23. Her protagonist, Stephen: See Kim Emery, The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 71–72.
24. “that wilfully selfish”: Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness [1928] (London: Virago, 1982), 13, 121, 153, 205, 275, 302–3, 324, 316, 396, 433.
25. “difference”: “Jo Sinclair” [Ruth Seid], Wasteland [1946] (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 33, 153, 193, 5, 155–56, 211. Wasteland anticipates later titles such as Noretta Koertge’s Who Was That Masked Woman? (1981) and Lisa Alther’s Other Women (1984) in which psychotherapy shapes the coming-out process.
26. Wasteland won: See Monica Bachmann, “‘Someone like Debby’: (De)Constructing a Lesbian Community of Readers,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6:3 (2000): 377–88.
27. “My love for Marie”: John Wesley Carhart, Norma Trist (Austin, Texas: Eugene von Boeckmann, 1895), 228, 67, 21, 69, 7, 61–62, 244.
28. “the existence of an individual”: Kim Emery offers a fascinating analysis of Carhart’s rejection of both the sexological distinction between congenital and acquired homosexuality, and lesbianism’s associations with degeneration; see The Lesbian Index, 31–56 (47, 52).
29. “I feel no condemnation”: Carhart, Norma Trist, 53–62 (61).
30. “psychopathia-sexualis”: Carhart, Norma Trist, 184–85, 205–6, 209, 211–12, 216–18. Mrs. LaMoreaux, on the other hand, is a mistress of denial: when she and Norma are not in bed yielding to “the full sway of passion’s convulsive joys,” she talks as if they are just good friends; she refuses to take any part in the prosecution, marries her captain, and never mentions Norma’s name again; see 11, 21, 36–37, 53, 189, 204.
31. “I abhor the love”: Carhart, Norma Trist, 218, 55–57, 182, 186–87, 205–11, 248, 239–40, 251.
32. “that all this normalcy”: Emery, The Lesbian Index, 56. The dubiousness of hypnosis is suggested by a funny tangent to the plot: Dr. Jasper falls in love with Norma’s widowed mother and it turns out that she, entirely self-taught, hypnotized him into it, to motivate him to work hard on Norma (Carhart, Norma Trist, 250).
33. “I love you that way”: Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour [1934], in The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 1–69 (18, 62).
34. The New York Times: Brooks Atkinson, “The Children’s Hour,” New York Times, November 21, 1934.
35. But I believe: Compare Maeve Binchy’s economical story “Holland Park” (in Victoria Line, Central Line, 1980), in which the narrator—appalled when she and her friend are mistaken for a lesbian couple by ostentatiously liberal hosts of a party—then realizes that she is in love with her friend after all.
36. Because the fact is: Even with the late revelation and suicide ending, the play was banned in Britain and only allowed to be put on by a private theater club. William Wyler had to completely heterosexualize the story to film it as These Three (1936); only after another quarter century was he able to remake it with original plot and title (The Children’s Hour, 1961), which led to another battle with the censors and finally the Hays Code being significantly toned down to permit “tasteful” treatments of homosexuality. See Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film [1992] (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 52, 67–70.
37. “physical abnormalities”: Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion [1919–21], abridged and trans. Whittaker Chambers (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 29, 64–67, 88–89, 77, 98, 108, 127–28. Kim Emery points out several key ways in which The Scorpion influenced The Well of Loneliness: the early guilty crush on a family servant, for instance, and the scene in the dead father’s study in which the protagonist discovers herself in medical writings; see The Lesbian Index, 71. In several other novels, threats of exposure in court are used to try to break up a lesbian relationship—successfully in Winter Love (1962), a poignant novella by Chinese-Flemish “Han Suyin” (Elizabeth Comber), but unsuccessfully in Jane Rule’s quietly modern Desert of the Heart (1964).
38. “It would be useless”: “Claire Morgan” (Patricia Highsmith), Carol [The Price of Salt, 1952] (London: Penguin, 1991), 227–29.
39. “silly promises”: Highsmith, Carol, 248, 228, 250.
40. “lesbian mother”: Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Faultline (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad, 1982), 6.
41. In works about: In Michèle Roberts’s A Piece of the Night (1978) and Norma Klein’s Breaking Up (1980) the threat comes from the child’s father, but Jax Peters Lowell’s Mothers (1995) has a twist: it is the non–birth mother’s mother who sues for custody on the somewhat illogical basis that her (nonbiological) grandson is being raised in an unhealthy atmosphere. Sometimes what results is more of a thriller than a courtroom drama, because mothers often go on the run from a legal system that is biased against them. Examples include Marge Piercy, Small Changes (1973); Sarah Daniels, Neaptide (1986); Cristina Salat, Living in Secret (1993); and Jan Clausen, Sinking, Stealing (1985). For comparison, narratives about mothers getting involved with women that do not focus on the legal angle include Iréne Monési, Althia (1957); Jeanne Galzy’s La Surprise de vivre (in English, Surprise of Life) series (1969–76); Marijane Meaker, Shockproof Sydney Skate (1972); Marianne Hauser, The Talking Room (1976); Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s trilogy Faultline (1982), Spring Forward, Fall Back (1985), and Southbound (1990); Gillian Hanscombe, Between Friends (1982); Ruth Geller, Triangles (1984); Ellen Frye, Look Under the Hawthorn (1987); Hélène de Monferrand’s Les Amies d’Héloïse trilogy (1990–1997); Barbara Wilson (later Barbara Sjoholm), Gaudi Afternoon (1990); Edith Forbes, Alma Rose (1993) and Navigating the Darwin Straits (2001); Ruthann Robson, Another Mother (1995); Cherríe Moraga, Mexican Medea (1995); Mary Dorcey, Biography of Desire (1997); Carol Anshaw, Lucky in the Corner (2002); and Caroline Williams, Pretending (2006).
42. As Terry Castle: Terry Castle, introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 35.
43. “the love of human beings”: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847] (London: Collins, 1950), 42, 59, 61, 65.
44. In schoolgirl fiction: Notably in “L. T. Meade” (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith), A Sweet Girl Graduate (1886) and The School Favourite (1908); Caroline Fuller, Across the Campus (1899); Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, The Farringdons (1900); Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, Smith College Stories (1900); Amy Blanchard, Janet’s College Career (1904); Julia Schwartz, Elinor’s College Career (1906); and Christina Catrevas, That Freshman (1910). Innocence about same-sex love within the cozy confines of the girls’ school story lasted well into the second decade of the twentieth century; a striking late example is Jennette Lee’s “The Cat and the King” (Ladies’ Home Journal, 1919). See Sherrie Inness, Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1910 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), 47, 53, and her The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity and the Representation of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 33–51, as well as Rosemary Auchmuty, A World of Girls (London: Women’s Press, 1992), 107–80. Passionate and jealous connections between schoolgirls and/or teachers are also central to texts in other genres, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Princess (1853); Gabrielle Reuter, Aus Guter Familie (1895; in English, A Girl from a Nice Family); and “Henry Handel Richardson” (Ethel Richardson), The Getting of Wisdom (1910).
45. Some critics dismiss: Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela! The Girls’ Story, 1839–1985 (London: V. Gollancz, 1986), 122: “The girls were at an age when they had to fall in love with someone; to pick on members of their own sex may have been just a matter of expediency.” This “situational lesbianism” argument also gets applied to prisons and convents.
46. “I could never love”: “Clemence Dane” (Winifred Ashton), Regiment of Women [1917] (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 45, 53, 124, 105, 150, 164,
175.
47. Christa Winsloe’s: The play was produced in Leipzig in 1930 as Ritter Nérestan, then in Berlin as Gestern und heute. The novel was published as Gestern und heute in 1932, as Das Mädchen Manuela in Amsterdam in 1933, and translated into English as The Child Manuela the same year.
48. “makes no favourites”: Christa Winsloe, The Child Manuela, trans. Agnes Neill Scott, intro. Alison Hennegan (London: Virago, 1994), 173, 183, 198, 228, 257- 59.
49. “shocking”: Winsloe, The Child Manuela, 188, 191, 270, 290. In the famous early sound film, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), the suicide is averted by the last-minute intervention of the other girls, prompted by Bernburg. In Germany the film was suppressed by the Nazis. In America, censors would not let the film be shown until cuts were made and subtitles were deleted, to obscure the relationship between Bernburg and Manuela; see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (London: Harper & Row, 1981), 56–58. There was a color film released in 1950.
50. “There is something”: Eveline Mahyère, I Will Not Serve [1958], trans. Antonia White, intro. Georgina Hammick (London: Virago, 1984), 14, 25.
51. “I hope that you will”: Mahyère, I Will Not Serve, 21, 27, 34, 56–59, 126, 128, 146. For another interesting, literary coming-of-age/coming-out novel, see Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927).
52. “the biggest mistake”: Quoted by Georgina Hammick, introduction to Mahyère, I Will Not Serve, xviii.
53. Bussy wrote it: Filmed by Jacqueline Audry in 1951, with a script by Colette, it was released after considerable cutting with the lurid title of The Pit of Loneliness.
54. “Julie-ites”: “Olivia” (Dorothy Strachey Bussy), Olivia [1949] (London: The Reader’s Union–The Hogarth Press, 1950), 39, 24.
55. “She communicated”: Bussy, Olivia, 30, 9, 21, 42–48, 55–57.
56. “Mystery was all”: Bussy, Olivia, 56, 58, 63–64, 70–72, 75–76, 91, 95, 100, 105–6. The tradition of sublimated schoolgirl yearning came to a sharp end with Violette Leduc’s short, explicit novel about her affair with another schoolgirl, Thérèse et Isabelle (written by 1954, published 1966). Brigid Brophy’s The Finishing School (1963) hilariously reprises elements of both Olivia and The Children’s Hour: when rumors of lesbianism at a Riviera boarding school hit the papers, some pupils are withdrawn from the school, but new ones make a point of applying.
57. “Colonna”: Mary Renault, Purposes of Love [1939] (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1986), 41.
58. Stephen’s Paris friend: Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 181.
59. “For God’s sake”: Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 443.
60. Sybil/Bill mixes all her signals: Thomas Beer, “Hallowe’en,” in Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians [1927] (London: Cassell, 1934), 36–59.
61. “just a drop in the bucket”: Tiffany Thayer, Thirteen Women (New York: Claude Kendall, 1932), 151–83 (159–62, 174, 183).
62. Judy Gardiner’s novella: Judy Gardiner, “Fidelia” in The Power of Sergeant Mettleship [1967], reprinted as Waltzing Matilda (London: Sphere, 1972), 9–56 (9, 12–13, 15–18, 21, 25–29, 34, 38–40, 42, 44, 54.
63. This hilarious novella: There were a few earlier texts that showed two women raising children together, rather than a lesbian couple deliberately bringing a child into their relationship: a Polish novel by Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit, Siostry (1908; in English, Sisters); and a Danish one, Agnete Holk’s Strange Friends (1941). In Ann Bannon’s Journey to a Woman (1960), a lesbian and a gay man marry to have a baby. For some reason, the more recent lesbian baby boom (including birth and adoption) has not produced a great deal of fiction or drama yet. Notable exceptions are the Dykes to Watch Out For graphic novels (from 1986), by that Dickens of lesbian life, Alison Bechdel. See also Patricia Grossman, Unexpected Child (2000); Mark Ravenhill, Handbag (2000); Brendan Halpin, Donorboy (2004); and Stacey D’Erasmo’s A Seahorse Year (2004).
64. “defiant lesbian hero”: Gabriele Griffin, Heavenly Love? Lesbian Images in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993), 62.
65. “Me being a queer”: Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle [1977] (New York: Bantam, 1977), 203, 44, 70.
66. “So now I wear”: Brown, Rubyfruit, 159, 128–31, 107, 220. For a story of a sixteen-year-old lesbian runaway locked up as “incorrigible” in a mental hospital in the early 1960s, see Madelyn Arnold’s Bird-Eyes (1998). Kim Emery points out (The Lesbian Index, 110) that although Brown’s novel is often hailed as the complete rebuttal of The Well of Loneliness, its story of a brilliant tomboy who finds freedom in the big city is actually “rife with resemblance to its infamous predecessor.”
67. But many coming-out novels: Persecution can lead to emigration: in Elizabeth Riley’s All That False Instruction (1975) and Fiona Cooper’s Not the Swiss Family Robinson (1991), an Australian and an American respectively decide to try their luck in England. Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name—A Biomythography (1982) was very influential, with its semifictional musings on an African-American lesbian’s woman-centered Grenadan heritage. Jacqueline Woodson and Shay Youngblood mull over queer African-American childhoods (urban and rural respectively) in Autobiography of a Family Photo (1995) and Soul Kiss (1997). Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound (1992) uses magic realist techniques to illuminate the cultural complexity of two Jewish lesbian sisters at college in the 1960s, Judy Doenges’s The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (2006) is about coming out on the wrong side of the tracks, Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984) takes as its protagonist a biracial girl in Jamaica, Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo (1996) weighs the ups and downs and ethics of coming out in a Cuban family in Chicago, and Mary Dorcey’s lyrical A Noise from the Woodshed (1989) does the same for rural Ireland.
68. “had known this would happen”: Valerie Miner, Blood Sisters (London: Women’s Press, 1982), 126.
69. Interestingly, these characters: Classic examples include Marge Piercy, Small Changes (1973); Verena Stefan, Häutungen (1975; in English, Shedding); Nancy Toder, Choices (1980); Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God (1980); and Carol Anne Douglas, To the Cleveland Station (1982).
70. “Unnatural Passion”: Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (London: Pandora, 1985), 89, 102, 109.
71. “There must be others”: Ann Allen Shockley, Loving Her [1974] (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 64.
72. “There is not anywhere”: Richard Lockridge, “The New Play,” New York Sun, November 21, 1934.
73. And indeed in fiction: See Linnea A. Stenson, “From Isolation to Diversity: Self and Communities in Twentieth-Century Lesbian Novels,” in Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 208–25 (215–19).
74. The first two are by Ann Bannon: Lesbian pulp was often written by and aimed at men, but Yvonne Heller proposes a useful subcategory of “pro-lesbian pulp,” often written by lesbians, in “Pulp Politics: Strategies of Vision in Pro-Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1955–65,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1–25. See also Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels, 1950–1965, ed. Katherine V. Forrest (San Francisco: Cleis, 2006).
75. Gabriele Griffin: Griffin, Heavenly Love?, 48.
76. House of Shades: Maureen Duffy, The Microcosm [1966] (London: Virago, 1988), 14, 286, 70–98, 21–22. Two other bar-centered novels are Marie-Claire Blais, Les Nuits de l’Underground (1978; in English, Nights in the Underground), and Nisa Donnelly, The Bar Stories: A Novel After All (1989).
77. But from the 1970s: Of course, this harked back to much older fantasies about, say, Sappho’s Lesbos. And the idea does come up in some earlier titles, even pulp ones. One example is Randy Salem’s trashy Man Among Women (1960), in which Alison and her aunt/lover Maxine have planned but not yet built their all-lesbian resort on a tiny Bahamanian island…when Maxine has to sacrifice herself to a barrac
uda so the hero can carry the wounded Alison to safety.
78. “all women”: June Arnold, Sister Gin (London: Women’s Press, 1975), 92.
79. “hillwomen”: See Diane Griffin Crowder, “Separatism and Feminist Utopian Fiction,” in Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 237–50.
80. The first lesbian historical: There are some earlier examples of lesbian-themed fiction set in past eras: Hope Mirrlees, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919); Naomi Mitchison, “The Delicate Fire” (1933); Maude Meagher, The Green Scamander (1933); Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936); and Kate O’Brien, As Music and Splendour (1958). But it was only in the late 1960s that openly lesbian novelists began to consciously invent a past for their community.
81. Paradoxically: “Any stone from their hill is a crystal ball,” Miller wrote in the afterword, and this was not just a metaphor: she and her partner Elizabeth Deran, in a fascinatingly collaborative and intuitive process, used a Ouija board to call up Brundidge and Willson and interview them. “Isabel Miller” (Alma Routsong), Patience and Sarah [titled A Place for Us in 1969], intro. by Emma Donoghue (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005), 202, 211–14.
82. “I figure to take up land”: Miller, Patience and Sarah, 47–48, 72, 128, 116.
83. “I held Sarah’s hand”: Miller, Patience and Sarah, 146, 183–84, 33–34, 38–39.
84. Isabel Miller intended: Miller, in a note on the fragment of it she did publish, “A Dooryard Full of Flowers,” in A Dooryard Full of Flowers (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad, 1993).
85. One example: Other examples include Ellen Galford, Moll Cutpurse, Her True History (1984), Doris Grumbach, The Ladies (1984), and Morgan Graham, These Lovers Fled Away (1988), all of which are about the eighteenth-century Ladies of Llangollen. The following titles are about lesbians who pass as men in settings that range from 1730s Germany to 1940s America: Jeannine Allard, Légende (1984); Caeia March, The Hide and Seek Files (1988); Ingrid MacDonald, “The Catherine Trilogy” (1991); Caro Clarke, The Wolf Ticket (1998); Judith Katz, The Escape Artist (1997); and Jackie Kay, Trumpet (2000). Some novels (by, for instance, Fiona Cooper, Anne Cameron, and Elana Dykewomon) situate a butch-femme couple within a community of kindred spirits.
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