17. “My Mistresse is my husband”: John Fletcher, The Pilgrim [1622], ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 111–224 (V.ii., V.vi., 191, 205). Other endlessly devoted maids or governesses are found in Charlotte MacCarthy, The Fair Moralist (1745); Charlotte Lennox, Henrietta (1758) and Euphemia (1790); Marie-Jeanne de Riccoboni, Miss Jenny Salisbury (1764).
18. But perhaps the most extraordinary: Jane Barker, “The Unaccountable Wife” [1723], in The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 49–173 (144–47). See Kathryn King, “The Unaccountable Wife and Other Tales of Female Desire in Jane Barker’s A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies,” The Eighteenth Century 35: 2 (1994): 155–71, and Christine Roulston, “The Eighteenth-Century Ménage-à-Trois: Having It Both Ways?,” The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27:2 (Autumn 2004): 257–77.
19. “inseparable Cousin”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Héloïse [1761], trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vache (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), 39, 81, 94, 146, 328, 490, 507, 602. For another example of devoted women friends rearing their children together, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue,” in The Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Newell F. Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 136–51, 612, 146, 94, 507.
20. But as Janet Todd argues: Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 132–67.
21. Although St. Preux’s: For other examples of the same attitude, see the anonymous Travels and Adventures of Mlle de Richelieu (1744), 1:107, and Charlotte Lennox, Euphemia, 4 vols. (London: for T. Cadell and J. Evans, 1790), 3:47–48
22. “the ambiguity is preserved”: Hans Wolpe, “Psychological Ambiguity in La Nouvelle Héloïse,” University of Toronto Quarterly 28:3 (April 1959): 279–90 (288).
23. “consolatory adjuncts”: Susan Lanser, “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:2 (1998–99): 179–98 (188).
24. “marriage plots”: Marcus, Between Women, 79; see also 3, 82.
25. ‘Oh, Alice’: Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864–65) (London: Penguin, 1986), 345. See Marcus, Between Women, 227–55.
26. risk their own reputation: Susanna Centlivre, The Wonder (1714); Germaine de Staël, Delphine (1802); Maria Edgeworth, Helen (1834); Mary Taylor, Miss Miles (1890).
27. men they cannot stand: Mary Pix, The Double Distress (1701); Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction (1788); Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife (1870).
28. Interestingly, nineteenth-century novels: This pattern was identified by Suzanne Raitt in “Fallen Women: Charlotte Mew in Context,” in Volcanoes and Pearl Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies, ed. Suzanne Raitt (London: Onlywomen, 1995), 52–73.
29. It is no accident: See Ruth Vanita’s fascinating comments on the nineteenth-century link between Marian imagery and desire between women in Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 7, 18–35.
30. “I’m goin’ to save you now”: Rosa Mulholland [Lady Gilber], The Tragedy of Chris (London: Sands & Co., 1903), 127, 293.
31. “Only one summer”: Louisa May Alcott, Work, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, 1873), 1:198.
32. Even an author: Compare Christina Rossetti’s weird poem Goblin Market (1862), in which Lizzie wins her spellbound sister Laura back from the goblins in a scene of startling oral eroticism.
33. “It is not absence”: Grace Aguilar, Woman’s Friendship (London: Groombridge & Sons, 1851), 39.
34. “female friendship”: Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature, 132.
35. This motif of women friends: On the triangle of two male friends competing for a woman, see Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
36. “a rehearsal in girlhood”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh [1849] (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1853), 79, 84, 168. Other examples of rivalry dividing friends include Catherine Bernard’s tragedy Laodamie reine d’Epire (1680); Marie-Jeanne de Riccoboni, Histoire de Jenny Salisbury (1764) and Histoire du Marquis de Cressy (1758); and Jane Austen, Emma (1816).
37. “We, Hermia”: Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), in The Complete Works, 198–222 (211) (III.11.198–216).
38. “give up Mankind”: Nicholas Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore [1714], facsimile of 1914 ed. (Menston, U.K.: The Scholar Press, 1973), 10–11.
39. “share my divided heart”: Catherine Trotter (later Cockburn), Agnes de Castro [1696], facsimile reprint in The Plays of Mary Pix and Catherine Trotter, ed. Edna Steeves, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1982), 2:1–47 (6, 5, 7, 30, 34). Like Eurione in George Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive (1606), Agnes is reluctantly persuaded to accept the widower’s proposal out of affection for his dead wife, but in this case her own death spares her at the eleventh hour. In many Victorian novels the Constantia type (a happily married woman) and the Agnes type (a sworn spinster) are joined in devoted friendship.
40. Over the eighteenth: Examples include Lady Mary Wroth, Love’s Victory (written around 1620); Eliza Haywood, The Surprize (1724); Sarah Fielding, Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in “David Simple,” and some Others (1747) and The Governess (1749); Fanny Burney, Cecilia (1782); Helen Maria Williams, Julia (1790); Eliza Fenwick, Secresy (1795); Mary Robinson, Walsingham (1798); Harriet Downing, Mary; or, Female Friendship: A Poem (1816); Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook (1839); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856); George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860); Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta (1876); Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883); and Annie E. Holdsworth, Joanna Traill, Spinster (1894). In one of the latest and oddest of these sacrifice stories, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s By the Light of the Soul (1907), Maria fakes her own death so that her husband and the half sister she adores can marry, and is rewarded with a loving partnership with a rich dwarf woman.
41. “an altruistic exchange”: Marcus, Between Women, 88–89.
42. “a touch of manhood”: Charlotte Brontë, Shirley [1849], ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 223, 224, 264, 292, 295–96. There has been speculation that Brontë meant Caroline to die, but that, having suffered through three deathbed vigils in a year, including that of her sister Anne, on whom she based Caroline, Brontë gave her heroine a last-minute reprieve.
43. It has recently been suggested: Anne Longmuir, “Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley,” Brontë Studies 31:2 (July 2006): 145–55.
44. The eleventh-hour appearance: Examples include Charlotte MacCarthy, The Fair Moralist (London: published for the author, 1745); and Sarah Fielding, The History of David Simple (1744) and The Cry (with Jane Collier, 1754).
45. The earliest example: A striking seventeenth-century drama about rivals who fall in love is Lodowick Carlell’s The Deserving Favourite [1629], in Charles Gray, Lodowick Carliell: His Life, a Discussion of His Plays, and “The Deserving Favourite” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 126, 128, 147. Like Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584), Philip Massinger’s The Picture (1629), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Comical Hash (1662), it contains a highly erotic kissing scene between the two women. Along with Suckling’s Brennoralt and Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir, Carlell’s The Deserving Favourite is an early example of the subordination of the third (male) term, what Terry Castle calls the lesbian counter-plot (The Apparitional Lesbian, 72–73).
46. From the seventeenth century: As the concept of romantic friendship came under suspicion toward the end of the nineteenth century, it became almost impossible to write stories of female inseparability which were not primarily investigations of lesbian identity (discussed in chapter 6). The nearest modern equivalent to the
motif of inseparables separated may be the lesbian novel of bereavement or loss: examples include Barbara Burford, The Threshing Floor (1986); Barbara Wilson, Cows and Horses (1988); Jan Clausen, The Prosperine Papers (1989); Sarah Schulman, After Delores (1989); Jenifer Levin, The Sea of Light (1992); May Sarton, The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1993); Marion Douglas, Bending at the Bow (1995); Sarah Van Arsdale, Towards Amnesia (1995); and Carol Anshaw, Seven Moves (1997). The timing of this cluster suggests that AIDS (or, rather, gay men’s AIDS fiction) was an influence.
47. “It was noticed”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Hedged In (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), 283–84.
48. “tree of knowledge”: Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman), “The Tree of Knowledge” (1899), in The Love of Parson Lord (New York: Harper & Bros., 1900), 85–140 (140). Compare her novels The Portion of Labor (1901) and The Shoulders of Atlas (1908), which both feature obsessive relationships between older and younger women.
49. Such painful denials: Examples include Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1863) and Our Mutual Friend (1865); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “At Bay” (1867); George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (1885); and Isabella Ford, On the Threshold (1895).
Chapter Three: Rivals
1. “Blest as th’immortal”: The Works of Anacreon and Sappho, trans. Ambrose Phillips (London: E. Curll and A. Bettesworth, 1713), 74–75. For a fascinating discussion of issues in the translation of Fragment 31, see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 57, 131–34, 321–25.
2. This lyric: “Lesbiai,” female inhabitants of Lesbos, was used in 914 in a Christian commentary by Arathas to mean women who desire women; see Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5. On Sappho’s reputation, see Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27–53.
3. Anne Le Fèvre Dacier: Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, ed., Les Poésies d’Anacréon et de Sapho (Paris: D. Thierry, 1681), 403.
4. “Whatever might have been”: A. Phillips, ed., The Works of Anacreon and Sappho (London: E. Curll and A. Bettesworth, 1713), 74–75.
5. François Gacon: François Gacon [“Le Poète sans fard”], Les Odes d’Anacréon et de Sapho (Rotterdam: Fritz et Böhm, 1712). Translation by Joan DeJean in Fictions of Sappho, 133–34. E. B. Greene, ed., The Works of Anacreon and Sappho (London: J. Ridley, 1768), 144–45.
6. In 1795: Abbé Jean-Marie Coupé, Soirées litteraires, 16 vols. (Paris: Honnert, 1795), 6:146.
7. And in 1855: See DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 238.
8. But over the period: Marjorie Garber calls this the “bisexual plot” in Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 456.
9. Which means that: One early, high-minded example is Lodowick Carlell’s play The Passionate Lovers (London: for Humphrey Moseley, 1655), in which Clorinda tries to fob off her besotted cousin Olinda by thanking her for “your love, / Rather your friendship” and suggesting she redirect it toward an unwanted male suitor of Clorinda’s called Clarimant—but Olinda rejects both the glossing of “love” as “friendship” and the advice, insisting that she is a legitimate rival to Clarimant for Clorinda’s love (part 2, III.i., V.i. [123–24, 149]). This is a daring notion, but Carlell does not follow through at the level of plot: later, Olinda announces that she has come to love Clarimant after all, but will be happy to see him marry the far more deserving Clorinda.
10. “so fervent a friendship”: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa [1747–48], ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 637, 40, 133, 863.
11. “If you allow of it”: Richardson, Clarissa, 931–32, 992–93, 331, 549, 1088, 1403. Lisa L. Moore argues that in eighteenth-century English fiction, “the sexual Other of the virtuous bourgeois woman is her slightly Sapphic female friend”; Dangerous Intimacies: Towards a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977), 12.
12. “the force of female friendship”: Richardson, Clarissa, 1130. A rich analysis of Anna and Clarissa’s relationship can be found in Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 46–68.
13. “a tender Heart”: Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Life of Count Grammont, trans. Abel Boyer (London, 1714), 234–37, 246, 251, 259–64. Excerpted in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 219–28.
14. Terry Castle points out: Terry Castle, introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 41, 44.
15. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos: Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses [1782], trans. P. W. K. Stone (London: Penguin, 1961), 170–76 (170–71). See Christine Roulston, “Separating the Inseparables: Female Friendship and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:2 (1998–99): 215–31 (220–21).
16. “inflexible purpose”: Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness [1799], ed. Mary Chapman (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1999), 226, 219, 241.
17. a “competitor”: Brown, Ormond, 242–51. Kristin M. Comment places this novel in the context of the “sex panic” of the 1790s—a widespread unease about female independence and the erotic freedoms (including same-sex ones) that might go with it; “Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic,” Early American Literature 40:1 (2005): 57–78.
18. “emotions of normal love”: Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1949), 135.
19. “Madam, my wife”: Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall [1762] (London: Pandora, 1986), 80.
20. “I can give you all you want”: Eliza Lynn Linton, The Rebel of the Family [1880] (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002), 50–52, 186–87.
21. “my little wife”: Linton, The Rebel of the Family, 54–57, 141, 51, 175, 144, 173.
22. “She will never be one of us”: Linton, The Rebel of the Family, 185–86, 292, 330–34.
23. The novel is marked by: On same-sex eroticism in some of Linton’s other works, including a novel in which she uses a male persona to tell her own life story, see Deborah T. Meem, “Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7:4 (April 1997): 537–60.
24. “The masculine lady”: Reviews excerpted as Appendix A to Linton, The Rebel of the Family, 399–402.
25. It is hardly surprising: The few earlier examples—Miss Barnevelt in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Harriot Freke in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801)—are much more tentative in drawing a link between their borrowed masculinity and same-sex desire.
26. “I wished to write”: Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, reprint ed. New York: 1961), 47.
27. “her sense that she found”: Henry James, The Bostonians [1886] (New York: Bantam Classics, 1984), 57, 67–71.
28. “the fine web of authority”: James, The Bostonians, 85, 154, 94–96, 116–18, 137–42, 256, 145, 189.
29. “Don’t attempt the impossible”: James, The Bostonians, 173, 268, 272–73, 216, 235, 240, 281.
30. “more wedded”: James, The Bostonians, 263, 288, 279, 300, 304, 325, 337, 357, 342.
31. Without ever naming: See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xxii.
32. “Olive put forward”: James, The Bostonians, 331, 395. For brilliant readings of the novel, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 150–85; Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 57–76; Garber, Vice Versa, 457–67.
33. Her gloomy shadow: See, for instance, L. T. Meade’s The Cleverest Woman in England (1898), in which Imogen passionately resents the marriage of her fellow suffragette Dagmar, and drops heavy hints about her love.
34. “We are a partnership”: Florence Converse, Diana Victrix (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 63, 145, 240–41. Similarly, at the end of Caroline Fothergill’s saga, Put to the Proof (1883), Angel discards her obtuse fiancé so she can move with her beloved Margaret (and Margaret’s accommodating husband) to New Zealand.
35. “Do you also be loyal”: Converse, Diana Victrix, 345, 347, 360. See Kate McCullough, “‘But Some Times…I Don’t Marry,—Even in Books’: Boston Marriages, Creoles, and the Future of the Nation,” in Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885–1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 58–92.
36. It is a laundry: Klaus Mann, Ania and Esther (1925), in Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, trans. and ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: Routledge, 1999), 161–99.
37. “in a manner fell”: Catherine Wells, “The Beautiful House,” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (March 1912): 503–11 (505, 509).
38. Catherine Wells: See Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910–1939 (New York: Dial Press, 2007).
39. Not that this conversion: Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 343–48.
40. As Terry Castle points out: Castle, introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism, 35.
41. “tired of one another”: D. H. Lawrence, The Fox [1922] (London: Sphere, 1968), 7, 10–11, 43, 27.
42. “Banford looked at her”: Lawrence, The Fox, 57, 61, 96, 99.
43. “for a beast”: Lawrence, The Fox, 101, 112–13, 115, 122.
44. “a fine story”: Quoted in introduction by David Ellis to D. H. Lawrence, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xxii–xxiii. See also appendix I, “The Ending of the First Version of ‘The Fox,’” 223–30.
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