Intimate Friends: women who loved women (1778-1928)
Martha Vicinus University of Chicago Press, 344pp, £24.50
ISBN 0226855635
When I first read the diaries of Anne Lister back in 1988, I was convinced they were fakes. It was too exactly what we wanted to read - the intimate diary of a predatory, independent butch lesbian, operating in the 1820s and 1830s, with a seduction success rate that would be the envy of many men. Lister figures strongly among the star cast of 19th-century dykes in Martha Vicinus's scholarly but gripping new history, which rereads and reinterprets parts of the territory first opened up by Lillian Faderman in her groundbreaking work Surpassing the Love of Men: romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present (1981). Faderman's book provoked a huge argument concerning the erotic limits of romantic friendship, and something of a did-they-do-it-or-didn't-they debate raged in high-minded, scholarly tomes. Vicinus sidesteps the issue by concentrating on the ways in which women themselves defined and expressed their erotic attachments - a lesbian "self-fashioning" where the terminology is as slippery as the phenomenon described.
In the "embodied lesbian history" that Vicinus has constructed, the search at the heart of each of these women's lives was for a language which expressed and honoured same-sex love, yet was socially respectable. The language of religious devotion, in which the beloved becomes an ennobling gift from God, served Mary Benson, wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, exceedingly well in her passions for many women, including her life partner, Lucy Tait. A late conversion to Catholicism, however, rendered the aunt-niece life partnership of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper more difficult. Cooper went in for celibacy, and their joint writing identity as "Michael Field" soon ended.
Many of the "intimate friends" in this book adopted male pseudonyms - Bradley and Cooper were called "Michael" and "Henry"; Lister was known as "Fred"; Mary Pickford, one of Lister's lovers, was "Frank"; and even the deeply respectable and married Mrs Benson was called "Ben". Radclyffe Hall was always known as "John". Despite being very recognisable, however, the "mannish" woman is not a stable concept. "Mannishness", as Vicinus points out,
had as many different meanings as "effeminacy". It could mean . . . an estimable power of reasoning, or remarkable learning and knowledge,
or an assertive patriotism in defence of
one's country . . . or a too overt interest
in pursuing women as erotic objects.
Victorian society polarised the genders and circumscribed the characteristics of each. What was a woman to do if she felt she "possessed characteristics from both sexes"? There were other categories available. The American sculptor Harriet Hosmer set herself up as a "genius", as did Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. In order to deal with the numerous young women who fell at her feet, Eliot and her partner, G H Lewes, encouraged them to call her "Madonna", which induced the right atmosphere of distant but adoring worship. The passion of the young Edith Simcox for the much older George Eliot is one of the treasures of this book. Unrequited lesbian love can be as revealing as the marital arrangements of lesbian couples.
Most of the women whom Vicinus describes were educated, wealthy or capable of earning their own living. These are the women who have left markers - not only diaries, letters and confessions, but also artworks, novels, clothes, houses and gardens. There is an intriguing sequence of bonfires where all-too-revealing letters are despatched by one of the lovers or by relatives. The section on the artistic community in Rome, centred around Hosmer and the actress Charlotte Cushman, is especially interesting. Vicinus sweetly disagrees with Judith Butler, who maintains that lesbian identities never ape heterosexual norms. The biographical narratives in this volume demonstrate how conventional heterosexual identities can be used as camouflage and subterfuge.
Vicinus has written a fascinating scholarly history of women who loved other women. The reader comes away with enormous respect for its subjects' emotional inventiveness, creativity and survival strategies. Buy it for your loved one, whatever their sex. And to have done with the did-they-do-it-or-didn't-they debate: well, who knows what "it" was in the 19th century? The answer clearly varied from couple to couple, as did its significance across the decades. Anne Lister certainly "did it" with her lovers - she exchanged lockets with her long-term "wife", Mariana Lawton, bought at great expense in Buxton, in which each enclosed a lock of pubic hair. "We both of us kissed each bit of hair before we put it into the locket." I rest my case.
Patricia Duncker is professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her latest book is Seven Tales of Sex and Death (Picador)
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