Currently on at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham: Celebrating Sculptress Anne Seymour Damer 17 October 2021 - 3 January 2022.
Damer was the god-daughter and heiress of Horace Walpole, who left her the house remodelled by him him in 'queer gothic' style. During her life, Anne Damer challenged gender roles not only in relation to her artistic ( Read more... )

Interview with Caroline Derry, author of Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, which was one of my trove from the Palgrave Macmillan Massive Knockdown Sale late last year, and which I commented on briefly here. I was looking forward to the book ever since I was at a seminar she was giving and ( Read more... )

[A] mature literary culture is diverse, inclusive, and deep. It’s a culture that includes works of writerly brilliance and works that speak to the circumstances of their readers’ lives or that exist simply to entertain and provide pleasurable escapism. What difference does it make, one might ask, whether a mystery features a gay protagonist or a ( Read more... )

Born on this day, 1939, Dusty Springfield, acclaimed pop singer, and 'Since her death.... commended as the leading 20th-century British soul singer'. Also an habitue of the Gateways, Chelsea, and had several somewhat troubled relationships with women, at a time when, even with the advent of the so-called 'permissive society', this was still not ( Read more... )

I was delving into my slightly fuzzy memory of an intrepid ?Victorian ?Edwardian lady, having just been reading something which I thought was rather dissing on the lady travellers of the pre-Great War era -
And by a process, which was that she wrote a book which included Outcast Siberian Lepers in the title, I discovered that her name was Kate ( Read more... )

A nice and ongoing blog by a fashion historian: Dressing Dykes: lesbian fashion history; who also maintains a related Instagram feed.
Okay, early days and large subject, but I am just a leetle surprised not to see anything particularly on Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge as style icons (posited by Laura Doan in Fashioning Sapphism). Maybe that's ( Read more... )

I was reminded, tangentially, via a discussion on social media earlier this week, of the Case of Miss Woods and Miss Pirie against Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, in which two schoolmistresses in Edinburgh sued an aristocratic lady for defamation of character which had destroyed the school they were running. As a result of information conveyed to her by ( Read more... )

I found this, ‘Treble Hearted’: Queer Intimacies in Early Modern Britain, a very provocative piece for thinking about the ways women might negotiate romantic friendships (or more) within a society/social milieu in which family ties and marriage were pre-eminent concerns and constraints in women's lives.
Constance Aston Fowler met Katherine Thimelby ( Read more... )

I see that there has just come out a new book that sounds very intriguing: Jen Mannion, Female Husbands: A Trans History: review here; blog post by Mannion here.
It's of course problematic to include this under the heading of FF Friday, but there were complexities about the reasons why persons assigned female at birth chose this identity in ( Read more... )

This sequence, published by Plus One Press and available as trade paperbacks and on Kindle, so far consists of Rituals (2012), Reflections (2013), Resurrections (2014) and Realities (2018), each subtitled A Novel of the Fantastic. (I say so far because although this was originally said to be going to be a tetralogy, Realities ends on the sort of ( Read more... )