Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings. Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris. In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire. |
Contents
PART I HUSBANDWIFE COUPLING | 1 |
PART II QUEER RELATIONSHIPS | 57 |
PART III CROSSAGE AND CROSSED LOVE | 109 |
PART IV MODERNIST REFASHIONINGS | 171 |
Beyond the Family Metaphor | 229 |
The Principal Intimate Friends | 239 |
Notes | 245 |
| 285 | |
| 303 | |
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admired adolescent American androgynous Anne Lister artist Barney's became behavior beloved Brewster Carlyle century chapter Charlotte Cushman Colette created cross-age Dane daughter death defined desire diary discussed E. F. Benson Edith Cooper Eliza Lynn Linton Emily Faithfull Emma Crow Cushman emotional entry erotic Ethel Smyth father feel female feminine feminist fiction friends gender inversion George Eliot girl Harriet Hosmer homosexual husband Ibid intimacy intimate friendships invert Jane Jewsbury John kissed knew Ladies of Llangollen Lady Ashburton lesbian letters Lisl lives London lover Lucy Maggie male mannish Mariana married Mary Benson masculine maternal metaphor Michael Field Miss moral mother Natalie Barney Natalie Clifford Barney nature never novel Paris passion Pirie pleasure poems Ponsonby Radclyffe Hall relationship Renée Vivien role romantic friendship Rome Rosa Bonheur same-sex love seemed sexologists social society spiritual Stebbins tion University Press Vernon Lee Victorian wife woman Woolf writing wrote York young