Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
England
Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.
LHMP entry
In the introductory matter for this book, Bray states: “I have...restricted the scope of the book to questions of male homosexuality. Female homosexuality was rarely linked in popular thought with male homosexuality, if indeed it was recognised at all. Its history is, I believe, best to be understood as part of the developing recognition of a specifically female sexuality.”
I can forgive Vicinus for starting off by claiming that much of the historical work on cross-dressing men has focused on the theater and especially on Shakespeare’s works, only because this article was written before much of the work on gender-crossing and trans history has been done. She’s looking at the couple of decades around 1900, a time when understandings of gender and sexuality were undergoing one of those periodic revolutions. The instability of how to read “male impersonation” came from both the multiplicity of framings of the act itself and the attitude of the viewer.
In this article, Lanser examines the intersection of changing conceptions of sexual difference (i.e., the difference between male and female) and changing attitudes toward sexuality in the 18th century, specifically with regard to how female homosexuality plays a part in these processes.
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
This article examines the question “were the Bluestockings queer?” Also the converse “were Bluestocking and ‘lesbian’ mutually contradictory?” On the Bluestocking side, Lanser places 5 women generally considered the movers and shakers: Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot, Hester Mulso Chapone, and Sarah Robinson Scott. The Bluestockings weren’t a clearly defined group and membership was sometimes assigned from outside, rather than being a self-identification—a process in which historians have participated.
This is a high-level overview of the English Bluestocking movement(?), as part of a special volume of Huntington Library Quarterly on “Reconsidering the Bluestockings.” As such, it doesn’t touch much on specifically sapphic topics, but provides a useful context for various individual Bluestockings.
In this article, Ingrassia challenges scholarship that views 18th century novelist Eliza Haywood’s work as depicting only heterosexual relationships and instead points out and discusses many aspects of her fiction that represent a wide spectrum of relations between women that range from the homosocial to the homoerotic. [Note: This article has a lot of literary theory jargon, which I tend to find of less interest, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the discussions of the content of Haywood’s work.]
This article looks at contrasting concepts of “woman writer” and “professional author” in the 18th century, using the lens of Eliza Haywood’s writing, and specifically the discussions around writing and authorship contained in her work The Tea-Table. In the early 18th century, resistance to the idea of women as “writers” (which had influenced many women to circulate their work only in manuscript among private social circles) was shifting to resistance specifically to women as professional writers, i.e., ones who aspired to make a living at it.
This is an overview of the rise of sexological theories about female homosexuality. The field consistently made connections between homosexuality and neurosis in women, as well as connecting the former with “inversion” or masculinity. Different part of the field gave different weight to ideas of genetic versus behavioral causes. There were also systematic ways in which the sexological approach to homosexuality differed for men and women. But the overall concept pressured women with homoerotic feelings to consider themselves mentally—and perhaps physically—ill.
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