Two revolutionary works of literature by queer women writers, and lesbianism would once again become the subject of intense dispute. Published within three months of one another, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (July 1928) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (October 1928) both deeply challenged the gender conventions and sexual mores of their time.
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MARY OLIVER (1935–2019) was famously private and accustomed to her ways of working as a poet, writing often about how she walked with pad and pen at dawn every day…More
Moby Dyke is not just the slice of Americana that all road trips provide, nor just a portrait of the splintering of sexual identity in the homosexual community; it’s also glimpses of a writer’s past. Indeed, the sheer specificity of those memories produces its best prose, particularly when the author returns to the state in which she was raised.
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Review of Ann Walker: The Life and Death of Gentleman Jack’s Wife by Rebecca Batley and As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries, 1836–38 by Jill Liddington.
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CATHERINE LACEY’S new book, Biography of X, is an innovative novel chronicling the life of an influential, outré, fictional performance artist named X, narrated by her grief-stricken widow, an investigative reporter, CM Lucca, who is contemplating suicide. Angered by a recent unauthorized biography of X written by a man who never even met her, CM decides to write her own “corrective” biography of X.
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Along the way, the novel recounts the poet’s early life as the daughter of the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, a credential that would become a liability after the Bolshevik Revolution, her mother’s death, and the poet’s marriage at nineteen to Sergei Efron, who would later enlist in the White Army during the Russian Civil War.
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While her novels dealt with incest and other topics, she’s best remembered for her lesbian themes. The Ladies, for example, based on a true story, depicts two women from wealthy Anglo-Irish families who ran off to Wales to live together. They entertained notable visitors, including the Duke of Wellington and Edmund Burke.
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Brief reviews of Novel Approaches to Lesbian History, Pathetic Literature, Less is Lost, and A Minor Chorus.
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LONNEKE GEERLINGS opens her biography of Rosey E. Pool, I Lay This Body Down, by depicting her subject getting off a cattle car destined for Auschwitz. Convincing the authorities that she was a guard who had lost her identifying armband, combined with her fluent German, served to win her a temporary reprieve. In any event, this quick-witted evasion both saved her life and forever marked her with survivor’s guilt.
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Memorial programs were held in both Boston and New York City this past fall to celebrate the life of activist Urvashi Vaid (1958–2022), who passed away last May. Her longtime friend and “co-conspirator” Richard Burns delivered the first of many eulogies at both programs. What follows is based on the Boston speech, which was delivered on September 28th at Northeastern University. A few items have been included from Richard’s remarks in New York (November 3rd), which began with the following prefatory statement:
You can see in your program that there’s a campaign to put Urvashi on a United States postage stamp. Stamps are planned three years in advance, and the time is long overdue for us to have an activist lesbian leader on our mail. You’ll be shocked to know that this will be a very political process, and the people in this room could make it happen.
The New York program was streamed live by the American LGBTQ+ Museum and can still be viewed on their website (americanlgbtqmuseum.org).
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