even when other narratives were also popular.]
In conclusion, Most notes that while the complexity and contradictions of the source materials have contributed to the shifts in the dominant narratives about Sappho, those shifts have also reflected “contingent and temporarily fashionable prejudices about the nature of women, of sexuality, of poetry, and so on” which I think has solidly been demonstrated. It has been difficult to ignore the intensity of the emotion expressed in her poetry, even though much of the corpus has been lost, but the highly personal focus of the poems has made it possible to question the target of those emotions, either in general (men vs women) or in specific (her feelings about specific named persons). The aspects of her poetry that contributed to her popularity also made it easier for later ages to reinterpret those poems according to their own circumstances, and reinvent their own version of Sappho in parallel.
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Sunday, October 19, 2025 - 10:00
I always love articles like this that dissect in detail the evidence for largely unanswerable questions, yet still come to conclusions (even if ones that other scholars might dispute).
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LHMPFull citation:
Lardinois, André. 1994. “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho's Poetry” in Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 124: 57-84.
Lardinois (who several years earlier wrote an excellent article digging into the actual known facts about Sappho’s life, and their likely interpretation – Lardinois 1989) examines the evidence for the context in which Sappho’s poetry was performed and the likely composition of her audience. In particular, he is responding to Parker 1993 (I have a copy but haven’t blogged it yet) who argues that rather than the received theory that Sappho’s audience/context was young, unmarried girls, that she was performing at banquets for adult women (i.e., in a symposium-like context). In addition to addressing this claim, Lardinois considers other popular paradigms: that Sappho taught at a formal school of some type, that she was the instructor of a girls’ chorus, and then she lead a thiasos (a religious association that participated in various ceremonies).
The first category of evidence under consideration are the “testimonia”, something like biographies, which include references to Sappho associating with young women (using various words that have a default understanding of young, unmarried women). The objections to this evidence are primarily that they were written about six centuries after Sappho’s lifetime and largely involve constructing biography out of the content of her poetry. However Lardinois notes that, unlike modern scholars, the authors of the testimonia had a much more complete corpus of that poetry available to them. One of Parker’s suggestions is that, in the testimonia, these biographers re-wrote the context of Sappho’s life into one more parallel to male pederastic relationships, substituting age-differentiated language for references to more egalitarian and age-matched relationships. Lardinois objects—not only on the basis that there’s no positive evidence for this—but that other authors in the same era as the testimonia had no trouble imagining and writing about f/f relations between mature women (albeit they wrote negatively about them). If the available evidence they worked from had indicated a mature audience, then Sappho would have been associated with representations like those in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, rather than being “translated” into an age-differentiated version.
This analysis doesn’t contradict the issue that later biographers often assumed that all ancient Greek poets were writing autobiographical poems. Sappho is not the only author whose works have been assumed to involve the poet speaking their own experience in their own person. One example that we know is the case, though even more clearly fictional, is how Ovid’s story about Sappho and Phaon was treated as truth and autobiography in later ages, aided by the fact that Sappho did write about Phaon (and Adonis) in the context of Aphrodite, sometimes writing in the goddess’s voice.
Trying to interpret which of Sappho’s poems might represent a personal, solo voice and which were compositions intended for (third-person) choral performance is not necessarily obvious. Some have argued that there is a clear metrical distinction, but Lardinois demonstrates that this is not the case, either for Sappho’s work or for her contemporaries. In a very few (surviving) cases, Sappho’s name appears in a poem, suggesting a more personal voice. Further, he points out, we can’t be absolutely certain that Sappho herself is a historic figure, rather than a poetic persona to whom work was attributed (as is a popular theory about Homer). But for the remainder of the article, Lardinois accepts that Sappho was a real historic figure and that, with the exception of poems clearly identifiable as “wedding songs” she is the “speaker” in the poem, though not necessarily the actual performer.
The significant time-gap between Sappho’s life and the composition of the testimonia does raise the question of whether they contain anachronisms. For example, there is no evidence for anything resembling formal schools for women in Sappho’s era. Young women might receive ad hoc instruction in songs and dances performed in ceremonies, and there is some evidence for instruction in reading and writing within the home, but the organized schools for girls found in later centuries (and indicated in the testimonia) had no parallel. Therefore references to Sappho as a “schoolteacher” in the testimonia is most likely an anachronistic fiction, leaving open the possibility that she did participate in instruction and leadership of choral groups.
The most substantial body of evidence for Sappho’s context is the poetry itself. In this section, Lardinois regularly notes that he’s analyzing the works that are not wedding songs, biographical poems (of other people), or mythological references. Within this, references indicating the age of the women she is singing to or about all use vocabulary normally associated with young, unmarried women (kore, pais, parthenon). (But at least one of the later testimonia makes a linguistic distinction between Sappho’s “pupils” (mathetriai) and the “companions and friends” (hetairai) who were responsible for her sexual reputation.) A few references are ambiguous, as when the poem says, “I love you once Atthis, long ago” which could be interpreted as referring to a time when they were both young women.
Moving on from the age of Sappho’s subjects/audience, Lardinois considers what her relationship was to them. It is clearly established that she wrote songs that other women/girls performed. It is also clear that Sappho expressed desire for some specific women (though it can’t always be determined whether they were part of the audience for the work’s performance). References to Atthis frame her as both a beloved and a performer. An unnamed addressee is reminded of a variety of sensual (and possibly erotic) activities they partook together, at a time when the addressee is leaving her. This is, perhaps, the most solid evidence of an erotic relationship between Sappho and a member of her chorus (who, presumably, is now leaving for marriage?).
The article moves on to consider various possible historic parallels for Sappho’s cultural context. Given that ancient Greek societies were not homogeneous, this can be tricky but Lardinois looks specifically for parallels to “expressions of desire for young women” and “composing songs for girls’ choruses.” This include Plutarch’s reference to noble women of Sparta having erotic relationships with young, unmarried women (parthenoi) similar to those that men had with boys. The poet Alcman uses the femining “aitis” in parallel with masculine “aitas” for the “beloved” in a pederastic relationship, and while there is not explicit reference to the gender of whom the girls are beloved by, the sexual logic of the day suggests that this was not a heterosexual relationship. In Alcman’s “wedding songs” voices representing the girls chorus express desire for their choral leader. A vase painting from Thera dating to Sappho’s era shows two women making an inviting gesture that, between a man and boy or between a man and woman, would indicate a sexual context. Taken all together, these suggest that there may have been a general Greek culture of female mentorship that included erotic relations.
For the second theme, there is extensive evidence in the archaic Greek period that the composer of choral songs for young women’s performance also trained them and led the performances. And there are some anecdotal examples representing one member of an adolescent group having an erotic relationship with a mentor and forming a connection to the group as a whole. (Tenuous, but possibly useful context.) Therefore one need not posit that Sappho had erotic relationships with all of her “students” but only that it was a context in which such relationships might be expected.
The article finishes by summarizing pros and cons for the four modern framings of Sappho: school teacher, chorus leader, thiasos leader, and symposium performer. Of these, Lardinois concludes the evidence is most congruent with chorus leader.
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Saturday, October 18, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 326 - Speculative Fiction and Sapphic Plots - transcript
(Originally aired 2025/10/18 - listen here)
When I get ideas for podcast episodes, I set up an empty folder to remind myself of the topic. Last month I was doing some file housekeeping to remove place-holder folders for topics I’d covered in some fashion and found this script—nearly complete and never used. I’d even assigned it an episode number, back three years ago. I have no idea at this point why I left it sitting. It does overlap with material from some other episodes. I worry about repetition sometimes, but then I remember that you, my audience, don’t live with all this information packed into your brains like I do. And there’s no point in letting the script go to waste, so I thought I’d finish polishing it up and offer it to you.
Introduction
For contemporary writers of lesbian and sapphic characters, the field of fantasy and science fiction offers wide open spaces to envision identities, lives, and societies that differ from the ordinary. Speculative literature embraces stories that are limited only by imagination, whether they choose alternate worlds as a setting, explore what science and technology might offer, or incorporate forces or beings that are not a part of our everyday lives.
For the most part, we don’t need speculative fiction as a medium for telling engaging, sympathetic, positive stories of women who love women. We write speculative fiction because we enjoy it for its own sake, and we write queer characters because they’re part of the world we live in, expressing a whole range of stories and personalities.
In past centuries, it wasn’t quite as simple to create stories in which women who loved women could be presented as ordinary, as sympathetic, and as positive role models. Oh, you could do it if that love were depicted as sisterly, or platonic. You got a lot more push-back if their love was clearly romantic or sexual.
But there was one big escape clause. People did enjoy stories about women who loved women; they just got a bit uncomfortable if you implied those stories took place in the here and now. If you set the story in the mythic past? If you told wonder tales about other worlds? If you took your readers or listeners through a doorway into an imagined adventure of heroes, gods, fairies, and magic? Then you could have your heroines kiss each other. Maybe.
There’s a regular theme running through lesbian history that societies try to deny the existence of love between women in the here and now. It’s something that people did a long time ago. It something the people in foreign lands do. Women in the here and now who didn’t keep the sexual aspects of their love invisible or disguised could face condemnation and punishment. But at the very same time, people were relatively accepting of fictions of female same-sex love, and were willing to find such characters honorable and even admirable. As long as they remained fictions.
The more removed the stories were from everyday life—the more they belonged to the fantastic and imaginary—the more free the characters were to have openly sapphic relationships. This means that early versions of fantasy and science fiction can offer some of the more positive and affirming stories about women loving women, or at least ones in which lesbian representation is present and not outright condemned.
The genre labels of “fantasy” and “science fiction” are modern inventions of course, but we can define some general definitions of what type of literature we’re talking about. We’re talking about stories that are explicitly not realistic. They aren’t depicting the everyday world and the sort of events and people in it. They may be set in an alternate geography—a place that is entirely invented, or that is a fictional adaptation of a real-world place, such as King Arthur’s Britain, or the China envisioned in tales from the 1001 Nights. The story may use a setting peopled with magical or supernatural beings, such as classical gods, or the inhabitants of Faerie. It may involve unexplainable events, such as transformations, visions, or magical journeys. The distinction between what we would define as fantasy versus science fiction isn’t always clear, and there’s more material that leans toward the former than that latter. But stories that take the form of a traveler’s tale, exploring a previously unknown land and society, often feel rather science-fictional.
In this brief survey, we’ll be looking at some characters and stories from historic literature that fall in the intersection of speculative fiction and sapphic plots.
All-Female Societies
One of the most obvious opportunities for sapphic stories would be woman-only societies, though the romantic possibilities aren’t always acknowledged. In the earliest classical stories of the all-female Amazons, the possibility of same-sex desire tends to be ignored. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the sex lives of Amazons were most relevant in their occasional encounters with men. But in medieval and Renaissance stories involving Amazons, they were often shown engaging in homoerotic encounters, or at least open to the possibility. In Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the Amazon Emilia is mourning her dead girlfriend and rejects the idea of marriage out of loyalty to her. While there is no explicit indication that it was a sexual relationship—as opposed to a very intensely romantic one—a sexual reference would be at odds with the tone of the work.
In a less familiar 17th century play The Female Rebellion, we are shown both platonic and sexual bonds within the mythological Amazonian setting. The Amazon Queen Orithya is being plotted against by her generals, but supported by the loyal Nicostrate who infiltrates the rebels. The rebels believe (and are allowed to believe) that the bond between Nicostrate and Orithya is sexual, so a lovers’ spat is invented to motivate Nicostrate’s supposed betrayal. The villainous Amazon generals are portrayed as openly erotic with each other, so perhaps this isn’t the best example of fiction excusing lesbianism.
In several chivalric romances, an Amazonian warrior character becomes the object of female desire due to gender confusion, but I’ll cover that motif separately in a little bit. In Philip Sidney’s mythic adventure Arcadia, a character pretending to be an Amazon uses the sapphic reputation of Amazons as a ploy when courting a woman, though in this case the fake Amazon is a man. But the episode establishes the literary motif of lesbian relationships being normalized among Amazons.
Another fantasy setting involving an all-female society comes from the classical myths of Artemis or Diana, goddess of the hunt, who required that her female followers reject relations with men. While not all literature depicting Diana’s band depicted sexual relations among the women, many works do—or at least involve erotic play, including an entire genre of mildly erotic artwork with this motif. Ovid’s story of Callisto’s seduction by Jupiter in disguise as Diana necessarily relies on the idea that Callisto would be open to a sexual relationship with the goddess. This motif appears in a number of Renaissance works that feature Diana and her followers in Arcadian fantasies, such as William Warner’s play Albion’s England and Thomas Heywood’s The Golden Age in which Diana’s followers are paired up in monogamous same-sex couples.
Aside from works playing with classical mythology, fiction about all-woman societies really begins to appear in the late 19th century. Most female-authored utopian novels of the 19th and early 20th century that depict all-woman societies reflect the gender stereotype prevalent at that time of women as being elevated, cultured, but non-erotic beings. In works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, or the much more obscure 1890 work Mizora by Mary E. Bradley, an event in the past has eliminated all the men in an isolated region and the women became able to reproduce via parthenogenesis. Sexual desire, however, is assumed to be absent from these societies and the authors may not even feel the need to explain this point. Mizora is a rather fascinating science-fictional “hollow earth” story, and the female explorer who narrates the story both has a past romantic friendship with a woman and develops an intensely romantic friendship with one of the women she meets there, though this isn’t depicted as a natural consequence of the single-sex nature of the society.
Stories of Long Ago and Far Away
Popular ways to create a fantasy setting for a story include setting it in the mythic past (as we saw in Amazon stories) or in a distant land. Setting aside genuine travelers’ tales, such as the flood of descriptions of the Ottoman Empire that became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, describing lesbianism as prevalent in a land far away—whether real or fictional—not only removed the ability for the audience to fact-check it, but made the idea less threatening.
The 2nd century author Iamblichos wrote a soap-opera-like tale, the Babyloniaka, set in a mythic earlier Mesopotamia. Perhaps not so far away as some fantasy settings, but definitely not intended as a contemporary story. Among many other characters and events, it includes a romance between Bernice, the Queen of Egypt, and a woman named Mesopotamia. Depending on how one translates certain key vocabulary, the two women either got married or simply had sex. The situation is presented in a positive light, though the 10th century summary which is our only source for the text may have been a bit more disapproving.
On the more satirical side, Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans also represents a 2nd century Greek author setting tales in a fictional antiquity. When his courtesan tells of being hired to be part of an all-female threesome, there may be an implied expectation that his contemporary audience will find this shocking, but within the story itself, the women’s relationship and actions are presented as merely odd.
The fully separate secondary world is often a feature of philosophical or satirical writing—a means in general of being able to comment on contemporary society with plausible deniability. This is the case for Delariviere Manley’s late 17th century roman à clef Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediteranean. I’d tend to classify this as a science fictional work, as it uses the motif of a separate society in the lost land of Atlantis, though mirroring Manley’s contemporary world closely. Her Atlantean society features an all-female secret society, the New Cabal, whose members reject the love of men and enjoy passionate pair-bonds with other women of the club. While Manley’s work strays a little from the theme of positive depictions, the satire is light and fairly gentle—gentler than her treatment of same-sex desire in her more realistic writings.
Secondary Worlds and Crossdressing Romances
Fantastic literature that includes female cross-dressing creates a doubly-distanced context for permitting the neutral depiction of same-sex desire. Cross-dressing alone doesn’t license lesbian relations in the eyes of society—as we can see in the legal history where prosecutions for female same-sex relations almost always are triggered by one member of the couple cross-dressing. But in an imagined secondary world, cross-dressing is often used as a gateway to depicting lesbian desire.
Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe not only created a neutral depiction of female same-sex desire (conveniently situated in an ancient past) in his original 1st century work, but inspired regular reworkings of the material throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Unlike some cross-dressing romances where a female-presenting character falls in love with a masculine-presenting one, the cross-dressed Iphis falls hopelessly in love with her childhood friend, though the author writes her as considering her love to be in vain. The love itself is not condemned, only the possibility of its fulfillment is denied until divine intervention restores heteronormativity.
Later authors who took up the tale, perhaps having the cushion of even greater conceptual distance from a mythic ancient Greece, were a bit more generous, sometimes allowing the two women a wedding night before the divinely-mediated sex-change. Or, as in the 17th century play Gallathea, concluding with the two women reaffirming their love for each other as women, before the off-stage resolution that allows them to marry, as all good theatrical protagonists must.
In general, the early modern fashion for mythic pastoral settings involving the presence of classical deities was generous to the possibility of female homoeroticism. Several versions of the story L’Astrée or Astræa include erotic scenes between the followers of the goddess Diana, plus the stratagem of a man only being able to win a woman’s romantic attention by cross-dressing. Something of a reversal of the usual cross-dressing romance plot.
Amazon romances are not confined to depictions of all-female Amazon societies, as in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, both of which involve positive depictions of female same-sex desire, mediated by mistaken gender or gender disguise. While one could argue that such gender-confusion plots don’t involve actual homoeroticism, the possibility of that desire is depicted in a neutral or positive way, even when the confusion is resolved.
Conclusion
These are only a selection of the historic literary works in which a fantastical or science-fictional setting created a space in which female fictional characters were allowed to experience same-sex desire without condemnation or punishment. The motivations were different from those of modern authors. Today, we may want the freedom to create positive depictions without directly violating what we consider to be the constraints of actual history or current society. (As well as the freedom to tell stories that break free of realistic fiction in other ways.) Authors of the past probably had a variety of motivations, not all of them admirable. Representations of lesbianism may have been done for titillation, in a context where a realistic depiction would have provoked moral outrage. Most of these depictions, however neutral in context, still included heteronormative resolutions in some fashion. But they all speak to the scope of what could be imagined, once the imagination was liberated from the here and now.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Historic “speculative fiction” as a context for neutral depictions of sapphic characters
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
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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LHMPTuesday, October 14, 2025 - 12:51
My new approach to structuring my "working time" is to focus on one project for a week, then move to a different focus the next week. This is as contrasted with trying to work on multiple projects every day, or doing one-day focuses. So far, I feel like it's being productive. The week timeframe means that I have a chance to get my feet underneath me, get into a deep-focus zone, and get substantial work done.
I had one previous fiction week where I picked a random in-process short story and got it through to a finished draft. (It's currently "aging" for a while before I touch it again.) This week I opened up the files for Mistress of Shadows, Alpennia #5. Monday, I read through the first two chapters of existing material, doing the sort of light edits that you always do when re-reading something. I also made some notes for different directions I wanted to go than my current outline notes. (Minor stuff. Mostly I decided that I really did need to kill off a side character who only shows up in the first chapter. I tried to avoid killing her, but I need to traumatize my protagonist, and also she's partially based on a real historical figure who was murdered.)
Today I started seriously working on new text in the first chapter. This involved a fair amount of going back and checking my research notes. Things that had previously been embedded in my consciousness have faded and I think I need to really dig into the background material again. But I also needed to pin down some concrete facts. Because in this scene (which is backstory set in 1815, before we jump to the "current" timeline of the books) I need my character to encounter the anti-Bonapartist riots in Marseille, the week after Waterloo, which turned into anti-immigrant riots (specifically, anti-Egyptian), giving her the impetus to agree to a devil's bargain for safety for her family that structures the rest of her story arc.
For that, I needed to figure out the most likely locations and progress of the riots relative to other relevant sites, specifically the Egyptian community on Cours Goffé, and a reason for her to be in the downtown area. A fish market--that's a good excuse for her to be there with her mentor. Yes, that works. Ok, where would the major fish market have been located in 1815? And does that location work for what I need to happen?
Two hours later...
This week I hope to get the first chapter solidly drafted. (Chapter 2 is already complete.) And maybe also review the detailed outline, since I've made some philosophical changes to how I want to handle point of view. All the previous books have been told from a specific set of points of view, one per chapter, always limited to the central protagonists. But that has gotten unwieldy. I need to show some things that none of my central characters are present for. And I simply can't manage the logistics of one-viewpoint-per-chapter at this point.
Once I've immersed myself in the outline and existing research, I expect things will progress more quickly. I hope.
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Mistress of ShadowsMonday, October 13, 2025 - 09:00
It is not at all surprising that there is a vast academic industry of Sappho studies. In the past I’ve covered a number of excellent, detailed publications that speak directly to the historic and social context of Sappho’s life and work, especially as it speaks to female same-sex relations. (Or to the reception of her life and work in other eras.) So I’ve gotten past the point of trying to include every Sappho publication I run across in someone’s bibliography, unless it looks like it might add to my existing coverage. I have a handful of articles in that field in my current set, of highly variable relevance. This one does NOT fall in the "excellent" category.
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LHMPFull citation:
Devereux, George. 1970. “The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 LP as Evidence of Her Inversion” in The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1: 17-31.
I probably should have been clued in to the angle of Devereux’s article by the word “inversion” in the title. This article is a modern psychoanalysis of Sappho fragment 31 (“He is like a god to me”), interpreting the emotional and physical reactions described in the poem as indicating, not romantic desire or even jealousy, but an anxiety attack triggered by Sappho’s recognition of her “abnormal” and “deviant” homosexual desires and her consequent shame at experiencing them. That is, the author works from the following premises and logic: A) same-sex desire is inherently and existentially abnormal and pathological; B) this was not only true in all historic times and places, but people have always been self-aware of its pathology; C) the poem represents an actual experience by Sappho; D) the described experience differs qualitatively from what a “normal” person would experience in a situation of desire or jealousy; E) therefore the existence of the poem is proof positive that Sappho was a lesbian (modern sense) who was self-aware of her pathological and deviant desires..
To this, Devereux adds the sneering coda that such a conclusion need not contradict theories that Sappho was a teacher of young women, as “even in our day and age, ‘tweedy’ games-mistresses and the like are far from rare” and “as much as in some modern societies, female inverts tended to gravitate into professions which brought them in close contact with young girls, whose partial segregation and considerable psycho-sexual immaturity—and therefore incomplete differentiatedness—made them willing participants in lesbian experimentation.”
[Note: An article like this reminds us of the cultural and academic atmosphere in which the beginnings of queer history struggled to emerge. This article was published in 1970, the year after the Stonewall riots. I would have been twelve years old (and obviously not yet reading academic journals!), beginning to form my own ideas about my sexuality, but fortunately starting to learn to read cultural messages critically.]
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Saturday, October 11, 2025 - 14:00
I found this a compelling analysis (though perhaps it was simply the goddess compelling me?)
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Petropoulos, J.C.B. 1993. “Sappho the Sorceress: Another Look at fr. 1 (LP)” in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 97: 43-56.
The poem by Sappho identified as “fragment 1,” which isn’t a fragment but the only surviving complete poem, is also the one where Sappho as a woman-desiring-woman is most overt. This is not only because she names herself within the poem, but also because it is specifically about asking divine help to attract the love of another woman.
In this article, Petropoulos draws strong parallels between the structure of this poem and Greek magical texts that are also designed to attract (or manipulate) erotic/romantic attention. That is, the poem is not simply one expressing desire, but has the format of a magical charm to achieve that desire, albeit through the intervention of the goddess Aphrodite.
I’m not going to go into the details of the evidence—which largely consists of analyzing grammatical parallelisms and fixed formulas—but I found the argument compelling. Specifically in the context of f/f desire, the article mentions two Greek magical papyri from Egypt that are clearly love-magic directed by one woman at another. (See e.g., Brooten 1997) One difference from the Egyptian love-spells is that, in Sappho’s poem, the desired result is not simply overcoming the resistance of the target, rather Aphrodite promises that the target will become an active lover: pursuing Sappho and offering her gifts, indicating that a reciprocal relationship is desired, rather than the hierarchical structure of male same-sex relations at the time. Another difference from more standard love-magic texts is that the agency is placed in the goddess's hands, rather than the power behind the compulsion coming from Sappho’s working of the spell.
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Monday, October 6, 2025 - 09:00
Continuing with some articles on ancient Greek topics, this one offers some entirely different interpretations of Anacreon's disinterested Lesbian.
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LHMPFull citation:
Davidson, J.F. 1987. “Anacreon, Homer and the Young Woman from Lesbos” in Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 40, Fasc. 1/2: 132-137.
Like Pellicia 1995, this article takes a stab at identifying and evaluating possible intended meanings contained in Anacreon’s “she doesn’t like my grey hair” epigram. After reviewing some of the more common suggestions (“she prefers another [hair color]”, “she prefers another [woman]” either in a sexual or non-sexual context) and some less common ones (“she prefers another [type of hair]” – playing on the reputation of Lesbos for fellatio), Davidson adds a couple of possible scenarios inspired by the reference to “Eros hitting me with his ball” (i.e., inspiring my desire), suggesting that an actual game of ball may have been involved. Davidson discusses references to young women playing ball games as with Nausicaa in the Odyssey, or ball-throwing games by young men as entertainment elsewhere in the Odyssey. There are other stylistic allusions to Homer in Anacreon’s poem, so this is a reasonable suggestion.
Two possible scenarios for the inspiration of the poem are suggested. In one possible scenaro, the young woman has deliberately thrown a ball to/at Anacreon in flirtation, but only then notices his grey hair and spurns him. In a second possible scenario, an accidentally thrown ball has drawn Anacreon’s attention to the woman, stimulating his erotic interest in her, but she can’t be bothered and is more enthusiastic about continuing the game. In the second scenario, the woman “gaping after another” simply refers to her interest in continuing the game rather than paying attention to Anacreon.
Davidson admits that neither of these scenarios offers the “dramatic twist” that the structure and genre of the poem seem to call for (and that Pellicia indicates is required by the grammatical structure), but have the advantage [for those who consider it an advantage] of not invoking a homoerotic scenario for the woman’s disinterest.
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Saturday, October 4, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 325 - On the Shelf for October 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/10/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2025.
It’s been quite a month! As I mentioned in the last On the Shelf show, I spent the first two weeks of September visiting New Zealand as my official retirement celebration trip. It sounds strange to talk about taking a “vacation” in retirement, but I disconnected from all my online projects—didn’t even take my laptop with me—and not only enjoyed the wonderful scenery, delightful people, and delicious food, but I spent a lot of time just relaxing and reading. As you’ll find out in the “what I’ve been reading” segment later.
Now I’m back to the routine of rotating between working on the blog and podcast, revising material for the history book, writing some fiction, and other projects. One of those projects needs to be getting back in practice on my harp, because it will feature in one of the podcast stories next month.
And speaking of the podcast fiction series, remember that we’ll be open for submissions for the 2026 series in January. That’s plenty of time for you to brainstorm, write, and polish up your sapphic historical short story! See the link in the show notes for the guidelines.
Publications on the Blog
No new book shopping for the blog, but in spite of the vacation, I’ve been working through my current folder of journal articles. In some cases, this is more like house cleaning than research. Works that I noted as being of minimal or no relevance include Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Brian Arkins’ “Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens”, Christine Downing’s Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, and Martha Reineke’s response to Downing in “Within the Shadow of the Herms: A Critique of ‘Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love’."
A separate article by Christine Downing, “Lesbian Mythology,” summarized some of the classical references to female same-sex desire without muddling it up with the Freudian psychology that was the main point of her book.
Jan Bremmer’s “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty” touches very briefly on the fragments of evidence for sexualized female mentorship in ancient Greece. And finally Max Nelson’s “A Note on the ὄλισβος” discusses the ancient Greek vocabulary for dildos and why this one specific word is erroneously considered to be the proper name for the object.
I have another 15 articles lined up, but I’m trying to spread them out a bit to avoid spending all my creative time on the blog.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
Let’s move on to the new and recent releases, of which there are quite a few. Remember that I’m always eager to have authors, publishers, or even knowledgeable fans tell me about upcoming sapphic historicals. With the demise of a few very useful book blogs, my primary source of information for releases is doing keyword searches in Amazon, and we all know how flawed that site is. I’d love it if authors of sapphic historicals started adding “notify the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast” to their pre-publication checklist. But for now, here’s what I’ve found.
I found three more August releases.
Florence Syndrome by Catherine Martini from Djuna Publishers reflects the role Italy played in expatriate queer communities.
Alessandra Corsi, a 25-year-old Florentine artist, lives for the quiet company of her easel and sketchbook. Her days are spent sketching the masters in the Uffizi, avoiding society, content with paint and silence. Until one August morning she notices a woman falter in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
Elizabeth Hughes is an Englishwoman of thirty-five, visiting Florence after her father’s death, carrying her grief and her careful manners like heavy luggage. Overwhelmed by beauty, she experiences what locals call “La sindrome di Firenze”—a dizzying spell of awe in the face of art. Alessandra goes to her aid, and so begins a journey neither expected: through sun-bleached streets, secret osterie, and the countryside by steam train to Siena, and into the hidden world of an artist’s studio.
As Elizabeth sheds her English restraint, she becomes both muse and lover, discovering a sensual and emotional freedom she never imagined. Alessandra, who thought she knew passion, is undone by the quiet boldness of a woman stepping into her own desires. Against the backdrop of Botticelli’s masterpieces, they find not just beauty but its dizzying cost: to be seen, to be loved, to love beyond rules.
I could swear that I already covered Red Wake, Black Flag by Dahlia Quinn, but it must have been a different novelization of the legend of pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read. There are a lot of them!
Nassau burns with rum, rumor, and the last embers of the Pirate Republic. Anne Bonny—sharp-tongued, knife-sure, and married to a man she doesn’t love—meets Jack Rackham, a swaggering rogue with a smile like a drawn cutlass, and Mary Read, a soldier in men’s clothes with secrets stitched into every seam. As the King’s Pardon curdles and the gallows in Jamaica grow busy, Anne stakes her life on one impossible wager: that love, desire, and a fast sloop can outrun the Empire.
Torn between a dangerous man and a forbidden longing, Anne fights storms, betrayals, and the relentless hunt of a Crown privateer. The sea is cruel—but love can be crueler. And Anne Bonny has never been good at choosing the safe harbor.
Boardwalk Desire by Melody Ashford from Brythonic Publishing adds to the burgeoning genre of jazz era romances.
Atlantic City, 1931. The boardwalk pulses with jazz, secrets, and sin.
Seraphina Rossi, the young wife of a ruthless mob boss, loathes the blonde flapper who once warmed her husband’s bed. But when she crosses paths with Lilly Moreau again—now a dazzling dancer at the club her husband owns—Seraphina finds herself drawn to the very woman she swore to despise.
Lilly is bold, brash, and unapologetically herself. Seraphina is polished, poised, and quietly suffocating. Their collision is electric. What begins as icy disdain melts into forbidden desire, and soon, Seraphina must decide: will she remain the loyal wife in a gilded cage, or risk everything for a love that defies the rules of the underworld?
It's not surprising that I’ve found a few more September books, given that I recorded September’s episode rather early. In fact, I expect to find more September releases next month.
Edale Lane continues her “Tales from Norvegr” fantasy-viking series with Thrall of Deception from Past and Prologue Press.
Ravn Fierceblade, a war hero, is renowned for her loyalty, unshakable duty, and formidable glare. When children in Vestfold go missing, she heeds the king’s call to lead an expedition to recover them.
Svana longs to see more of the world, but as a widowed single mother carrying on her husband’s work as a fisher while raising her baby, she barely has time to dream. Will she ever meet someone who can lift her beyond a mundane existence?
While searching for the kidnapped children, Ravn and her crew travel to Svana’s hamlet. Ravn’s attraction to Svana is inescapable, yet she must not let it distract her from the mission. Uncovering a clue, she investigates further, unsure of the culprit’s identity. Who can Ravn trust? And is a scheme more devious than she could imagine at play—one that could cost the shieldmaiden her life?
Many years ago, Elizabeth Bear put out a fabulous sapphic steampunk duology starting with Karen Memory. Now we get a third story in the cycle, Angel Maker from Sobbing Squonk Press.
Every cowboy story needs a horse no man can ride.
No man—but Miss Karen Memery is all woman. When she and her beloved Priya sign on to do stunts for a motion picture about a rogue Mechanical named Cowboy and a Wild West show, she finds the horse of her dreams: Angel Maker.
Her plans to rescue him from a deadly stunt are ambitious enough, but she’s soon beset by even greater threats when two men are murdered brutally. Cowboy and Priya are arrested for the crime, and Karen must prove them innocent—and save the life of the wild stallion too!
Secrets of the Night by Shelby Banks features a solidly historic Victorian social set-up, though perhaps it overemphasizes a need for the protagonists to keep their relationship secret?
In an age where silence was demanded and passion condemned, two women find themselves bound by fate, yearning for a truth the world would never permit.
Eleanor lives within the grandeur of a vast Victorian estate, yet her days are filled with emptiness. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she drifts through candlelit corridors and echoing rooms, her heart restless for a companionship she cannot name aloud. Clara tends quietly to her ailing father in a modest house, her life one of devotion and sacrifice, her dreams buried beneath duty.
When chance draws them together, a spark is struck in the shadows. What begins as a glance becomes a bond, a recognition that defies the silence around them. In secret meetings by firelight, in gardens heavy with winter frost, in the hush of rain against glass, they discover a love both forbidden and eternal.
And finally we have a solid selection of October releases, though I’m saving one title out for next month when I’ll have the author on the show.
We start with Gold for the Dead (Cantor Gold #7) by Ann Aptaker from Bywater Books.
Early November, 1958
New York City
Art thief and smuggler Cantor Gold's latest underworld caper begins when she arrives at big-time bookie Nick Fortunato's apartment to celebrate his birthday, a ritual the two friends have enjoyed for years. But Nick is missing, and there’s blood on the living room carpet. It’s not Nick’s blood, though. Nick’s death still awaits him. Despite crime lord Sig Loreale’s best plans to protect Nick, with whom Sig has financial dealings, a killer finds Nick hidden away in a cheap hotel owned by Loreale.
The beautiful and possibly deadly Abbey O’Brien was Nick’s right hand in his bookie operation, and now that he’s dead, she stands to either gain big or lose even bigger.
But there’s a surplus of people who have a stake in Nick’s death…and motives to either solve his murder or get him out of the way. And always circling are the cops.
The previous books in Darcy McGuire’s The Queen’s Deadly Damsels series from Boldwood Books all involve male-female romances, but A Lady Most Wayward is sapphic.
Phillipa, Duchess of Dorsett is not your average demure lady in society. For behind her charming smile, she hides a secret and a wicked reputation. Tasked by Queen Victoria to protect the innocent, she’s recruited the most formidable women of the ton - The Queen’s Deadly Damsels. And now they have one final mission…but this time it’s anything but simple… It’s personal.
Lady Olivia Smithwick sold her soul to save her daughter, and in return has made an enemy of the Duchess. But when she’s faced with an offer of Phillipa’s protection and a promise to bring down The Devil’s Sons, she can’t refuse.
As they attempt their mission, together and alone, their simple deal becomes dangerously complicated. Because when their tension makes way for an unexpected desire, the heat between them becomes impossible to ignore. To reveal their true selves is a risk, especially when even one touch is strictly forbidden. But who said it was a good idea to follow the rules?
The Impossible Act of Georgia Cline by Eline Evans involves a cross-dressing plot, but the character identifies as female.
California 1938. Georgia would be pretty happy with her job as a painter in her uncle’s business if it wasn’t for her dream of becoming a cartoon animator. When her application to Disney’s training school is rejected because she’s a woman, she takes on the identity of a man and travels to Los Angeles. Disney hires her as an apprentice, and Georgia steps into a complicated life as George.
On a night out at a swanky Hollywood nightclub with her fellow animators, she meets the beautiful socialite Cara, who suggests they see each other again. Cara, witty and mysterious, is impossible to resist, and Georgia’s mouth speaks a yes when she knows she ought to say no. The job at Disney is as exciting as Georgia has imagined, but her charade as a man is hard to maintain — especially after she falls hard for Cara, who has her own secrets.
Georgia rises quickly in the Disney ranks, but the movie industry is full of ruthless ambition. When Georgia gets on the wrong side of the son of a powerful Hollywood mogul, the lie she has so carefully crafted falls apart. And with it both her dream and her love for Cara.
There are some settings that authors of lesbian and sapphic romance return to again and again. The voyage of the Titanic is one of those, as in Iceberg by Gun Brooke from Bold Strokes Books.
A recent widow, Lady Arabella Grey hires the young and unconventional Zandra Lancaster as governess to her children. Despite Zandra’s impressive recommendations, Arabella is skeptical and unimpressed by Zandra’s youth and artistic nature. But Zandra is brilliant with her daughters, and Arabella’s inexplicably drawn to her.
Zandra harbors secret reasons for needing this position, and when she reciprocates their attraction, her feelings escalate. Impropriety abounds as she craves Arabella’s company and increasingly intimate touch.
An extended trip to Manhattan with Arabella and the children changes everything. As they embark on the RMS Titanic’s maiden voyage, their love is undeniable, but so is their course toward unforeseen danger, risking not only love but their very lives.
A Legacy of Blood and Bone by Millie Abecassis from Row House Publishing feels on the edge of the line between pure fantasy and historic fantasy, but it references a specific historic setting.
Blood is life. Bones are strength. Flesh is control. Skin is death.
Every blessed family knows this mantra, and Aubeline, gifted with blood magic and heiress of the Sterraux family, is no exception.
Aubeline becomes the new Countess of Sterraux after her father’s unexpected passing. But when her brother Renan challenges her and claims the title of count for himself, his ambitions don’t end there. Soon, he also takes control of Aubeline’s guardianship over their niece Damarisse, for reasons tied to the family’s magic. Backed into a corner, Aubeline must seek allies to protect Damarisse, uncover her brother’s hidden agenda, and stop the magical catastrophe instigated by him and his somber allies wielding forbidden, deadly magic.
She never expected her best ally to be Damarisse’s new private teacher, Vinnie—a young woman cursed with an uncontrollable gift of clairvoyance. Nor did she expect to fall in love with her, defying the rigid rules of early twentieth-century France.
Following the pattern that stories set in the classical world always bring myths and gods into the mix, we have Gladiator, Goddess by Morgan H. Owen from Gallery YA.
The Roman Goddesses have grown weary of the rule of Gods and men.
They seek to change the fortune of the world by backing a brilliant young woman.
In Pompeii, Gia dreams of being a female Gladiator, but there is no such thing.
When she wins the favour of Claudia – the beautiful daughter of the Emperor – her star begins to rise in the arena, but so does the risk to her life.
Together, the girls must battle conspiracies to overthrow the Empire, and their growing feelings for one another. Feelings the Goddesses had not planned on.
For a while, we seemed to be getting a lot of re-tellings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Re-tellings of Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla are always popular. But I’ve also started to see a persistent thread of retellings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic gothic story, Rappaccini’s Daughter, as in Her Wicked Roots by Tanya Pell from Gallery Books.
Cordelia Beecher is on the run. In search of her missing brother Edward, she has fled the oppressive charity school she was raised in, desperate to find the only family she knows. Using clues from his past letters, she sets off for the sleepy town of Farrow but everyone there claims to have never heard of Edward—not even the man he was supposedly working for as an apprentice.
With nowhere to go, Cordi turns to Lady Evangeline, a local botanist who owns the magnificent Edenfield estate. The benevolent lady of the manor has made it her mission to take young, often traumatized, women into her employ and protect them from man’s world of wicked desires and deceits. Hired as a maid and companion to her enigmatic daughters, Prim and Briar, Cordi quickly settles into Edenfield. Even as her relationship with Briar blossoms, Cordi can’t help but suspect that there are secrets in the estate…and when she stumbles across evidence that Edward was once there, she’s determined to find answers.
The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri from Hachette sounds a bit more on the fantasy side than the historic side, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt because of how much I’ve loved her previous books.
In an England fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.
Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen’s court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other?
As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them.
But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?
Skipping halfway around the world and many centuries later, just on the cusp of what I’m willing to consider “historical” we have When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee from Tor.
Singapore, 1972: Newly independent, a city of immigrants grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters are the last conduits of the gods their ancestors brought with them, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place where magic has not been assimilated and legislated away.
Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight—a girl with a butterfly tattoo–she discovers she’s far from alone.
Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline’s mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she’s dead, Adeline’s bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother’s killer and the gang’s succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls’ dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.
But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.
Other Books of Interest
This next book isn’t historical fiction, but I’m always a sucker for books about historic re-enactment or costume dramas. Check out Toni and Addie Go Viral by Melissa Marr from Bramble.
Hot new author and her lead actress stun fans in a secret wedding—is it all a publicity stunt? Or something more…
On a whim—and hoping to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt her grifter father left behind—Victorian history professor Toni Darbyshire sells her lesbian detective novel in a massive deal. Suddenly thrust into the overwhelming new world of publishing, plus a television adaptation, Toni’s life gets even more complicated when her one-night stand turned pen pal (and the namesake for her main character) shows up in person for casting of the show.
Aspiring actress Addie’s had a crush on the professor ever since she watched her lectures on the Victorian era to prep for a stage role. Now, getting cast in Toni’s TV series could be her big break. But Addie’s in over her head when promo pictures of their fake Victorian wedding go viral. She could lose more than just her heart … and her historically accurate underthings.
What Am I Reading?
So what have I been reading? Due to the recording schedule last month, this list covers a month and a half of reading, including my vacation reads. About half of it is audiobooks, but I read a fair amount in print during my travels.
First up are two T. Kingfisher fantasies. Both involve a fairly standard no-nonsense Kingfisher heroine. Illuminations is more on the YA side about a girl in a family of magicians who unwittingly releases a malicious force and needs the help of a talking raven to catch it again. Hemlock and Silver is a bit more on the horror side, featuring a spinster who dedicated her life to finding antidotes for poisons who gets dragged into a command performance treating a king’s daughter with a mysterious wasting condition. The story is structured around Snow White, but the magic mirrors are…something else entirely.
I’ve been enjoying the podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones which is doing chronological deep dives into the late fantasy author’s extensive catalog. This inspired me to check out (or revisit) some of Diana Wynne Jones’s work, starting with the Chrestomanci series, specifically A Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and The Magicians of Caprona. The books are clearly aimed at a younger readership and have certain issues due to being of a particular time (such as the somewhat wince-worthy Italian stereotypes in Caprona), but it’s easy to see why Jones’s book are classics.
The audiobook queue at my local library served up the second Murderbot book, Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, and now I’m about to start the third. These tend to have a long wait-time at the library, so it’ll probably take me a while to get through the series. Back before I started being more careful about my budget, I hadn’t looked into library opportunities for audiobooks. It definitely changes my habits, in that I’m looking at what’s available rather than what I want to read right now.
There were two ebooks that I’ve been meaning to get to for quite some time where I ended up quitting about a quarter of the way through. The Rosetti Diaries by Kathleen Williams Renk just had a few too many plausibility issues in the story of investigating forgotten archives in a church. I also had issues with it being written as diary entries yet not reading like what anyone would actually write in a diary. The second DNF, The Illhenny Murders by Winnie Frolik, simply never grabbed me in terms of the writing style.
On the flip side, I think K.J. Charles could write a shopping list and make it gripping and a page-turner. Her recent release Copper Script combines a mystery involving graphology with a gay romance. I liked the plot, even though it felt a bit rushed at the end.
That Self-Same Metal by Brittany H. Williams is a book that I wouldn’t have heard of except it turned up in my keyword searches for the new releases. It’s the first book in a YA trilogy set in early 17th century England with an engaging heroine who wields metal-based magic, plus Shakespeare, fairies, and a bisexual “why choose” romantic triangle.
In part inspired by the trope series I’ve been doing on the podcast, I picked up the first volume in Cindy Dees’ non-fiction “Tropoholic’s Guide to Romance Tropes” series. It’s more of a reference work than a read-through book. Interesting, but I’m not sure I’ll get the whole series.
And to finish up this month’s reading, I just finished Alexandra Vasti’s Regency romance Ladies in Hating, about two rival gothic romance authors. I haven’t quite made up my mind about the book yet. I stayed up late to finish it, which is a plus, but it felt like the characters cycled through the same crisis over and over again, making it hard to believe in the stability of their relationship. But on the third hand, I got a shout-out in the author’s notes at the end as a research source, so I can forgive a lot.
Author Guest
We have an author guest this month. I managed to miss Raven Belasco’s lesbian vampire pirate story when it came out several months ago, but thankfully she reached out about coming on the show and I was able to make up for that omission.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Bray, Alan. 1996. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 9780231102896
- Downing, Christine. 1989. Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love. The Continuum Publishing Company, New York. ISBN 0-8264-0445-6
- Reineke, Martha & Christine Downing. 1993. “Within the Shadow of the Herms: A Critique of "Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love" [with Reply] in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 19, No. 1: 81-101, 103-106
- Downing, Christine. 1994. “Lesbian Mythology” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 20, No. 2, Lesbian Histories: 169-199.
- Nelson, Max. 2000. “A Note on the Olisbos” in Glotta, 76. Bd., 1./2. H.:75-82
- Bremmer, Jan. 1980. “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty” in Arethusa, Vol. 13, No. 2, Indo-European Roots of Classical Culture: 279-298.
- Arkins, Brian. 1994. “Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens” in Classics Ireland, Vol. 1: 18-34.
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- Florence Syndrome by Catherine Martini
- Red Wake, Black Flag by Dahlia Quinn
- Boardwalk Desire by Melody Ashford
- Thrall of Deception (Tales from Norvegr) by Edale Lane
- Angel Maker (Karen Memory #3) by Elizabeth Bear
- Secrets of the Night by Shelby Banks
- Gold for the Dead (Cantor Gold #7) by Ann Aptaker
- A Lady Most Wayward (The Queen's Deadly Damsels #5) by Darcy McGuire
- The Impossible Act of Georgia Cline by Eline Evans
- Iceberg by Gun Brooke
- A Legacy of Blood and Bone by Millie Abecassis
- Gladiator, Goddess by Morgan H. Owen
- Her Wicked Roots by Tanya Pell
- The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri
- When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee
- Other Titles of Interest
- What I’ve been reading
- Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher
- Illuminations by T. Kingfisher
- A Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones
- The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones
- The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones
- Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
- The Rosetti Diaries by author
- The Illhenny Murders by Winnie Frolik
- Copper Script by K.J. Charles
- That Self-Same Metal by Brittany H. Williams
- The Tropoholic's Guide to Internal Romance Tropes by Cindy Dees
- Ladies in Hating by Alexandra Vasti
- Call for submissions for the 2026 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
- This month we interview Raven Belasco and talk about:
- The real historic background of Sadie the Goat and Gallus Mag
- Vampire stories and time-travel stories as mirror images
- Expanding formats
- World-building and inventing languages
- Lesbian sex in the 19th century
- That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story by Raven Belasco
- Sadie the Goat (Wikipedia)
- Gallus Mag (Wikipedia)
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
- Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Links to Raven Belasco Online
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- Twitter (X): @RavenBelasco
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- Facebook: author.ravenbelasco
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LHMPFriday, October 3, 2025 - 08:00
Researching queer history involves embracing ambiguity, but ambiguity is present on many levels with many different purposes. This article, though otherwise somewhat tangential, is a useful exercise in recognizing that.
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LHMPFull citation:
Pelliccia, Hayden. 1995. “Ambiguity against Ambiguity: Anacreon 13 Again” in Illinois Classical Studies, Vol. 20: 23-34.
In the ages before people fought their academic battles in mailing lists and then blogs, the pages of academic journals often recorded back-and-forth rivalries over such details as the accuracy of translations and interpretations, proper credit for prior publication, and accusations of misunderstanding. This article is one of those: largely a record of detailed pedantic rivalry over whether a prior rebuttal to a previous article had correctly understood the original author’s position. As such, I don’t know how much value it has in absolute terms—especially given that neither the original article nor the rebuttal had previously come to my attention—but it touches on whether a particular turn of phrase in one ancient Greek poem does or does not make lesbianism a punchline.
Perhaps of more general interest, the essay considers questions of ambiguity: not only the ambiguity inherent in trying to decipher and choose among multiple possible meanings in a text for which we are not a contemporary audience, but also trying to discern the deliberate ambiguities built into the text by the original author and how those ambiguities would have been received at the time.
So, that said, the poem in question is Anacreon #13. Superficially it is an old man’s lament that an attractive young woman has no interest in him. Anacreon’s poems tend to be witty epigrams with a theme of “wine, women, and song.”
[Note: if you ever want to go down a peculiar rabbit hole, check out the 18th century English “Anacreontic Society” who chose him for their patron. And in particular their theme song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose tune has achieved some small amount of lasting notoriety. But I digress.]
The translation offered in Hubbard 2003 can serve as context. I’ve re-ordered the words in the last line to better match the Greek original, since it will be relevant. (See also Boehringer 2021 for further context on the poem.)
Once again golden-haired Eros,
Hitting me with a purple ball,
Calls me out to play
With a fancy-sandaled maid.
But she, hailing from
Well-endowed Lesbos, finds fault
With my hair, for it’s white.
At another she gapes open-mouthed.
The first key point is that the word “another” in the last line is grammatically feminine, but the word for “hair” is also grammatically feminine. So there is ambiguity in whether the punchline is simply “the girl prefers another type of hair, i.e., someone younger” or refers to an unspecified female person “the girl prefers another girl.”
The reference to the girl being from Lesbos stands out to a modern reader, but as many scholars have pointed out, the women of Lesbos were associated in antiquity with a wide variety of attributes, including beauty (and thus the ability to pick and choose partners), and same-sex desire is far from the most obvious interpretation. (Though Pelliccia seems to lean towards that being a significantly available association at the time.)
The second key point in interpretation is that the structure of the poem demands a “punchline”—a twist of interpretation, and that the phrase “gapes at” has a negative connotation.
The scholarly arguments covered in the article revolve around who has endorsed which possible interpretations of the poem, on what basis, and which interpretations should be ruled out. Three possible readings of the text are discussed by both the author and his adversary:
- The poem is straightforwardly heterosexual, the missing referent is “hair,” and Anacreon is being nasty to the girl because she prefers a younger man.
- The poem is straightforwardly homosexual, the reference to Lesbos indicates the girl’s desires, the missing referent is another woman, and Anacreon is being nasty to the girl because she’s a lesbian.
- Both the reference to Lesbos and what could fill in the missing referent are ambiguous to the audience, the context of the poem first signals the audience to expect “from Lesbos = beautiful” in a heterosexual context, the missing “another [xxx]” is thus filled in with “hair,” based on the previous mention, but the final “gapes at” signals the audience to reanalyze the poem and look for a reason for the surprising hostility, which they can find by switching to the alternate readings “lesbian…another girl.”
After much detailed discussion of how the structure of the poem sets up the various possible readings (with examples from similar poems and expressions), Pelliccia offers the conclusion (or at least opinion) that all three readings could be inherent in Anacreon’s intent, with different members of the audience either getting the lesbian reading immediately (#2), not getting the reading at all (#1), or experiencing that twist of meaning when the final words signal to look for it.
Although the context of this article may seem to be a pedantic snit-fit, the deep dive into the meanings and uses of ambiguity and the considerations in how to analyze it, is useful to keep in mind when popularized queer history offers simple and straightforward assertions about historic texts.
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Monday, September 29, 2025 - 09:00
Not much of interest here. Just more housecleaning of assorted articles, grouped thematically. (You might guess that I've been working through Classical Greece currently.)
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LHMPFull citation:
Arkins, Brian. 1994. “Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens” in Classics Ireland, Vol. 1: 18-34.
This article is not particularly relevant, as it presents an overview of the structure of sexual relations from an elite male point of view. There is discussion of the social construction of sexual systems, with some odd anecdotal parallels from more modern cultures. There is a brief discussion of how to understand Sappho’s biography and work within this context (including a perhaps unwarranted assumption that social structures in Lesbos were identical to those in Athens).
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