Inseparable

by Emma Donoghue

  64. “devil-woman”: H. Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife [1889] (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), 102, 170.

  65. “I have been very fond”: Haggard, Allan’s Wife, 188–89, 194, 246.

  66. “the lower one”: Haggard, Allan’s Wife, 172.

  67. The link goes back: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel (1816), in The Literature of Lesbianism, ed. Castle, 360–79 (LL.168–69, 372).

  68. Ghost stories: Terry Castle argues that Western literature more broadly uses spectral language to cast lesbians as ghosts and lesbianism “as absence, as chimera or amor impossibilis”; see The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 28–65 (30).

  69. “queer-looking”: Elizabeth Bowen, “The Apple Tree” (1934), in The Collected Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), 461–70 (468–70). Other ghost stories that hinge on such unfinished business include Margaret Oliphant’s “Old Lady Mary” (1885) and Rosemary Timperley’s “The Mistress in Black” (1969).

  70. “took a girl”: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House [1959] (London: Michael Joseph, 1980), 67–69, 12, 74, 99, 111, 115, 125, 133, 137.

  71. “It was as if”: Edith Olivier, The Love Child[1927] (London: Virago, 1981), 21, 23–24, 17.

  72. “attraction”: Olivier, The Love Child, 64–70, 134, 143, 149, 179–80.

  73. “I belong to Agatha”: Olivier, The Love Child, 190, 193. A later Quebecois equivalent is Louise Maheux-Forcier’s Une forêt pour Zoé (1969; in English, A Forest for Zoe), in which the narrator is preoccupied by the seductive, ghostly presence of her—possibly imaginary—childhood friend.

  74. The vampire, too: For similarities between the representation of lesbians and vampires, see Richard Dyer, Now You See It (New York: Routledge, 1990), 272.

  75. “unintelligible”: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1872), in Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Lillian Faderman (New York: Viking, 1994), 303–62 (316, 319–20, 329, 333). See Nina Auerbach on the twinning of victim and villain in Christabel and Camilla, in Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–53.

  76. But even if Laura’s: Le Fanu, Carmilla, 329, 333.

  77. “the Female enraged”: Bertha Harris, “What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature,” Heresies 30:3 (September 1977): 5–8 (7).

  78. In her fascinating study: Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (London: Cassell, 1999), 4, 63.

  79. “Your body is not my food”: Katherine V. Forrest, “O Captain, My Captain,” in Dreams and Swords (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad, 1987), 107–65 (125). See Palmer, Lesbian Gothic, 113–14. For a discussion of lesbian science fiction, see Patricia Duncker, Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 99–120.

  80. “There are only”: Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories [1991] (London: Sheba, 1992), 31, 43.

  81. “I have had Miss Wade”: Dickens, Little Dorrit, 753, 506, 618–19. 139 “fighting a losing battle”: Diderot, La Religieuse, 174.

  82. “my diseased imagination”: Musset, Gamiani, 46.

  Chapter Five: Detection

  1. Lesbians kill: See George Moore, Sappho (1881); Francis Lepage, Les Fausses vierges (1902; in English, The False Virgins); William Hurlbut, Sin of Sins (1926); Hermann Sudermann, Die Freundin (1913–14; in English, The Girlfriend); Alfred Döblin, Die beiden Freundinnen und hir Giftmord (1924; in English, The Two Girlfriends and Their Murder by Poison); Vita Sackville-West, The Dark Island (1934); Flora Fletcher, Strange Sisters (1954); and “Vin Packer” (Marijane Meaker), The Evil Friendship (1958), a thinly veiled version of the Parker-Hulme matricide in 1954 New Zealand, which also inspired Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures (1994).

  2. Often they murder: See, for instance, Françoise Mallet-Joris’s “Jimmy” (1965) or Leda Starr’s All at Once (1967).

  3. And they can be victims: Henri de Latouche, Fragoletta (1829); Honoré de Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835); Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud ma femme (1870); Rachilde, Madame Adonis (1888); Adrienne Saint-Agen, Amants féminins (1902; in English, Women Lovers); Frank Wedekind, Erdgeist (1895; in English, Earth Spirit) and Die Büsche der Pandora (1904; in English, Pandora’s Box); D. H. Lawrence, The Fox (1922); Vita Sackville-West, The Dark Island (1934); Lilyan Brock, Queer Patterns (1935); George Willis, Little Boy Blues (1947); Simon Eisner, Naked Storm (1952); and Martin Kramer, The Hearth and the Strangeness (1956).

  4. Perhaps the earliest: Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929).

  5. “a hieroglyph”: Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 188–89.

  6. Inspector Wexford: Ruth Rendell, From Doon with Death [1964] (London: Hutchinson, 1975).

  7. “the creature”: Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise [1950] (London: P. Davies, 1966), 37, 242–55. For a brilliant analysis of the slippery figure of Leslie, see Garber, Vested Interests, 196–202.

  8. “chérie”: Cynthia Asquith, “The Lovely Voice,” in This Mortal Coil: Tales (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1947) 203–27 (205–8). Similarly in The House of Stairs (1988), by Barbara Vine (the pseudonym Ruth Rendell uses for psychological thrillers), the female narrator is infatuated with the killer, and the erotic identification between narrator and killer undermines the traditional structure of detection and punishment.

  9. “repeated kisses”: Asquith, “The Lovely Voice,” 209, 215–16, 221.

  10. “her own wonderful colouring”: Asquith, “The Lovely Voice,” 227.

  11. “a young, fresh”: L. T. Meade, The Sorceress of the Strand (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1903), 15, 24, 31.

  12. “I love her”: Meade, The Sorceress, 35, 59, 70, 81, 77, 203, 212–13.

  13. “Hunting her”: Meade, The Sorceress, 272, 307. For other sapphic characters by L. T. Meade, see, for instance, A Sweet Girl Graduate (1886) and The Siren (1898).

  14. This is the case: She credited J. Edgar Chamberlain as co-author, but all he seems to have done is help her shape the piece to the syndicate’s specifications.

  15. Her neighbors: Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman), “The Long Arm” (1895), in Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Lillian Faderman (New York: Viking, 1994), 372–98 (375, 378, 392–93).

  16. Like many fictions: Valerie Rohy, “‘The Long Arm’ and the Law,” South Central Review 18:3–4 (Autumn–Winter 2001): 102–18.

  17. “I stopped it”: Wilkins, “The Long Arm,” 394–98.

  18. “I couldn’t have her”: Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman), “Two Friends” (1887), in Chloe Plus Olivia, ed. Faderman, 77–88 (85, 88). See also Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–53), in which cravat-wearing Deborah Jenkyns prevents her sister Matty from leaving her for a man.

  19. Wilkins was writing: For more about this fascinating author, see Leah Blatt Glasser, In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

  20. But as Lillian Faderman: Faderman, Chloe Plus Olivia, 372.

  21. “You loved Verity”: Agatha Christie, Nemesis (London: William Collins, 1971), 159, 229–30.

  22. Interestingly: For instance, in John Flagg, Murder in Monaco (London: L. Miller, 1957).

  23. “Does anybody”: “Hilda Lawrence” [Hildegarde Kronmiller], Death of a Doll (London: Chapman & Hall, 1948), 39, 89, 213, 277, 284. Stella in P. D. James’s Death of an Expert Witness (1977) gets into the dangerous game of blackmail to secure a loan to buy the swamp cottage where she lives with her beloved secretary, Angela—which suggests her death might have been prevented if the bank had had a more enlightened policy of giving mortgages to same-sex couples.

  24. “A more orthodox blackmailer”: P. D. James, Shroud for a Nightingale [1971] (London: Penguin, 1989), 305. For a s
imilar excessive protectiveness, see Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), in which a gym student arranges a fatal accident to secure her beloved a good job.

  25. “The happiest marriages”: James, Shroud for a Nightingale, 3.

  26. “domestic partner”: Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), 85, 141, 138, 176–82, 184.

  27. “Humiliating”: Sayers, Unnatural Death, 252.

  28. “There’s nothing”: Sayers, Unnatural Death, 274–77.

  29. “almost a moustache”: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. Julian Symons (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1974), 58, 61, 148.

  30. “I won’t live without her”: Collins, The Woman in White, 61. There are many other texts published in the same decade in which sisters express romantic or pseudomarital sentiments for each other: Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862); Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons (1862); Charlotte M. Yonge, The Clever Woman of the Family (1865); George Meredith, Rhoda Fleming (1865); Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866); and Louisa M. Alcott, Little Women (1868). See “The Double Taboo: Lesbian Incest in the Nineteenth Century,” in Sara Annes Brown, Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003), 135–54.

  31. “Men!”: Collins, The Woman in White, 148, 203, 207–8.

  32. Though not, presumably: See Kirsten Huttner, The Woman in White: Analysis, Reception and Literary Criticism of a Victorian Bestseller (Trier, Germany: Wissenschafflicher Verlag, 1996), 67.

  33. “I am all aflame”: Collins, The Woman in White, 63, 208, 214, 216, 236, 268, 248.

  34. “our endurance must end”: Collins, The Woman in White, 340, 342, 443, 454, 225.

  35. For a modern equivalent: Perhaps the first overtly lesbian police officer appears in George Baxt’s homophobic Burning Sappho (1972), but her investigation into the radical women’s movement promptly scares her straight. The first lesbian-feminist crime novel is M. F. Beal’s Angel Dance (New York: Daughters Publishing Co., 1977), featuring a radical, bed-hopping, half-Cuban lesbian private eye. See Sally Munt, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (London: Routledge, 1994), 121–22, and Phyllis Betz, Lesbian Detective Fiction: Woman as Author, Subject and Reader (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006).

  36. It is standard protocol: Barbara Wilson (now Barbara Sjoholm), Murder in the Collective (1984); Katherine V. Forrest, Amateur City (1984).

  37. “You could get killed”: Katherine V. Forrest, Murder at the Nightwood Bar [1987] (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad, 1995), 216, 15, 102, 206. The title alludes to Djuna Barnes’s modernist fantasia of lesbians and other outcasts, Nightwood (1936).

  38. “If people can’t imagine”: Peggy Sumner, The End of April (London: Women’s Press, 1992), 18–19.

  39. “lady visitor”: Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago, 1999), 341.

  40. “I feel the mounting pressure”: Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), 250.

  41. “make it ours”: Waters, Fingersmith, 124–25, 263.

  42. “She has made a fiction”: Waters, Fingersmith, 279, 244, 506–9.

  Chapter Six: Out

  1. The term: Sylvia Plath has been credited with its first use, in an essay in the London Magazine of January 16, 1963.

  2. “I love, and only love”: Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840), ed. Helen Whitbread (London: Virago, 1988), 145, 273.

  3. But this storyline: The idea of coming out as a healthy and useful process has been credited to Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, who campaigned openly as an “Urning” (his word for a man attracted to men) in Germany from the 1860s.

  4. The discovery of same-six desires: Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–1989 [1990] (London: Onlywomen, 1992), 35–37.

  5. In the second half of the nineteenth: The idea of the invert was first suggested in 1860s Germany in the writings of sexologists including Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Carl von Westphal, then developed by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Psychopathia Sexualis, 1886) and Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion [1896]). Basing his theory on his woman-loving wife, Edith, Ellis specified that the female “true invert” (as opposed to her “false invert” or “passive invert” girlfriend) had to have a certain innate (though not always visible) masculinity, plus neurosis and girlhood crushes on other girls. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present [1981] (London: Women’s Press, 1985), 239–49.

  6. “love that was wild”: George Moore, A Drama in Muslin [1886] (Gerrards Cross, U.K.: Colin Smythe, 1981), 3, 6, 185–86. The names Cecilia and Alice are clearly borrowed from Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh (1849), about two friends parted by a man.

  7. “misshapen body”: Moore, Drama, 187, 226–27, 298.

  8. “The monster which had always”: Catulle Mendès, Méphistophéla (Paris: E. Dentu, 1890), 35–36, 81, 103, 118–20, 123, 134, 138, 149. “Le monstre qui, de tout temps, fut en elle, en voulait sortir et se satisfaire.” All translations from Méphistophéla are by Emma Donoghue.

  9. “stupid creature”: Mendès, Méphistophéla, 143, 157, 180–85, 195, 212, 269. “Stupide creature, inachevée, infirme, aimant sans savoir aimer, convoitant sans savoir posséder”…“les mysterieux rites du culture dont elle etait l’oblaie instinctive.”

  10. “sullen in her terrible joys”: Mendès, Méphistophéla, 10–13, 258, 260, 295, 308, 323. “Elle s’en orguillissait d’etre…detestable.” “Morose dans ses affreuses joies.” “Il semble qu’elle ne veut pas son vice, qu’il lui est indifférent, odieux mème, mais qu’elle y est obligée, qu’elle y est soumise comme à une insecouable loi.”

  11. But as Peter Cryle notes: Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality a Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 320–21, 332–34. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 392. “Le désir jamais repu.”

  12. “straight to her damnation”: Mendès, Méphistophéla, 11. ‘Elle réalise sa damnation, sans halte, tout droit, comme une pierre tombe.”

  13. “not a marrying woman”: Sylvia Stevenson, Surplus (London: Longmans, Green, 1924), 16, 113, 106, 66. Note that Sally’s surname, Wraith, links her to Terry Castle’s idea of the “apparitional lesbian.” The novel was reprinted by Naiad Press in 1985.

  14. “abnormal”: Stevenson, Surplus, 134, 226, 230, 207–8, 293, 294, 299, 227, 314–15.

  15. “mistaken in thinking”: Reviews quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 408–10.

  16. It is no accident: Not that the results are always benign; in Mary Lapsley’s The Parable of the Virgins (1931), a female college doctor breaks up a pair of “inseparable” roommates, triggering the suicide of one of them. Similarly, in Strange Fire (1952) by “Vin Packer” (Marijane Meaker), the dean of women and a college doctor intervene to split up a couple (who have reached the point of naming themselves as “lesbians”), saving the not-really-queer-after-all heroine from her girlfriend (revealed as insane); this cancelled coming-out story sold 1.5 million copies and launched the genre of lesbian pulp.

  17. “nunnish”: Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavelle (London: William Heinemann, 1936), 84, 97, 100, 119, 284–86, 296–98. The novel was banned for obscenity in Ireland, and filmed as Talk of Angels in 1998.

  18. “inverted women”: Aimée Duc, Sindes Frauen? (1903). No complete translation into English has been published; my quotes are from the excerpts in Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century Germany, ed. Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad: 1980), 1–21. Faderman and Eriksson emphasize how completely Duc departed from the stern conventions of lesbian-themed fiction in German, such as R. von Seyditz, Pierres Ehe: Psychologisch Probleme (1900); Alfred Meebold, “Dr. Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis” (1900); Jacob Wassermann, Geschi
chte der Junge, Renate Fuchs (1900); George Kenan, Unter Frauen (1901); Heinrich Mann, Die Gottinen (1902); Frank Wedekind, Mine-haha (1905); and Maria Janitschelk, Die Neva Eva (1906). See Biddy Martin’s fascinating chapter on Sind es Frauen?, “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary,” in her Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996), 45–70.

  19. “That would be a crime”: Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me [1904], trans. Jeannette H. Foster (Reno, Nev.: Naiad Press, 1976), 7–8, 1. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 190–98.

  20. “merely female”: “Christopher St. John” (Christabel Marshall), Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul (London: Methuen, 1915), 58, 98, 219, 88, 226. The coincidence of the name Sally, for the straying friend, may suggest that Sylvia Stephenson read this before writing Surplus (1924). The one critic who has paid Hungerheart real attention is David Trotter, who describes its plot as “serial rather than developmental,” and argues that the book avoided prosecution for its lesbian content (unlike Lawrence’s The Rainbow, published by the same publisher in the same year) because of its disavowal of lust; see “Lesbians Before Lesbianism: Sexual Identity in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction,” in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, ed. Billie Melman (London: Routledge, 1998), 193–211 (206–9). For comparison, see Jean de Kellac’s A Lesbos (1891; in English, To Lesbos), in which a rebellious tomboy finds herself attracted to her own sex but insists on spurning the advances of various decadent, aristocratic women.

  21. “Exaggerating her actions”: Jacques de Lacretelle, Marie Bonifas [1925] (London: Putnam’s, 1927), 40, 114, 130, 146, 148–49, 164, 177, 185, 189, 193–97, 199–202. The novel was filmed for French TV as La Boniface in 1968.

  22. But by far the most famous: For reviews and reports on the book’s legal difficulties, see Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, 444–46.