Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, and fiction addressing lesbian characters; non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics; and works by lesbian writers. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian. Lesbian and sapphic literature are types of LGBTQ literature.
Fiction that falls into this category may be of any genre, such as historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance.
Overview Lesbian literature includes works by lesbian authors, as well as lesbian-themed works by heterosexual authors. Even works by lesbian writers that do not deal with lesbian themes are still often considered lesbian literature. Works by heterosexual writers which treat lesbian themes only in passing, on the other hand, are not often regarded as lesbian literature.
The fundamental work of lesbian literature is the poetry of Sappho of Lesbos. From various ancient writings, historians have gathered that a group of young women were left in Sappho's charge for their instruction or cultural edification.Foster, Jeannette H. (1985). Sex Variant Women in Literature, Naiad Press. , p. 18. Not much of Sappho's poetry remains, but that which does demonstrates the topics she wrote about: women's daily lives, their relationships, and rituals. She focused on the beauty of women and proclaimed her love for girls.Aldrich, Robert, ed. (2006). Gay Life and Culture: A World History, Thames & Hudson, Ltd. , p. 47–49.
Certain works have established historical or artistic importance, and the world of lesbian fiction continues to grow and change as time goes on. Until recently, contemporary lesbian literature has been centered around several small, exclusively lesbian presses, as well as online fandoms. However, since the new millennium began, many lesbian presses have branched out to include the works of trans men and women, gay and bisexual voices, and other queer works not represented by the mainstream press. Additionally, novels with lesbian themes and characters have become more accepted in mainstream publishing.
Early literature Medieval Christian mysticism The European Middle Ages lacked a specific term for lesbians, but medieval French texts, under the influence of the Arabic literature of the period, featured literary depictions of love and sexual desire between women. Such expressions are found in devotional texts to the Virgin Mary or the hagiography of Ida Louvain, by Beguines, or the writings of female Christian mystics, including Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch, Margery Kempe, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete.
13th century Japan One of the oldest Japanese stories involving a romance and implied sexual relations between women appears to be the 6th volume of Waga mi ni tadoru himegimi () (The Princess in Search of Herself) which was created between 1259 and 1278 (author unknown).
16th-18th century Europe Renaissance-era translations of Greek and Roman texts uncovered their references to desire and sexual practices between women. Terry Castle credits these translations as the trigger for increased lesbian themes in European literature. Influences included fragments of poetry by Sappho, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, Martial's Epigrams, and Juvenal's Satires. In particular, Sappho's legend and poetry sparked numerous adaptations over the next centuries in Italy, France, England, and Germany. However, many commenters denied the homoerotic content of the original works.:12-15
During the 17th and 18th centuries, many British women published works with queer or homoerotic themes and varying degrees of explicitness. One school of British women wrote poetry for other women inspired by earlier themes of "romantic" friendship. These writers included Katherine Philips, Anne Killigrew, Anne Finch, and Anna Seward.:2,48
19th century: forerunners
In the early 19th century, Chinese poet Wu Tsao gained popularity for her lesbian love poems. Her songs, according to poet Kenneth Rexroth, were "sung all over China".Kenneth Rexroth, Women Poets of China, New Directions Publishing, 1972, p. 135 In 1849, Leona Florentino was born in the Philippines during the brutal patriarchal Spanish colonial regime. Known as the mother of Philippine women's literature and a pioneer in Philippine lesbian literature, her poems, both written and oral, during her 35-year life brought about feminism in the archipelago which influenced many of the revolutionaries before the Philippine revolution.Blanton, S. (2016). A Threshold of Flowers: Public and Private Eroticism in the Poems of Leona Florentino. University of North Carolina.Mabanglo, R. E. (2020). Leona Florentino: Mother of Filipina poetry. Philippine Graphic.Writing Lesbian, Lesbian writing (Cruz, Jhoanna Lynn, Bulatlat News), 2005.
Though lesbian literature had not yet evolved as a distinct genre in English in the 19th century, lesbian writers like the essayist and supernatural fiction writer Vernon Lee sometimes hinted at lesbian subtexts in their work or, like Lee's lover Amy Levy, wrote love poems to women using the voice of a heterosexual man.Naomi Hetherington, Nadia Valman, Amy Levy: Critical Essays Ohio University Press, Apr 6, 2010 Others wrote, but kept their writing secret. Beginning in 1806, English landowner and mountaineer Anne Lister kept extensive diaries for 34 years, which included details of her lesbian relationships and seductions, with the lesbian sections written in secret code. The diaries were not published until the 1980s. In 2010, they were the basis for a BBC television production, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.
Twenty-first century writer and editor Susan Koppelman compiled an anthology titled Two Friends and Other 19th-century American Lesbian Stories: by American Women Writers, which includes stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Octave Thanet, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewett that were originally published in periodicals of their time. Of these stories, which range "from the explicit to inferentially lesbian", Koppelman said, "I recognize these stories as stories about women loving women in the variety of romantic ways that we wouldn't even have to struggle to define if we were talking about men and women loving each other."
Since the 1970s, scholars of lesbian literature have analyzed as lesbian relationships that would not have been labeled as such in the 19th century due to different conceptions of intimacy and sexuality. For example, Christina Rossetti's 1862 poem "Goblin Market" has been widely read as a narrative of lesbianism, even though it attempts to paint itself as a narrative of sisterly love.The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. Ed. Terry Castle. New York: Columbia University Press 2003. Additionally, scholars have engaged in queer readings of the novels of Charlotte Brontë, particularly Shirley and Villette, in which the female main characters engage in close or even obsessive relationships with other women. Some have even speculated that Brontë herself may have been in love with her friend Ellen Nussey; Vita Sackville-West called the letters between the two "love letters pure and simple."
Scholars have similarly speculated on whether the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson might have been in love with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, a possibility that encourages queer readings of Dickinson's many love poems.Mason, Janet. "The American Sappho: In Pursuit of a Lesbian Emily Dickinson". Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, 3(3), Sept. 2002, p. 91.
Michael Field was the pseudonym used by two British women, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote poetry and verse-dramas together. Bradley was Cooper's aunt, and the two lived together as lovers from the 1870s to their deaths in 1913 and 1914. Their poetry often took their love as its subject, and they also wrote a book of poems for their dog, Whym Chow.Donoghue, Emma. We Are Michael Field. Bello 2014
Modern history
1900–1950: Beginnings
The first novel in the English language recognised as having a lesbian theme is The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, which a British court found obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women". The book was banned in Britain for decades; this is in the context of the similar censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which also had a theme of transgressive female sexuality, albeit heterosexual. In the United States, The Well of Loneliness survived legal challenges in New York and the U.S. Customs Court.
Elsa Gidlow, who was born in England and grew up in Quebec, Canada, co-edited, published, and contributed literary work to the first known North American lesbian/gay-themed periodical, Les Mouches fantastiques, published in Montreal from 1918 to 1920. She later moved to the United States, where she continued her literary output by publishing, in 1923, the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry to be produced in that country, titled On a Grey Thread.
In the early 20th century, an increasingly visible lesbian community in Paris centered on literary salons hosted by French lesbians as well as expatriates like Nathalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, who produced lesbian-themed works in French and English, including Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Idyll Saphique by Liane de Pougy, poetry by Renee Vivien, Barney's own epigrams, poetry, and several works by Stein. Radclyffe Hall also spent time in Paris at Barney's salon and modeled one of her characters in The Well of Loneliness after her.Nicole G Albert, "De la topographie invisible à l'espace public et littéraire :les lieux de plaisir lesbien dans le Paris de la Belle Époque".
In Spain, there was also a timid awakening of lesbian literature in the early 20th century. The first work to deal with the subject was Zezé (1909) by Ángeles Vicente. The only one who dared to publish homoerotic verses was Lucía Sánchez Saornil, although under the male pen name Luciano de San Saor. Other authors, such as Carmen de Burgos, made references to lesbianism in a more veiled manner.
In Japan, there were several love suicides involving school girls in 1911 and it was in this context of greater awareness of female-female love that one of the most commercially successful female writers of the period Nobuko Yoshiya published Flower Tales (1916–1924) () which were fifty-two stories of romantic friendship between young women within the Class S genre. In her later work “Two Virgins in the Attic” (1919) (), she describes a female-female love experience, which ended with their decision to live together as a couple. Tamura Toshiko published works with same-sex love between women: Resignation (1911) () and The Fresh Heart (1916) ().
Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel of a high-spirited gender-bending poet who lives for centuries, Orlando, which was said to be based on her lover, Vita Sackville-West, was re-examined in the 1970s as a 'subversive' lesbian text.Eileen Barrett, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, NYU Press, Jul 1, 1997
A key piece of modern Greek lesbian literature was Her Lover, published in 1929 in Alexandria, Egypt. It was written by the Alexandrian Greek author Dora Rosetti and published without her permission by two male friends of hers when she was eighteen. The book elicited a large scandal in Greece, resulting in the destruction of almost all of its copies. The publication contained photos and details about Rosetti and her partner, outing them publicly. This caused Rosetti to not release any more of her writing until one of her readers, Eleni Bakopoulou, sought her out in 1984. Rosetti agreed to let Bakopoulou study her writing for posthumous publication.