Passions Between Women, Emma Donoghue
I do love Emma Donoghue's fiction. I think her short stories are well-crafted and her novels intelligent and warm, and she tends to include queer characters who are just queer without centering the story on their queerness, a thing I always love. So naturally when I saw that she'd written a book on queer women's literature in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain, I was there.
It did not disappoint.
Donoghue covers a broad range of topics, from sex between women to romantic friendship, from women passing as men to communities of queer women. The book is very well-researched, and though it drags a bit at the beginning, it picks up pretty quickly. Donoghue even mentioned a pair of women that she wrote a book about, Anne Damer and Eliza Farren from Life Mask (which I really need to get back to!). She locates a community of women who desired women in the past and expands on it until it seems unnatural that we should have believed that women never wanted other women until recently.
My only complaint is with some of the terms she used. It's true that the book is on the older side, but for people who might be hurt by this: she uses the term hermaphrodite frequently, and also uses "lesbian" as a catch-all for all women desiring women, which it very much is not. That said, I did love the book and I look forward to reading her other academic works.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/342927.html. Please comment over there if possible.
It did not disappoint.
Donoghue covers a broad range of topics, from sex between women to romantic friendship, from women passing as men to communities of queer women. The book is very well-researched, and though it drags a bit at the beginning, it picks up pretty quickly. Donoghue even mentioned a pair of women that she wrote a book about, Anne Damer and Eliza Farren from Life Mask (which I really need to get back to!). She locates a community of women who desired women in the past and expands on it until it seems unnatural that we should have believed that women never wanted other women until recently.
My only complaint is with some of the terms she used. It's true that the book is on the older side, but for people who might be hurt by this: she uses the term hermaphrodite frequently, and also uses "lesbian" as a catch-all for all women desiring women, which it very much is not. That said, I did love the book and I look forward to reading her other academic works.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/342927.html. Please comment over there if possible.