FF Friday: ff relationships in the works of Naomi Mitchison
I am an immense fan of the works of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999). Although I wouldn't say that ff relationships form a central theme of any of her numerous works, for somebody who was born when she was and writing over the period she did, she had a very relaxed attitude towards same-sex relationships in general. She had, at the very least, romantic friendships herself, about which she does not, from the testimony of her autobiography, to have felt any conflicts or phobia over fears of lesbianism (I think this was really much less of a thing than some historians have alleged, at least before the 1950s).
It probably helped that her early works were historical fiction mostly set in classical times - as she later wrote, when having censorship problems over a novel set in contemporary Europe during the 1930s, she could get away with almost anything if the characters were wearing wolfskins or togas. There are close and loving relationships between women even if they were not depicted explicitly as sexual (very open to shipping, however: the relationship between Philylla and Erif Der in The Corn King and the Spring Queen always seems to me a good deal more powerful than that between Philylla and Erif's brother Berris).
While her best known work of science fiction, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), focuses more on heterosexual relationships and motherhood, though in new societal configurations - and one might well posit some editorial edicts from the publisher about how far she could go with re-envisaging sexual relations - she moved somewhat further in Solution Three (1975).
Solution Three critiques the idea that the orientation of sexual desire is entirely innate, setting up a society which has decided, in the interests of peace and harmony, to gently direct its members into believing that same-sex relationships are preferable. However, it also critiques the notion that societies can altogether control individuals' desires. It additionally makes significant gestures towards the fluidity of desire. But the relationships that exist are depicted as, most of them of whatever kind, positive and sustaining.
The 1983 Not By Bread Alone has as a central character a middle-aged woman scientist: she is a lesbian, with a high-powered woman lover with whom, it is implied, she enjoys an open relationship, as their occupations keep them apart much of the time. For a woman of over 80 at the time of writing, born in the reign of Queen Victoria*, fairly remarkable.
*Who did not refuse to believe in lesbianism, this is a popular but exploded myth. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2809662.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.