When browsing through the history of women who love women, there are certain confluences of time, place, and people that cry out to be mined for their fictional potential. Get enough women of the right sort together in the same place, and you have a great setting for your own invented characters, who can borrow bits and pieces of real lives and inherit their historicity. The Paris of Natalie Clifford Barney, Renée Vivien, Colette, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall, Liane de Pougy, and all the rest is just such a place and time. Invent yourself a devil-may-care heiress.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 190 - So You’re Writing a Sapphic Historical Romance: Questions to Consider - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/12/26 - listen here)
Introduction
I'm going to confess that Vicinus's Intimate Friends is becoming a bit of a slog. (Did you notice I failed to get a blog up last week?) The material is becoming more and more literary critisicm and less biography. And there's a fair amount of psychological analysis that feels at odds with the historic context of the subjects. Or maybe I'm just going through a reading slump. Two more chapters. And then maybe I'll throw out my plans for the next publication and hunt through my shelves for something I can get excited about.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 189 – Book Appreciation with Diana Pinguicha – transcript pending
(Originally aired 2020/12/19 - listen here)
(Transcript pending)
Show Notes
In the Book Appreciation segments, our featured authors (or your host) will talk about one or more favorite books with queer female characters in a historic setting.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 188 – Interview with Diana Pinguicha – transcript pending
(Originally aired 2020/12/12 - listen here)
(Transcript pending)
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 187 - On the Shelf for December 2020 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2020/12/05 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for December 2020.
Some article I read -- I no longer remember which one, but it isn't important -- tried to claim that pre-20th century female couples inevitably involved an age difference and therefore followed the classical model of an older mentor and a younger "beloved". It seems to me that this is a case of finding what you're looking for, because even when a couple are very close in age--for example, fellow students at a boarding school--it may happen that one is seen as the older, more experienced figure and the other as the follower.
There's an entire book on the Benson family that I should probably add to the blog to-do list at some point. She seems like a fascinating person, though the interpersonal relations within the Benson family are not exactly a pinnacle of functionality. Still, to think that someone who came into a marriage so disadvantaged in terms of social power (I mean, her husband arranged to train her up to be his future wife when she was only 11 years old!) was able to come to a no-fucks-to-give point where she renegotiated the entire basis of their marriage and relationship. That's quite a story.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 186 - Poetry about Love between Women from the 18th Century - transcript
(Originally aired 2020/11/28- listen here)
When Romancelandia became more generally aware that Georgia voter activist Stacey Abrams was also romance author Selena Montgomery, they took her and her cause to their heart big-time. Thus was born "Romancing the Runoff", a fund-raising project to support various organizations in the state of Georgia working on voter registration, turnout, and education. While putting together a fund-raising auction with all manner of fascinating book-related stuff, they raised nearly $100,000 in direct donations.
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