Queer Fiction by Politically Active Female Authors (1870-1910)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Birmingham
Department Name: Department of English Literature
Abstract
Scholarship on late nineteenth-century women's queer writing has tended to focus on elite poets of the Aesthetic movement - Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (writing together as Michael Field) and, to a lesser extent, Amy Levy and Charlotte Mew (Parker, 2015). Current scholars also write overwhelmingly on poetry, with Field the most popular (Parker, Parejo-Vadillo, 2019), although recent work also considers Levy and Olive Custance. While some recent attention has been paid to lesbian-like relationships in works by men, including Dickens and Hardy, such fiction by women remains understudied (Prizel, 2018). This lacuna stems from historical secrecy between queer women regarding their desires (social pressure to 'pass' as heterosexual), as well as the scholarly privileging of queer men that dates back to Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's Between Men (1985) cited by Terry Castle as the primary reason for longstanding
critical indifference to writing by and about queer women (Vicinus, 2004; Castle, 1993).
While critics such as Lilian Faderman (1985) and Martha Vicinus (2004) have referred to authors such as Simcox and Ormston-Ford in passing, their work prioritises social history and biographical recovery rather than literary analysis. Additionally, Heike Bauer (2009) has studied the sexological field and so-called female inverts in conversation with literary tradition. Nevertheless, no one study has yet been undertaken on these and similar authors nor has examined these women's unique literary outputs in any amount of detail.
By analysing the intersection of political activism and lesbianism in fiction while simultaneously interrogating the growing role of the sexologist to trace the relationship between the scientific, political, and literary world regarding female homosexuality, my project will thus rectify a scholarly oversight, restoring women's queer fiction to its rightful place in the British literary canon.
critical indifference to writing by and about queer women (Vicinus, 2004; Castle, 1993).
While critics such as Lilian Faderman (1985) and Martha Vicinus (2004) have referred to authors such as Simcox and Ormston-Ford in passing, their work prioritises social history and biographical recovery rather than literary analysis. Additionally, Heike Bauer (2009) has studied the sexological field and so-called female inverts in conversation with literary tradition. Nevertheless, no one study has yet been undertaken on these and similar authors nor has examined these women's unique literary outputs in any amount of detail.
By analysing the intersection of political activism and lesbianism in fiction while simultaneously interrogating the growing role of the sexologist to trace the relationship between the scientific, political, and literary world regarding female homosexuality, my project will thus rectify a scholarly oversight, restoring women's queer fiction to its rightful place in the British literary canon.
