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irish-dress-history · 3 months

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Did the ancient Celts really paint themselves blue?

Part 2: Irish tattoos

Clockwise from top left: Deirdre and Naoise from the Ulster Cycle by amylouioc, detail from The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife by Daniel Maclise, a modern Celtic revival tattoo, Michael Flatley in a promotional image for the Irish step dance show 'Lord of the Dance'

This is my second post exploring the historical evidence for our modern belief that the ancient and medieval Insular Celts painted or tattooed themselves with blue pigment. In the first post, I discussed the fact that body paint seems to have been used by residents of Great Britain between approximately 50 BCE to 100 CE. In this post, I will examine the evidence for tattooing.

Once again, I am looking at sources pertaining to any ethnic group who lived in the British Isles, this time from the Roman Era to the early Middle Ages. The relevant text sources range from approximately 200 CE to 900 CE. I am including all British Isles cultures, because a) determining exactly which Insular culture various writers mean by terms like ‘Briton’, ‘Scot’, and ‘Pict’ is sometimes impossible and b) I don’t want to risk excluding any relevant evidence.

Continental Written Sources:

The earliest written source to mention tattoos in the British Isles is Herodian of Antioch’s History of the Roman Empire written circa 208 CE. In it, Herodian says of the Britons, "They tattoo their bodies with colored designs and drawings of all kinds of animals; for this reason they do not wear clothes, which would conceal the decorations on their bodies" (translation from MacQuarrie 1997). Herodian is probably reporting second-hand information given to him by soldiers who fought under Septimius Severus in Britain (MacQuarrie 1997) and shouldn't be considered a true primary source.

Also in the early 3rd century, Gaius Julius Solinus says in Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium 22.12, "regionem [Brittaniae] partim tenent barbari, quibus per artifices plagarum figuras iam inde a pueris variae animalium effigies incorporantur, inscriptisque visceribus hominis incremento pigmenti notae crescunt: nec quicquam mage patientiae loco nationes ferae ducunt, quam ut per memores cicatrices plurimum fuci artus bibant."

Translation: "The area [of Britain] is partly occupied by barbarians on whose bodies, from their childhood upwards, various forms of living creatures are represented by means of cunningly wrought marks: and when the flesh of the person has been deeply branded, then the marks of the pigment get larger as the man grows, and the barbaric nations regard it as the highest pitch of endurance to allow their limbs to drink in as much of the dye as possible through the scars which record this" (from MacQuarrie 1997).

This passage, like Herodian's, is clearly a description of tattooing, not body staining or painting. That said, I have no idea of tattoos actually work like this. I would think this would result in the adult having a faded, indistinct tattoo, but if anyone knows otherwise, please tell me.

The poet Claudian, writing in the early 5th c., is the first to specifically mention the Picts having tattoos (MacQuarrie 1997). In De Bello Gothico he says, "Venit & extremis legio praetenta Britannis,/ Quæ Scoto dat frena truci, ferroque notatas/ Perlegit exanimes Picto moriente figuras."

Translation: "The legion comes to make a trial of the most remote parts of Britain where it subdues the wild Scot and gazes on the iron-wrought figures on the face of the dying Pict" (from MacQuarrie 1997).

Last, and possibly least, of our Mediterranean sources is Isidore of Seville. In the early 7th c. he writes, "the Pictish race, their name derived from their body, which the efficient needle, with minute punctures, rubs in the juices squeezed from native plants so that it may bring these scars to its own fashion [. . .] The Scotti have their name from their own language by reason of [their] painted body, because they are marked by iron needles with dark coloring in the form of a marking of varying shapes." (translation from MacQuarrie 1997)

Isidore is the earliest writer to explicitly link the name 'Pict' to their 'painted' (Latin: pictus) i.e. tattooed bodies. Isidore probably borrowed information for his description from earlier writers like Claudian (MacQuarrie 1997).

In the 8th century, we have a source that definitely isn't Romans recycling old hearsay. In 786, a pair of papal legates visited the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria (Story 1995). In their report to Pope Hadrian, the legates condemn pagans who have "superimposed most hideous cicatrices" (i.e gotten tattoos), likening the pagan practice to coloring oneself "with dirty spots". The location of the visit indicates that these are Anglo-Saxon tattoos rather than Celtic, but some scholars have suggested that the Anglo-Saxons might have adopted the practice from the Brittonic Celts (MacQuarrie 1997).

A gloss in the margin of the late 9th c. German manuscript Fulda Aa 2 defines Stingmata [sic] as "put pictures on the bodies as the Irish (Scotti) do." (translation from MacQuarrie 1997).

Fulda Aa 2 folio 43r The gloss is on the left underlined in white.

Irish Written Sources:

Irish texts that mention tattoos date to approximately 700-900 CE, although some of them have glosses that may be slightly later, and some of them cannot be precisely dated.

The first text source is a poem known in English as "The Caldron of Poesy," written in the early 8th c. (Breatnach 1981). The poem is purportedly the work of Amairgen, ollamh of the legendary Milesian kings. In the first stanza of the poem, he introduces himself saying, "I being white-kneed, blue-shanked, grey-bearded Amairgen." (translation from Breatnach 1981)

The text of the poem with interline glosses from Trinity College Dublin MS 1337/1

The word garrglas (blue-shanked) has a Middle Irish (c. 900-1200) gloss added by a later scribe, defining garrglas as: "a tattooed shank, or who has the blue tattooed shank" (Breatnach 1981).

Although Amairgen was a mythical figure, the position ollamh was not. An ollamh was the highest rank of poet in medieval Ireland, considered worthy of the same honor-price as a king (Carey 1997, Breatnach 1981). The fact that a man of such esteemed status introduces himself with the descriptor 'blue-shanked' suggests that tattoos were a respectable thing to have in early medieval Ireland.

The leg tattoos are also mentioned c. 900 CE in Cormac’s Glossary. It defines feirenn as "a thong which is about the calf of a man whence ‘a tattooed thong is tattooed about [the] calf’" (translation from MacQuarrie 1997)

The Irish legal text Uraicecht Becc, dated to the 9th or early 10th c., includes the word creccoire on a list of low-status occupations (Szacillo 2012, MacNeill 1924). A gloss defines it as: crechad glass ar na roscaib, a phrase which Szacillo interprets as meaning "making grey-blue sore (tattooing) on the eyes" (2012). This sounds rather strange, but another early Irish text clarifies it.

The Vita sancti Colmani abbatis de Land Elo written around the 8th-9th centuries (Szacillo 2012) contains the following episode:

On another time, St Colmán, looking upon his brother, who was the son of Beugne, saw that the lids of his eyes had been secretly painted with the hyacinth colour, as it was in the custom; and it was a great offence at St Colmán’s. He said to his brother: ‘May your eyes not see the light in your life (any more). And from that hour he was blind, seeing nothing until (his) death. (translation from Szacillo 2012).

The original Latin phrase describing what so offended St Colmán "palpebre oculorum illius latenter iacinto colore" does not contain the verb paint (pingo). It just says his eyelids were hyacinth (blue) colored. This passage together with the gloss from the Uraicecht Becc implies that there was a custom of tattooing people's eyelids blue in early medieval Ireland. A creccoire* was therefore a professional eyelid tattooer or a tattoo artist.

A possible third reference to tattooing the area around the eye is found in a list of Old Irish kennings. The kenning for the letter 'B' translates as 'Beauty of the eyebrow.' This kenning is glossed with the word crecad/creccad (McManus 1988). Crecad could be translated as cauterizing, branding, or tattooing (eDIL). McManus suggests "adornment (by tattooing) of the eyebrow" as a plausible interpretation of how crecad relates to the beauty of the eyebrow (1988). The precise date of this text is not known (McManus 1988), but Old Irish was used c. 600-900 CE, meaning this text is of a similar date to the other Irish references to tattoos.

Kenning of the letter 'b' with gloss from TCD MS 1337/1

There is a sharp contrast between the association of tattoos with a venerated figure in 'The Caldron of Poesy', and their association with low-status work and divine punishment in the Uraicecht Becc and the Vita. This indicates that there was a shift in the cultural attitude towards tattoos in Ireland during the 7th-9th centuries. The fact that a Christian saint considered getting tattoos a big enough offense to punish his own brother with blindness suggests that tattooing might have been a pagan practice which gradually got pushed out by the Catholic Church. This timeline is consistent with the 786 CE report of the papal legates condemning the pagan practice of tattooing in Great Britain (MacQuarrie 1997).

There are some mentions of tattooing in Lebor Gabála Érenn, but the information largely appears to be borrowed from Isidore of Seville (MacQuarrie 1997). The fact that the writers of LGE just regurgitated Isidore's meager descriptions of Pictish and Scottish (ie Irish) tattooing without adding any details, such as the designs used or which parts of the body were tattooed, makes me think that Insular tattooing practices had passed out of living memory by the time the book was written in the 11th century.

*There is some etymological controversy over this term. Some have suggested that the Old Irish word for eyelid-tattooer should actually be crechaire. more info Even if this hypothesis is correct, and the scribe who wrote the gloss on creccoire mistook it for crechaire, this doesn't contradict my argument. The scribe clearly believed that eyelid-tattooer belonged on a list of low-status occupations.

Discussion:

Like Julius Cesar in the last post, Herodian of Antioch c. 208 CE makes some dubious claims of Celtic barbarism, stating that the Britons were: "Strangers to clothing, the Britons wear ornaments of iron at their waists and throats; considering iron a symbol of wealth, they value this metal as other barbarians value gold" (translation from MacQuarrie 1997). If the Britons wore nothing but iron jewelry, then why did they have brass torcs and 5,000 objects that look like they're meant to attach to fabric, Herodian?

Brass torc from Lochar Moss, Scotland c. 50-200 CE. Romano-British trumpet brooch from Cumbria c. 75-175 CE. image from the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

Trumpet brooches are a Roman Era artifact invented in Britain, that were probably pinned to people's clothing. more info

Although Herodian and Solinus both make dubious claims, there are enough differences between them to indicate that they had 2 separate sources of information, and one was not just parroting the other. This combined with the fact that we have more-reliable sources from later centuries confirming the existence of tattoos in the British Isles makes it probable that there was at least a grain of truth to their claims of tattooing.

There is a common belief that the name Pict originated from the Latin pictus (painted), because the Picts had 'painted' or tattooed bodies. The Romans first used the name Pict to refer to inhabitants of Britain in 297 CE (Ware 2021), but the first mention of Pictish tattoos came in 402 CE (Carr 2005), and the first explicit statement that the name Pict was derived from the Picts' tattooed bodies came from Isidore of Seville c. 600 CE (MacQuarrie 1997). Unless someone can find an earlier source for this alleged etymology than Isidore, I am extremely skeptical of it.

Summary of the written evidence:

Some time between c. 79 CE (Pliny the Elder) and c. 208 CE (Herodian of Antioch) the practice of body art in Great Britain changed from staining or painting the skin to tattooing. Third century Celtic Briton tattoo designs depicted animals. Pictish tattoos are first mentioned in the 5th century.

The earliest mention of Irish tattoos comes from Isidore of Seville in the early 6th c., but since it seems to have been a pre-Christian practice, it likely started earlier. Irish tattoos of the 8-9th centuries were placed on the area around the eye and on the legs. They were a bluish color. The 8th c. Anglo-Saxons also had tattoos.

Tattooing in Ireland probably ended by the early 10th c., possibly because of Christian condemnation. Exactly when tattooing ended in Great Britain is unclear, but in the 12th c., William of Malmesbury describes it as a thing of the past (MacQuarrie 1997). None of these sources give much detail as to what the tattoos looked like.

The Archaeology of Insular Ink:

In spite of the fact that tattooing was a longer-lasting, more wide-spread practice in the British Isles than body painting, there is less archaeological evidence for it. This may be because the common tools used for tattooing, needles or blades for puncturing the skin, pigments to make the ink, and dishes to hold the ink, all had other common uses in the Middle Ages that could make an archaeologist overlook their use in tattooing. The same needle that was used to sew a tunic could also have been used to tattoo a leg (Carr 2005). A group of small, toothed bronze plates from a Romano-British site at Chalton, Hampshire might have been tattoo chisels (Carr 2005) or they might have been used to make stitching holes in leather (Cunliffe 1977).

Although the pigment used to make tattoos may be difficult to identify at archaeological sites, other lines of evidence might give us an idea of what it was. Although the written sources tell us that Irish tattoos were blue, the popular modern belief that woad was the source of the tattoo pigment is, in my opinion, extremely unlikely for a couple of reasons:

1) Blue pigment from woad doesn't seem to work as tattoo ink. The modern tattoo artists who have tried to use it have found that it burns out of the person's skin, leaving a scar with no trace of blue in it (Lambert 2004).

2) None of the historical sources actually mention tattooing with woad. Julius Cesar and Pliny the Elder mention something that might have been woad, but they were talking about body paint, not tattoos. (see previous post) Isidore of Seville claimed that the Picts were tattooing themselves with "juices squeezed from native plants", but even assuming that Isidore is a reliable source, you can't get blue from woad by just squeezing the juice out of it. In order to get blue out of woad, you have to first steep the leaves, then discard the leaves and add a base like ammonia to the vat (Carr 2005). The resulting dye vat is not something any knowledgeable person would describe as plant juice, so either Isidore had no idea what he was talking about, or he is talking about something other than blue pigment from woad.

In my opinion, the most likely pigment for early Irish and British tattoos is charcoal. Early tattoos found on mummies from Europe and Siberia all contain charcoal and no other colored pigment. These tattoos range in date from c. 3300 BCE (Ötzi the Iceman) to c. 300 CE (Oglakhty grave 4) (Samadelli et al 2015, Pankova 2013).

Despite the fact that charcoal is black, it tends to look blueish when used in tattoos (Pankova 2013). Even modern black ink tattoos that use carbon black pigment (which is effectively a purer form of charcoal) tend to look increasingly blue as they age.

A 17-year-old tattoo in carbon black ink photographed with a swatch of black Sharpie on white printer paper.

The fact that charcoal-based tattoo inks continue to be used today, more than 5,000 years after the first charcoal tattoo was given, shows that charcoal is an effective, relatively safe tattoo pigment, unlike woad. Additionally, charcoal can be easily produced with wood fires, meaning it would have been a readily available material for tattoo artists in the early medieval British Isles. We would need more direct evidence, like a tattooed body from the British Isles, to confirm its use though.

As of June 2024, there have been at least 279 bog bodies* found in the British Isles (Ó Floinn 1995, Turner 1995, Cowie, Picken, Wallace 2011, Giles 2020, BBC 2024), a handful of which have made it into modern museum collections. Unfortunately, tattoos have not been found on any of them. (We don't have a full scientific analysis for the 2023 Bellaghy find yet though.)

*This number includes some finds from fens. It does not include the Cladh Hallan composite mummies.

Tattoos in period art?

It has been suggested that the man fight a beast on Book of Kells f. 130r may be naked and covered in tattoos (MacQuarrie 1997). However, Dress in Ireland author Mairead Dunlevy interprets this illustration as a man wearing a jacket and trews (Dunlevy 1989). Looking at some of the other figures in the Book of Kells, I agree with Dunlevy. F. 97v shows the same long, fitted sleeves and round neckline. F. 292r has long, fitted leg coverings, presumably trews, and also long sleeves. The interlace and dot motifs on f. 130r's legs may be embroidery. Embroidered garments were a status symbol in early medieval Ireland (Dunlevy 1989).

Left to right: Book of Kells folios 130r, 97v, 292r

A couple of sculptures in County Fermanagh might sport depictions of Irish tattoos. The first, known as the Bishop stone, is in the Killadeas cemetery. It features a carved head with 2 marks on the left side of the face, a double line beside the mouth and a single line below the eye. These lines may represent tattoos.

The second sculpture is the Janus figure on Boa Island. (So named because it has 2 faces; it's not Roman.) It has marks under the right eye and extending from the corner of the left eye that may be tattoos.

I cannot find a definitive date for the Bishop stone head, but it bears a strong resemblance to the nearby White Island church figures. The White Island figures are stylistically dated to the 9th-10th centuries and may come from a church that was destroyed by Vikings in 837 CE (Halpin and Newman 2006, Lowry-Corry 1959). The Janus figure is believed to be Iron Age or early medieval (Halpin and Newman 2006).

Conclusions:

Despite the fact that tattooing as a custom in the British Isles lasted for more than 500 years and was practiced by at least 3 different cultures, written sources remain our only solid evidence for it. With only a dozen sources, some of which probably copied each other, to cover this time span, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. The 4th century Picts may not have had the same tattoo designs, placements or reasons for getting tattooed as the 8th c. Irish or Anglo-Saxons. These sources only give us fragments of information on who got tattooed, where the tattoos were placed, what they looked like, how the tattoos were done, and why people got tattooed. Further complicating our limited information is the fact that most of the text sources come from foreigners and/or people who were prejudiced against tattooing, which calls their accuracy into question.

'The Cauldron of Posey' is one source that provides some detail while not showing prejudice against tattoos. The author of the poem was probably Christian, but the poem appears to have been written at a time when Pagan practices were still tolerated in Ireland. I have a complete translation of the poem along with a longer discussion of religious elements here.

Leave me a tip?

Bibliography:

BBC (2024). Bellaghy bog body: Human remains are 2,000 years old https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68092307

Breatnach, L. (1981). The Cauldron of Poesy. Ériu, 32(1981), 45-93. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30007454

Carey, J. (1997). The Three Things Required of a Poet. Ériu, 48(1997), 41-58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30007956

Carr, Gillian. (2005). Woad, Tattooing and Identity in Later Iron Age and Early Roman Britain. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 24(3), 273–292. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2005.00236.x

Cowie, T., Pickin, J. and Wallace, T. (2011). Bog bodies from Scotland: old finds, new records. Journal of Wetland Archaeology 10(1): 1–45.

Cunliffe, B. (1977) The Romano-British Village at Chalton, Hants. Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 33(1977), 45-67.

Dunlevy, Mairead (1989). Dress in Ireland. B. T. Batsford LTD, London.

eDIL s.v. crechad https://dil.ie/12794

Giles, Melanie. (2020). Bog Bodies Face to face with the past. Manchester University Press, Manchester. https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/46717/9781526150196_fullhl.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Halpin, A., Newman, C. (2006). Ireland: An Oxford Archaeological Guide to Sites from Earliest Times to AD 1600. Oxford University Press, Oxford. https://archive.org/details/irelandoxfordarc0000halp/page/n3/mode/2up

Hoecherl, M. (2016). Controlling Colours: Function and Meaning of Colour in the British Iron Age. Archaeopress Publishing LTD, Oxford. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Controlling_Colours/WRteEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Lambert, S. K. (2004). The Problem of the Woad. Dunsgathan.net. https://dunsgathan.net/essays/woad.htm

Lowry-Corry, D. (1959). A Newly Discovered Statue at the Church on White Island, County Fermanagh. Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 22(1959), 59-66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20567530

MacQuarrie, Charles. (1997). Insular Celtic tattooing: History, myth and metaphor. Etudes Celtiques, 33, 159-189. https://doi.org/10.3406/ecelt.1997.2117

McManus, D. (1988). Irish Letter-Names and Their Kennings. Ériu, 39(1988), 127-168. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30024135

Ó Floinn, R. (1995). Recent research into Irish bog bodies. In R. C. Turner and R. G. Scaife (eds) Bog Bodies: New Discoveries and New Perspectives (p. 137–45). British Museum Press, London. ISBN: 9780714123059

Pankova, S. (2013). One More Culture with Ancient Tattoo Tradition in Southern Siberia: Tattoos on a Mummy from the Oglakhty Burial Ground, 3rd-4th century AD. Zurich Studies in Archaeology, 9(2013), 75-86.

Samadelli, M., Melisc, M., Miccolic, M., Vigld, E.E., Zinka, A.R. (2015). Complete mapping of the tattoos of the 5300-year-old Tyrolean Iceman. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 16(2015), 753–758.

Story, Joanna (1995). Charlemagne and Northumbria : the influence of Francia on Northumbrian politics in the later eighth and early ninth centuries. [Doctoral Thesis]. Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1460/

Szacillo, J. (2012). Irish hagiography and its dating: a study of the O'Donohue group of Irish saints' lives. [Doctoral Thesis]. Queen's University Belfast.

Turner, R.C. (1995). Resent Research into British Bog Bodies. In R. C. Turner and R. G. Scaife (eds) Bog Bodies: New Discoveries and New Perspectives (p. 221–34). British Museum Press, London. ISBN: 9780714123059

Ware, C. (2021). A Literary Commentary on Panegyrici Latini VI(7) An Oration Delivered Before the Emperor Constantine in Trier, ca. AD 310. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Literary_Commentary_on_Panegyrici_Lati/oEwMEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

#early medieval #roman era #pict #tattoos #ancient celts #apologies to people who wanted a shorter post #archaeology #art #anecdotes and observations #statutes and laws #irish history #gaelic ireland #medieval ireland #anglo saxon #insular celts #romano british

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henry-fox-biggest-stan · 3 months

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Some more obscure and / or underrated lesbian literature : An incomplete list made by a lesbian in hopes of making other sapphics happy

(I haven’t read all of them)

Sorted by years (this rapidly became a history lesson of lesbian literature sorry I’m a nerd)

Ancient times

(A good article about lesbians in ancient greece / rome)

Queen Zhuang Jiang 庄姜 (???- BC 690) / We know about Sappho and Enheduanna, but what about her? She wrote poems some of which were, uh, pretty gay. I learnt about her here. It is said than her poems are in The Book of Songs (which is a collection of ancient Chinese poetry). I couldn’t find a lot about her but I found enough to believe than (hopefully) she was a real person and the internet isn't lying to me.

Dialogues of the courtesans - Lucian of Samosata (somewhere in the second century BC) / Basically Dialogues of the courtesans is a collection of dialogues between well, courtesans (prostitutes). Either between themselves or between clients. One of the dialogues is called “The Lesbians”. Link to read (somehow finding a pdf of Dialogues of the courtesans is pretty hard but reading it chapter by chapter online it’s not??)

The Babyloniaka - Iamblichus (somewhere in the second century AC) / Lost novel, so all you need to know is here

Of course we can’t forget this Pompeii poem

1200s

Bieiris de Romans (somewhere in the first half of the 1200s) / Bieiris was a French poet, and we only have one of her poems with us because the others have been lost. We don’t know much (anything) about her, except that she was a woman, French, and who wrote about a woman called Maria. Some say that this mysterious Maria referred to the Virgin Mary, others than Maria was her gf, and others than she was writing in the perspective of a man (because obviously a woman writing about other women in a not so platonic way is unthinkable). Anyway, feel free to get your own conclusions, here’s the poem (translated)

1500s

The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Siena - Konrad Eisenbichler / So while this is a modern book, it is the only one I’ve been able to find than includes Laudomia Forteguerri’s poems (1515-1555). Some historians considered her to be the earliest Italian lesbian writer. “Although only six of her sonnets have survived, all are testaments to the love she bore for other women, and five are specifically dedicated to Margaret of Austria.”

The Maitland Quarto / Manuscript (1586) / So, this is a collection of 95 scot poems, and poem 49 is pretty sapphic. It’s technically anonymous, but it has been attributed to Marie Maitland (who transcripted the manuscript and is thought to have added her own poems there). The last lines mean “'There is more constancy in our sex / Than ever among men has been”, I haven’t been able to translate the rest of it. The poem.

1600s

The Flower's Shadow Behind the Curtain - Ko Lien Hua Ying (somewhere in the 1600s) / It is said this book was written towards the end of the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644). It’s a erotic book, and chapter 22 includes an erotic story between two 16 year old girls. I found it in Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture by Fang Fu Ruan (believe it or not, I don’t just randomly know all this books, I did research)

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) / English writer, one of the first female writers to live through her writing. She was also a spy. She wrote a lot about women. “Homoeroticism is standard in Behn's verse, either in descriptions such as these of male to male relationships or in depictions of her own attractions to women. Behn was married and widowed early, and as a mature woman her primary publicly acknowledged relationship was with a gay male, John Hoyle, himself the subject of much scandal.” (here). She wrote a lesbian love poem (in the link before, it also makes an analysis of it). The poem: To The Fair Clarinda

Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings - Juana Inés De la Cruz (1648-1695) / So the thing about Juana is than every single spanish-speaking lesbian knows her (and loves her), but hardly anyone who doesn’t speak spanish has ever heard of her, which is a shame, because she’s an absolute icon. She was a Mexican nun who was also incredibly gay. You know how Sappho is called the tenth muse? Juana is also called the (mexican) tenth muse. She’s also called the phoenix of America, which is incredibly badass. She learnt how to read at 3 years old, at 8, she asked her mother to send her to college dressed as a man (her mother refused). She learnt and studied by her own, because she wanted to learn. She studied by cutting her hair (if she got something wrong or forgot something, she cut a strand of her hair as a punishment) because she said that “a head adorned with hair is worthless if it’s a head naked of ideas”. When she was sixteen (important to note than she already spoke Latin fluently at 12, having mastered it in just a few lessons) the archbishop Payo Enríquez de Rivera heard of her, and decided to ask her to be the company lady of his wife (his wife and her eventually would have a relationship) and decided to test her intelligence. He got 40 (!!!) university profesor of all subjects, and they all asked her questions related to maths, literature, philosophy, etc. She answered all of them right. At around 21, she decided to become a nun (not out of faith, but because it was either becoming a nun and being able to continue her education, or marrying a man and stop studying. To her, the choice was clear). Also it is said she owned around 4000 books in her personal library. So yeah, an educated, extremely intelligent gal, who wrote lesbian love poems to her gf, and who was definitely not afraid to stand up for herself.

1700s

The Game of Flats - Nicholas Rowe? (1715) / Poem, “game of flats” was an 18th century slang for lesbian sex. Link to read <- that website includes lots of 18th century queer history and poems like this one

The Sappho-an - Anonymous (1735 or 1749) / When I first heard of this I couldn’t believe it. It sounds like an AO3 fanfic, or some modern erotic book (one of those than have a real person in the cover), or maybe a forgotten 1970s lesbian book. It’s none of that. It’s an anonymous poem written in the 1700s. The plot? The goddesses of Olympus are sexually unsatisfied because the gods keep on going after mortals (except Ares, he’s just too busy with war) instead of paying attention to them. The gods keep going after woman and male mortals, so Hera just says yknow what if they can sleep with men then we can sleep with each other. Sappho also appears. Link to read.

Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - John Cleland (1742) / Ok fine, this one is not sapphic but the main character (female) does have sex with a woman at one point. This is basically an erotic novel. Very dirty (specially for the time period) and very banned in lots of places. The main character is Fanny, a prostitute. It includes lots of straight sex, some gay (mlm) sex, and two pages where Fanny describes in detail having sex with Phoebe, bisexual prostitute. Not sapphic, but thought it was worth mentioning.

1810s

Christabel - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816) / So, have you heard of Carmilla (1872)? If you’re reading this post, you probably have, if you haven’t, it’s a classic (vampire) book than is said to have inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. It’s also incredibly gay. Well, some say it was Christabel than was the inspiration for Carmilla. Of course we don’t know this for sure, but the similarities definitely are there. Review from a reader: “what if we were the protagonist and villain of a never-completed sensual gothic poem (and we were both girls) / alternately: when you meet a wickedhot girl only she's SPOOKY but that's SEXY and turns out your dad and her dad were also gay back in the day before having a sexy gay falling-out and she's like 'babe let's get naked and hold each other close' and you're like '—wait fuck I mean uhhhh I PRETEND I DO NOT SEE IT!'” I haven’t read this one, however for what it seems Christabel is not explicitly a vampire. Since the poem is unfinished we don’t know the end, and we just think she’s a vampire because so many things used in here were also reused for vampires characterization (like not being able to enter a house unless invited)

1830s

Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier (1835) / “A woman uses her incredible beauty to captivate both d'Albert, a young poet, and disguised as a man, his mistress, Rosette. In this shocking tale of sexual deception, Gautier draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French château in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue, and gives voice to a longing which is larger in scope, namely, the wish for completeness in oneself.”

1870s

Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife - Adolphe Belot (1870) / “The sensational Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife tells of the suffering of a naive young man whose new bride will not agree to consummate the marriage. Eventually he learns from an acquaintance, to his amazement, that their wives are lovers.” In reviews it says than this is a homophobic novel (who’s surprised) but “Christopher Rivers argues in his introduction that the protagonist's homophobic attitude toward lesbianism is ironically linked to his intimate homosocial bonds with men”

1880s

Jill - Amy Dillwyn (1884) / “Jill is the story of an unconventional heroine—a gentlewoman who disguises herself as a maid and runs away to London in search of adventure after her mother dies and her father is pursued by a Victorian gold-digger. Once in London she uses her position as lady's maid to become close to her mistress. Her life above and below stairs is portrayed with irreverent wit in this fast-paced story, but at the centre of the novel is Jill's unfolding love for the woman she works for. On the surface a feminist manifesto, Jill is a poignant story of same-sex desire and unrequited love. A new introduction tells the autobiographical story on which the novel is based —the author's own passionate attachment to a woman she called her wife, but who she couldn't have.”

Mephistophela - Catulle Mendès (1889) / “Telling the story of Baronne Sophor d'Hermelinge, a woman as thoroughly martyrized by her creator as any other heroine in the history of fiction, in spite of the enormous competition for that title established by countless writers, male and female, it is one of the archetypal novels of the Decadent Movement, and one of the most striking, precisely because is it such a discomfiting piece of writing, the deliberately controversial nature of which has been further enhanced as its surrounding social context has changed over time. Highly influential, especially on the works of such writers as Jean Lorrain and Renée Vivien, Mephistophela, in placing lesbian amour in the foreground of the story, deals forthrightly and intensively with a literary theme that had previously only been treated with delicacy and indecision, mostly in poetry. It is essentially a horror story about demonic possession, about contrived and cruel damnation, devoid even of a Faustian pact, which merely employs obsessive lesbian desire as an instrument of damnation.” Goodreads review: “As a story it is quite straightforward. Girl has same-sex desires and the novel follows her various affairs up to about the age of thirty. […] More controversially, Stableford (and the books blurb) suggests that it is a novel of demonic possession. Now Brian has probably forgotten more than I will ever learn about the period but a few of the episodes show distinct Charcotian traits (an early childhood 'illness', two doctors in conversation etc) and a (really great) fantasy/visionary episode in the book seems to show, to me, the influence of Michelets book on witchcraft. If anything, the book seems even more subversive that Stableford suggests, as Sophie seems largely 'out and proud' and the author often says that she is 'is as she is' suggesting to me that it is 'natural' rather than demonic. I wonder whether the publisher asked Mendes to add some suggestion of the demonic to 'tone down' the idea that people were actually like 'that'.”

1890s

Avant la nuit / Before the dark - Marcel Proust (1893) / Short story (seriously, less than 10 pages). I read it the other day before bed and it’s pretty good. Talks about Françoise, a woman, revealing her homosexuality to her friend Leslie.

A Sunless Heart - Edith Johnstone (1894) / “Its first third focuses on Gasparine O'Neill, who shares an intense connection with her sickly twin brother, Gaspar. Living in poverty, the two struggle to live decently until Gaspar dies. Here gritty naturalism gives way to fantasy, as Gasparine is rescued from despair by the brilliant Lotus Grace, a much-admired teacher at the local Ladies' College. Sexually exploited from the age of twelve by her sister's fiancé, Lotus cannot love anyone, not even her illegitimate child. Gasparine devotes herself to Lotus, but Lotus finds her final brief happiness with a woman student, Mona Lefcadio, a passionate Trinidadian heiress. Exploring issues of race, sexuality, and class in compelling prose, A Sunless Heart is a startling re-discovery from the late- Victorian era. The appendices to this Broadview edition provide contemporary documents that illuminate the tension between romantic friendship and lesbian consciousness in the novel and address other debates in which the novel the nature of Creole identity, the education of women, and the dangers of childhood sexual exploitation.”

The Songs of Bilitis - Pierre Louÿs (1894) / Poetry. However, believe it or not, these were not written by a woman but by a man. Why add it then, well, the story is quite original. The author (Pierre Louÿs) published this verses as written in Ancient Greece by a “disciple of sappho” named Bilitis. He created this whole character, she was a woman, she was a poet, she was a sappho disciple, her work has been lost until now, and she was a huge lesbian. Of course, this is not true, but still, it’s an interesting read. “Between their open celebration of lesbian love and the eventual revelation of their true authorship—the verses actually were written by French novelist and poet Pierre Louÿs—they became a succès de scandale. Although debunked as a work of antiquity, The Songs of Bilitis remains a classic of erotic literature.”

1900s

A Woman's Affair - Liane de Pougy (1901) / "Despite her beauty and her riches, Annhine de Lys, one of the most notorious courtesans of 1890s Paris, is bored and restless. Into her life bursts Flossie, a young American woman, and everything changes. The love she offers Annhine is dangerous, perverse and hard to resist. Ignoring the warnings of her best friend, Annhine encourages the affair."

I Await the Devil's Coming - Mary MacLane (1902) / “Mary MacLane's I Await the Devil's Coming is a shocking, brave and intelectually challenging diary of a 19-year-old girl living in Butte, Montana in 1902. Written in potent, raw prose that propelled the author to celebrity upon publication, the book has become almost completely forgotten. In the early 20th century, MacLane's name was synonymous with sexuality; she is widely hailed as being one of the earliest American feminist authors, and critics at the time praised her work for its daringly open and confesional style. In its first month of publication, the book sold 100,000 copies--a remarkable number for a debut author, and one that illustrates MacLane's broad appeal.” She’s pretty sapphic and claims her (female) lit teacher is her true love. Also an excerpt from a Goodreads review: “She awaits the Devil to come and marry her and bring happiness if only for three days, meanwhile rehearsing suicide. She prays to the Devil to deliver her from “unripe bananas; from bathless people; from a waist-line that slopes up in the front" but offers sensuous instructions on how to eat an olive, and enjoys porterhouse steaks and fudge she makes with brown sugar. It's quite a ride. Many recent reviewers pigeonhole her as an ahead-of-her-time Goth or emo, simply transcribing an eternal and universal teen angst.”

Q.E.D. - Gertrude Stein (1903) - Autobiographical short story about a love triangle between three women; Adele (Stein), Mabel, manipulative and wealthy, and Helen, who seduces Adele.

A Woman Appeared To Me - Renée Vivien (1904) / I have no idea how to explain this book other than it's all I ever wanted and it has an absolutely breathtaking prose. Think of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s writing style and descriptions, the character's philosophy, and the queer toxic relationships in the book. Now make it lesbian and even more explicitly queer. Also I'm pretty sure the main characters want to fuck Sappho. On the second chapter the main characters + some side characters (all women + one guy) are having a discussion (a symposium of sorts) about how much they love sappho and how believing she married a man is stupid and how they don’t hate men, just really dislike them, and the guy says: "Mademoiselle, you are trying to hide from the irresistible seduction of the male. You will certainly finish your love-life in the arms of a man." And our main character being an icon finished the chapter answering him this: "That would be a crime against nature, sir. I have too much respect for our friend to believe her capable of an abnormal passion!". It’s so good. I have seen mixed opinions on this one, but I’m just gonna say: the girls than get it, get it. Everything by Renée Vivien is so good, but this is her only full novel I think (she also wrote poems and short stories). If you have to read only one book out of all the books in this post, let it be this one.

Zezé - Ángeles Vicente (1909) / Not translated (I think) but it’s the first lesbian novel written in Spanish which is pretty cool (even cooler than it was written by a woman who, in 1909 (or around it) divorced her husband and lived through her writing). The plot is basically, the narrator (the author) is on a ship and shares the cabin where she’s staying with another woman, Zezé, a cuplé singer, who tells her about her life (her childhood in a religious school, where she discovered her sexuality with had a relationship with another (female) student, her life in Madrid as an adult and living life as a woman, etc)

1910s

Despised & Rejected - Rose Allatini (1918) / A gay man and a lesbian are friends during WWI, which they are against (an anti-war novel). I think the book is in the perspective of the gay man, but his friend is also a main character.

The Scorpion - Anna Elisabet Weirauch (1919) / A review by a reader: “This book felt more like historical fiction than a novel actually written in 1919-1932, considering the explicitly lesbian relationships and coming of age and coming out style narrative. The story follows the life of Metta, a lesbian who grew up with a controlling family in Berlin. The narrative follows her from her first crush on her manipulative governess, to her first love the older and intelectual Olga, and her foray into the gay scene in Munich and beyond. The story isn't without suffering and it isn't just a love story despite how much you might want it to be. Definite trigger warnings for suicide (not Metta), poor mental health, homophobia and general cringe comments due to the time of writing. But the point of the book is for Metta to find a way to be, a way to live her life comfortably and happily, essentially to find herself.”

1920s

The Bacheloress - Victor Marqueritte (1922) / “Monique is an emancipated French woman who leaves home to escape a marriage of convenience to a man whom her parents have forced on her. She then succumbs to all sorts of carnal temptations including a lesbian love affair with a singer. The scandal provoked by Victor Margueritte's La Garçonne, here translated as The Bacheloress, led to its author having his legion d'honneur revoked, which only propelled this novel about a brazenly independent "new woman" to best-seller status. What was shocking then was not so much the reckless behavior of its heroine, who is depicted as the victim of psychological torment, but the portrait of the corrupt post-WWI society in which she lives. Authentic as Monique is, the types of love she encounters, set against the hostile and contemptuous portrayal of her peers, only amplifies her struggle.”

Yellow Rose - Nobuko Yoshiva (1923) / This is the only book than has been translated by this author, she was a lesbian who wrote Class-S romance (a Japanese book genre of the time, which focused on lesbian / homoerotic relationships between women [so-called romantic friendships], than usually take place in an all-girls boarding school). This specific story talks about a teacher-student relationship. She has other books, one called Yaneura no nishojo (two virgins in the attic) (1919) which isn’t translated, but sounds good, the story “is thought to be semi-autobiographical, and describes a female-female love experience with her dormmate. In the last scene, the two girls decide to live together as a couple. This work, in attacking male-oriented society, and showing two women as a couple after they have finished secondary education presents a strong feminist attitude, and also reveals Yoshiya's own lesbian sexual orientation”.

Freundinnen: ein Roman unter Frauen / Girlfriends: a Novel among Women - Maximiliane Ackers (1923) / Only in German, not translated. Review from an English reader: “This novel—which went through several editions in the 20s before being banned by the Nazis—is uncompromisingly, heartbreakingly queer. The novel tells the story of the love between two actresses in Wiemar Germany, Ruth and Erika. Both women struggle to support themselves on the stage, to live independently, and to come to terms with their love for each other and how they might live and express themselves and their desire.”

Surplus - Sylvia Stevenson (1924) / Review from a reader: “This book should be included in lists of seminal lesbian fiction. Published in 1924, Surplus is the story of Sally Wraith's young adult adventures after the end of WWI, during which period she served as an ambulance driver. The novel is not explicit and dos not detail a physical relationship between Sally and her romantic friend Averil but Sally refers to Averil as her "dream girl" with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life. This novel was published before Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness , which is often hailed for its early negative portrayal of homophobia. But I find it compelling that Sally's love for Averil is not treated as deviant. It's just tragic for any babydyke to fall in love with a straight girl!”

The Captive - Eduard Bourdet (1926) / Theatre, “Irène is a lesbian tortured by her love for Madame d'Aiguines, but pretending engagement to Jacques (man). Though Irène attempts to leave Madame d'Aiguines and marry Jacques, she returns to the relationship, saying that it is "a prison to which I must return captive, despite myself". Madame d'Aiguines is not seen in the play, but leaves behind nosegays of violets for Irène, as a symbol of her love.” Read here

Women Lovers, or The Third Woman - Natalie Clifford Barney (1926) / “This long-lost novel recounts a passionate triangle of love and loss among three of the most daring women of belle époque Paris. In this barely disguised roman à clef, the legendary American heiress, writer, and arts patron Natalie Clifford Barney, the dashing Italian baroness Mimi Franchetti, and the beautiful French courtesan Liane de Pougy share erotic liaisons that break all taboos and end in devastation as one unexpectedly becomes the "third woman."

HERmione - H.D (1927) / “This autobiographical novel, an interior self-portrait of the poet H. D. (1886-1961) is what can best be described as a find, “a posthumous treasure”. In writing HERmione, H.D. returned to a year in her life that was peculiarly blighted. She was in her early twenties—a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place... Waves to fight against, to fight against alone... “I am Hermione Gart, a failure” —she cried in her dementia, “I am Her, Her, Her.” She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl who was, if not lesbian, then certainly of bisexual bent, brought an atmosphere that made her hold on everyday reality more tenuous. This stormy course led to mental breakdown, then to a turning point and a new beginning as her own true self, as Her"

Lucia Sánchez Saornil (1895 - 1970) / Spanish poet, putting her here because she’s part of generation ‘27. Read her Wikipedia page because she’s literally iconic (I can’t put the link here for some reason). I love her so much. She was an anarchist and very revolutionary. She wrote under a pen name to be able to explicitly write about women and lived with her partner (América Barroso) until she died. I haven’t been able to find an English translation of her writing, but I do have found a French one, so better than nothing

Dusty Answer - Rosamond Lehmann (1927) / Coming of age story of Judith Earle, sensitive, lonely, who grew up as an only child, but with 4 neighbors (all cousins) to make her company (and eventually harbor romantic feelings for). Then she moves to college, where she meets Jennifer and enters a relationship with her. Although the relationship is not explicitly romantic.

Ladies Almanack - Djuna Barnes (1928) / “Written as a medieval calendar, Ladies Almanack is a clever parody of the crazy sapphic circle of Natalie Barney and her Académie des Femmes. Sharp, biting, witty and transgressive, it is also a modern and pioneer in his vision of lesbianism and the issues surrounding relationships between women. The emotional endogamy, transvestism, motherhood, marriage or differences between sex and gender are already presented in the book with a charge of irony and acidity that is rare in the treatment of the topic. And it is also a breath of fresh air, an essential reference to know the world of lesbian women in all its breadth and diversity.”

1930s

The Angel and the Perverts - Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (around 1930) / "Set in the lesbian and gay circles of Paris in the 1920s, The Angel and the Perverts tells the story of a hermaphrodite born to upper class parents in Normandy and ignorant of his/her physical difference. As an adult, s/he lives a double life as Marion/Mario, passing undetected as a lesbian in the literary salons of the times, and as a gay man in the cocaine dens made famous by Colette." Technically not lesbian, but it’s “set in the lesbian cercles of Paris”

Broderie Anglaise - Violet Trefusis (1935) / Technically not a lesbian novel, but by a sapphic author. Do you know about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West? Of course you do, everyone does. However, do you know than Violet Trefusis used to be Vita’s lover? They dated as teens and again as adults. There’s this whole gay toxic romantic circle between Violet, Vita, and Virginia. Violet wrote this book where she’s basically adding Vita, Virginia, and herself into the characters and dissing them. The plot centers on an encounter between Alexa, a celebrated English writer (Virginia), and her rival, Anne (Violet), and their discussion about their mutual lover, Lord Shorne (Vita).

Summer Will Show - Sylvia Townsend Warner (1936) / Sophia Willoughby's husband has a mistress who he cheats on her with. So she grabs him and packs him up to Paris with his mistress. She'll raise their children and he can have his mistress all day long if he wants, what she wants is to not see him. Sadly, her children die, and she goes to Paris, where she'll find her husband's mistress, and the two of them start an affair with eachother.

Diana: A Strange Autobiography - Diana Frederics (1939) / “«This is the unusual and compelling story of Diana, a tantalizingly beautiful woman who sought love in the strange by-paths of Lesbos. Fearless and outspoken, it dares to reveal that hidden world where perfumed caresses and half-whispered endearments constitute the forbidden fruits in a Garden of Eden where men are never accepted». This is how A Strange Autobiography was described when it was published in paperback in 1952. The original 1939 hardcover edition carried with it a Publisher's This is the autobiography of a woman who tried to be normal. In the book, Diana is presented as the unexceptional daughter of an unexceptional plutocratic family. During adolescence, she finds herself drawn with mysterious intensity to a girl friend. The narrative follows Diana's progress through college; a trial marriage that proves she is incapable of heterosexuality; intelectual and sexual education in Europe; and a series of lesbian relationships culminating in a final tormented triangular struggle with two other women for the individual salvation to be found in a happy couple.”

1940s

Hidden Path - Elena Fortún (somewhere around the 1940s) / Maria Luisa grows up on 1910s/1920s Spain. She is a peculiar girl, one who despises wearing dresses and wants to dress as a sailor, who could spend all day reading, who loves painting, and who swears she will never marry. Oh, and she's also a lesbian. Based on the author's life Maria Luisa is kind of the author's alter ego, and it follows her from childhood to adulthood while dealing with a world not created with people like her in mind. (Not published until 2016)

El Pensionado de Santa Casilda / The Boarding School of Saint Casilda - Elena Fortún (somewhere around the 1940s) / This book is not translated, but if you know spanish I recommend to pick it up. A group of 14/15 year old girls who go to the same spanish all-girls boarding school, and they are all in love with each other. It follows them into adulthood and how they navigate their lives being women and lesbians in the past (Not published until 2022). Messy lesbians at its finest. Like, seriously. Lesbians still in love with their ex and not over their first love, dating their friends and their ex friend, and the ex of their friend, and having sugar mommies, etc etc

1960s

Winter Love - Han Suyin (1962) / “As a college student in London during the bitterly cold winter of 1944, Red falls in love with her married classmate Mara. Their affair unleashes a physical passion, a jealousy, and a sense of self-doubt that sweep all her previous experiences aside and will leave her changed forever. Set against the rubble of the bombed city, in a time of gray austerity and deprivation, Winter Love recalls a life at its most vivid.”

The Chinese Garden - Rosemary Manning (1962) / “A "very intelligent, sensitive, and compelling" novel of adolescent rebellion and sexual awakening at a girls' boarding school (Anthony Burgess). Set in a repressive British girls' boarding school in the late 1920s—where not only sexuality but femininity is squashed—the novel is the coming-of-age story of sixteen-year-old Rachel, a sensitive, bright, and innocent student. Rachel finds refuge from the Spartan conditions, strict regime, fierce discipline, and formidable headmistress at Bampfield in a secret garden. She also finds friendship there, with a rebellious girl named Margaret. As Margaret has her mind expanded by a scandalous tome entitled The Well of Loneliness, she engages in a bold, forbidden act—the ultimate transgression at Bampfield—and Rachel is drawn into the turmoil. Confronted with the persecution of her friend and troubled by a growing awareness of her own sensuality, Rachel faces an imposible choice that drives her to desperate measures.”

The Microcosm - Maureen Duffy (1966) / “At the House of Shades, Matt, a bar-room philosopher, tries to make sense of the disparate lives which cross here -- of Judy who saves herself and her finery for a Saturday night lover, of Steve the gym teacher who dreads a chance encounter with a pupil in this twilight environment, and of Matt herself, who needs these vicarious exchanges despite the security of her relationship with Rae and her sense that this lesbian sanctuary is a prison too, enforcing the guilt and estrangement of the city streets beyond. Elsewhere there are women such as Marie, trapped within an unwanted marriage and unable to admit her sexuality, and Cathy, for whom the discovery that she is not 'the only one in the world' is an affirmation of her existence. With its innovative structure and style, perfectly mirroring the voices and experiences of women forced by society to live on the margins, The Microcosm remains as powerful today as when originally published in 1966.”

1970s

Beginning with O - Olga Broumas (1977) / A poetry collection by a lesbian, greek writer.

The Same Sea as Every Summer - Esther Tusquets (1978) / A stream-of-consciousness type book, by an author who has been compared to Virginia Woolf. “Poetic and erotic, El mismo mar de todos los veranos ( The Same Sea As Every Summer ) was originally published in Spain in 1978, three years after the death of Franco and in the same year that government censorship was abolished. But even in a new era that fostered more liberal attitudes toward divorce, homosexuality, and women's rights, this novel by Esther Tusquets was controversial. Its feminine view of sexuality (in particular, its depiction of a lesbian relationship) was unprecedented in Spanish fiction. The disillusioned narrator of The Same Sea As Every Summer is a middle-aged woman whose unhappy life prompts a journey into she past to rediscover a more authentic self. However, events force her to realize that love or trust will inevitably be repaid by betrayal. This pattern assumes various forms in a story that moves forward as well as backward, playing out in Barcelona among the haute bourgeoisie. Richly textured with allusion, The Same Sea As Every Summer is also a commentary on post-Civil War Spanish society by an author who grew up during the repressive Franco regime.”

Así es: Mi vida 3 - Victorina Durán (somewhere in the late 1970s) / So, not translated but has great historical value. Basically, this is the third book out of Victorina’s memories that she wrote in the 70s. Victorina (1899 - 1993) was so cool. She was an icon. She was a sceneographer, a painter, a costume designer, writer (aside from her memories, she has some theatre plays), etc. She actually wanted to be an actress. She was part of the Círculo Sáfico de Madrid (the sapphic club of Madrid, a club made out of her and her friends, who were sapphic) among others. She never hid her sexuality. She was friends with almost all the importante well known people in 1920s / 1930s Spain. This book is the third one out of her memories, and it’s focused explicitly on her relationships (all with women). She said she wanted to focus on them and give them a book of their own, so this is of great historical value, giving insights into the queer spaces, lesbian scene, wlw relationships and being gay at that time. I need to read it so bad if someone has a pdf please tell me I’ll send them my fanfic wips

1980s

On Strike against God - Joanna Russ (1980) / “A lost feminist masterwork by feminist and speculative fiction icon, Joanna Russ, about a young lesbian's coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s. When Esther, a recently divorced professor, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and precipitates a personal crisis. She flees her small, upstate New York college town, grapples with gender confusion and the ghosts of therapists past, and fumbles her way through comedic sexual self-discovery, oscillating all the while between visionary confidence and debilitating self-doubt. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. On Strike Against God is quintessentially experimental but accesible, alternately wry and earnest, poignantly didactic, playful, and emotionally charged.” From a review: “For anyone like me who's unfamiliar with the quote which inspired the title: A judge was sentencing a picketer from the early twentieth century shirtwaist-makers strike (the first large scale strike by women), and he told her, "You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!"

Faultline - Sheila Ortiz Taylor (1982) / “An outrageous, zesty, funny Lesbian novel; the adventures of a Lesbian mother with six children, three hundred rabbits, and very relaxed attitude."

The Swashbuckler - Lee Lynch (1985) / "Frenchy Tonneau leaves her closeted home in the Bronx for the bars of New York City, the freedom of Provincetown, and the liberation of Greenwich Village in the 1960s and 1970s. Her hangouts, her women, her small yet universal world tell the stories of the times - and the stories of lesbians today. A timeless journey and a riveting read, The Swashbuckler is heart-wrenching, heartwarming, and unforgettable." Butch main character, lesbian life in the 60s/70s, lesbian-feminism, butchfemme, etc.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café - Fannie Flagg (1987) / listen, LISTEN, I know this book is not obscure, absolutely not given it even has a movie adaptation, but people do not give this book the love it deserves. I'm constantly thinking about Idgie and Ruth, they are one of my favorite fictional couples ever, and also my favorite lesbian fictional couple. They are such interesting characters with such an interesting dynamic and I just love them so so much. A femmebutch couple in 1920s Alabama, who go through many hardships but still find eachother, still end together, and even have a restaurant, live together, and raise a kid. And not only them, but the book is made out of 4 main characters (or 3 depends on if you see Ninny as a main character or not), Idgie, Ruth, and Ninny and Evelyn. Evelyn, an 80s depressed housewife in her 40s finds solace and a true friend in Ninny, a 90 year old woman staying at a nursing home (not ‘cause she needs it, but to keep a friend company). Ninny tells her the story of Idgie (her, kind of, sister) and Ruth, her best friend and lover. Evelyn finds feminism and hope through the memories, getting inspired by Idgie and Ruth's story and becoming happier in her life. It has several points of views and it jumps between years (first 1980s, then 1920s, then 1940s, then 1980s again, etc) and it also talks a lot about racism in 1920s Alabama, and i'll just stop because I love this book so much and i could go on forever. Oh, and also they murder a man and feed him to a police officer.

Lovers' choice - Becky Birtha (1987) / A collection of eleven short stories about lesbian women.

1990s

Out Of Time - Paula Martinac (1990) / Susan finds an old photograph album with pictures from the 1920s, all pictures being of a group of women (four in total). She's told it's not for sale, but she steals it anyway. After some digging, she finds out than two of the girls from the photos were lovers! And not only is Susan trying to navigate the details of her life and of her relationship with her own girlfriend, but she obsesses over the women in the picture, and eventually, the spirits of the girls start to haunt her.

The Gilda Stories - Jewele Gomez (1991) / Gilda escaped from slavery in the 1850s, until she's taken by a vampire who (consensually) turns her into a vampire too. Gilda moves through the decades finding community and connections and helping people, and slowly builds a place for herself in time. (Fine, not actually obscure since I’ve seen it all around the internet, but it just sounds so good)

Annabel and I - Chris Anne Wolfe (1996) / Plot summed up by a reader: “Half-orphaned Jenny-Wren spends her summers at her uncle Jake's fishing lodge on Lake Chautauqua. One summer day when she's twelve years old while boating with her uncle, she finds a girl on the end of a dock reaching futilely for her escaped model boat. Jenny swims over and rescues the boat, meeting the orphaned Annabel, spending her summers at her grandmother's summer estate. This begins a friendship that endures and grows for years as the two girls spent each summer together, only to be separated at the end of summer. As the two grow older, they realize a magic is at work that keeps bringing them together, despite the near century between them. As the summers come and go, the two young women discover their love for each other, and the realization that their love is imposible. Can their love persist beyond those fleeting summers and flourish, in the face of time?”. Review from a reader: “The foreword says this book is for all wlw, and that, "Because there are as many different ways to love a woman as there are women who love women; it's the loving, not the label, that really matters." That really captured the core of what this book does, it treasures the love we create with our bare hands for and with another woman.” A time travel romance (Jenny is from the 1980s, Annabel from 1890s)

Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice - April Sinclair (1996) / Bisexual mc. “Jean "Stevie" Stevenson, the indomitable heroine of "Coffee Will Make You Black," is back—somewhat older and wiser, with some experience and a college degree -- diving headfirst into the hot tub, free love, yoga, and vegetarian lifestyle of 1970s San Francisco. In this liberating new world of raised consciousness, mind-expanding, and disco-dancing, a soul sister with passion and daring has room to experiment with life and love to find out who she "really" is.”

Beyond the Pale - Elana Dykewomon (1997) / “The story of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York. Interwoven with her tale is that Chava Meyer, who was attended by Gurvich at her birth and grew up to survive the pogrom that took the lives of her parents. Throughout the book, historical background plays a large part: Jewish faith and traditions, the practice of midwifery, the horrific conditions in prerevolutionary Russia and New York sweatshops, and the determined work of labor unionists and suffragists." While it is a romance, it's also more than that, it's about the life of Jewish women in the 20th century.

Crystal Diary - Frankie Hucklenbroich (1997) / “Frankie Hucklenbroich's razor-edged, compelling, often wryly humorous story hustles us from the blood-and-beer-drenched corners of her St. Louis meat-packing district '50s youth, through the sex-soaked Hollywood alleys of her '60s baby butch years, into the druggy metropolis of '70s San Francisco. Moving relentlessly from one woman to another until faces and bodies blur, scamming her existence, learning what the street has to how to make a buck, how to make it with a woman, how to court the dangers of crystal meth, how to survive.”

Hers 3 - Terry Wolverton (1999) / Short stories

2000s

Valencia - Michelle Tea (2000) / "Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Through a string of narrative moments, Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart."

Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir - Lillian Faderman (2003) / “Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman is the only child of an uneducated and unmarried Jewish woman who left Latvia to seek a better life in America. Lillian grew up in poverty, but fantasised about becoming an actress. When her dreams led to the dangerous, seductive world of the sex trade and sham-marriages in Hollywood of the fifties, she realised she was attracted to women, and that show-biz is as cruel as they say. Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful, she studied at Berkeley; paying her way by working as a pin-up model and burlesque dancer, hiding her lesbian affairs from the outside world. At last she became a brilliant student and the woman who becomes a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer and ground-breaking pioneer of gay and lesbian scholarship. Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, Naked in the Promised Land is the story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.”

Her Naked Skin - Rebecca Lenkiewicz (2008) / Theatre. “Militancy in the Suffragette Movement is at its height. Thousands of women of all classes serve time in Holloway Prison in their fight to gain the vote. Amongst them is Lady Celia Cain who feels trapped by both the policies of the day and the shackles of a frustrating marriage. Inside, she meets a young seamstress, Eve Douglas, and her life spirals into an erotic but dangerous chaos. London 1913. A crucial moment when, with emancipation almost in sight, women refuse to let the establishment stand in their way.”

The Rain Before it Falls - Jonathan Coe (2008) / “A story of three generations of women whose destinies reach from the English countryside in World War Il to London, Toronto, and southern France at the turn of the new century. Evacuated to Shropshire during the Blitz, eight-year-old Rosamond forged a bond with her cousin Beatrix that augured the most treasured and devastating moments of her life. She recorded these memories sixty years later, just before her death, on cassettes she bequeathed to a woman she hadn't seen in decades. When her beloved niece, Gill, plays the tapes in hopes of locating this unwitting heir, she instead hears a family saga swathed in promise and the story of how Beatrix, starved of her mother's affection, conceived a fraught bloodline that culminated in heart-stopping tragedy—its chief victim being her own granddaughter. And as Rosamond explores the ties that bound these generations together and shaped her experience all along, Gill grows increasingly haunted by how profoundly her own recollections--not to mention the love she feels for her grown daughters, listening alongside her-- are linked to generations of women she never knew. A stirring, masterful portrait of motherhood and family secrets, "The Rain Before It Falls" is also a meditation on the tapestries we weave out of the past, whether transcendent or horrific.”

2010s

When We Were Outlaws - Jeanne Cordova (2011) / "A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals. When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women's Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s. Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Cordova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is "to the revolution".—to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians."

Call Me Esteban - Leila Kalamuié (2015) / “With unapologetic vividness, Lejla Kalamujic depicts pre- and post-war Sarajevo by charting a daughter coping with losing her mother, but discovering herself. From imagined conversations with Franz Kafka to cozy apartments, psychiatric wards, and cemeteries, Call Me Esteban is a piercing meditation on a woman grasping at memories in the name of claiming her identity.”

Jigsaw Youth - Tiffany Scandal (2015) / “Lose your best friend because you finally Came Out. Spend days driving aimlessly because there's nothing to do. Serve your rapist breakfast because you need your job. Fall asleep to gunshots and sirens because that's the only sense of home you've ever known. Hold hands with ghosts. Your life is in pieces, but you can't be broken. Wipe off the blood. Tired of being told who to be, what to wear, how to act and who to fuck. Break the rules and learn fast how to never get caught. All you need is nothing, but you're happy with your car, guitar and camera. Throwing around polaroids of tits like they're money, you swap stories about adventures and realize that we're all running away from something.”

Creatures of Will & Temper - Molly Tanzer (2017) / Recommended as a sapphic picture of dorian gray retelling, it tells the story of Dorina (hedonistic, art lover, and woman-kisser), her older sister Evadne (fencer and responsable), Lady Henrietta (suit-wearing, cigar-smoking lesbian who is a horrible influence), and Basil, Dorina and Evadne's uncle, and who's character has not changed much. They also summon demons.

The Adventures of China Iron - Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (2017) / “1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina's richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building. This subversive retelling of Argentina's foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.”

2020s

Thirst - Marina Yuszczuk (2020) / “Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. It is the twilight of Europe's bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet. In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women-and they cross a threshold from which there's no turning back. With echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.” Lesbian vampires!

The Lives We Left Behind - Olivia Bratherton-Wilson (2021) / I read this one so long ago and I don’t remember everything with detail, just than I really liked it. “1943. Seventeen-year-old Dorotea Miller is given the responsibility of managing the family farm when her father and brother are conscripted, leaving her with only her distant mother and the unfamiliar Land Girls for company. Angeline Carter and her four younger brothers are evacuated to the Welsh countryside to escape the bombings; the Miller farm is nothing like they've seen before and certainly more than Angeline bargained for when she meets the surly, unwelcoming farmer's daughter. Despite their rocky start, misunderstandings and tragedies, Dorothea and Angeline realise that their friendship may run deeper than either of them had prepared for.” There is also a sequel! That one I haven’t read tho.

Agatha of Little Neon - Claire Luchette (2021) / "Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters (the other nuns) : they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a formermill town now dotted with wind turbines. […] Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone, to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she will have to reckon with what she sees and feels all on her own. Who will she be if she isn't with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home--or has she just been hiding? […] It is a novel about female friendship and devotion, the roles made available to us, and how we become ourselves." Lesbian nuns

Burning Butch - R/B Mertz (2022) / A butch lesbian memoir of their life growing up catholic and surviving in the world, while dealing with faith and what it shape it takes to them.

London on My Mind - Clara Alves (2022) / So, the English translation just came out! Funny thing is, I started this in 2022 even tho I don’t know Portuguese (translating paragraph by paragraph with google translate) and it was pretty good. I haven’t finished it (translating a whole book with google translate is definitely work) but I’m so ready to read it now that it’s translated. Dayana (seventeen, black, plus size, and Brazilian) is forced to move to London with her father (who abandoned her mother and her) and his new family after her mother died. She’s having a pretty horrible time, until, on a walk, finds a redhead girl… escaping Buckingham Palace?? So of course, she helps her escape. Who exactly is this girl? Why was she escaping?? The answer, her name is Diana and she’s sort of (super) the princess of Wales. Huh.

Helen House - Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (2022) / “Right before meeting her girlfriend Amber's parents for the first time, the unnamed narrator of Helen House learns that she and her partner share a similar both of their sisters are dead. As the narrator wonders what else Amber has been hiding, she struggles with her own secret--using sex as a coping mechanism--as well as confusion and guilt over whether she really cares about Amber, or if she's only using her for sex. When they arrive at the parents' rural upstate home, a quaint but awkward first meeting unravels into a nightmare in which the narrator finds herself stranded in a family's decades-long mourning ritual. At turns terrifying and erotic, Helen House is a queer ghost story about trauma and grief.”

Promises in Pompeii - Violet Morley (2022) / Set in Ancient Rome, it tells the story of two girls, Octavia and Helvia, childhood friends, and their journey through life as women and through their feelings. In the author ig, she said it includes: adventure/survival, against the odds, brothels, butch/femme, coming of age, disguised as a man, first love, friends to lovers, opposites attract, etc. I’m currently reading it, and I really like it so far.

Nettleblack - Nat Reeve (2022) / “Subversive and playful, Nettleblack is a neo-Victorian queer farce that follows a runaway heir/ess and an organisation of crime-fighting misfits as they struggle with the misdeeds besieging a rural English town. The year is 1893. Having run away from her family home to escape an arranged marriage, Welsh heiress Henrietta “Henry” Nettleblack finds herself ambushed, robbed, and then saved by the mysterious Dallyangle Division - part detective agency, part neighbourhood watch. Desperate to hide from her older sisters, Henry disguises herself and enlists. But the Division soon finds itself under siege from a spate of crimes and must fight for its very survival. Assailed by strange feelings for her new colleague - the tomboyish, moody Septimus - Henry quickly sees that she's lost in a small rural town with surprisingly big problems. And to make things worse, sinister forces threaten to expose her as the missing Nettleblack sister. As the net starts to close around Henry, the new people in her life seem to offer her a way out, and a way forward. Is the world she's lost in also a place she can find herself? Told through journal entries and letters, Nettleblack is a picaresque ride through the perils and joys of finding your place in the world, challenging myths about queerness - particularly transness - as a modern phenomenon, while exploring the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you're struggling for words.”

Sunburn - Chloe Michelle (2023) / In Ireland, the early 1990s, Lucy feels out of place in her small town. She falls in love with her best friend and she has to find a way to find herself, make a meaning out of her feelings, and hide the truth from her conservative small town and religious peers.

Lucky Red - Claudia Cravens (2023) / "A vibrant and cinematic debut set in the American West about a scrappy orphan who finds friendship, romance, and her true calling as a revenge-seeking gunslinger." Lesbian cowboys

Neon Roses - Rachel Dawson (2023) / “Eluned Hughes is stuck. It's 1984 in a valley in south Wales: the miners' strike is ravaging her community; her sister's swanned off with a Thatcherite policeman; and her boyfriend Lloyd keeps bringing up marriage. And if they play '99 Red Balloons' on the radio one more time, she might just lose her mind. Then the fundraising group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners comes down from London, and she meets June, a snaggle-toothed blonde in a too-big leather jacket. Suddenly, Eluned isn't stuck any more - she's in freefall. June's an artist and an activist, living in a squat in Camden. With June, Eluned can imagine a completely different - and exciting - life for herself. But as her family struggles with the strike, and her relationship with her sister deteriorates, should she really leave it all behind? From the Valleys to the nightclubs of Cardiff, London and Manchester, NEON ROSES is a heartwarming, funny and a little bit filthy queer coming-of-age story with a cracking '80s soundtrack.”

Tale of Three Ships - Darcia G. Laucerica (2023) / “In a world under the thumb of an empire, pirates sail away searching for a breath of freedom. But even the ocean is tainted by the powerful nation that has spread lies about women being bad luck at sea. Glenlivet has never cared about the fear-mongering. Her ship welcomes those who are rejected and need a home. For all the sailor' s superstitions and "codes" of piracy the captain mocks every day, not leaving the docks when it's dark is a personal boundary she swears by ever since acquiring The Outsider about eight years ago. She just might have to break her own rules to protect her crew, escape the claws of a king who wants her dead, and murder the man who raised her.” I’ve heard so many good things about this. Lesbian main character, with mlm and trans side characters. Author in social media said it includes: Chosen pirate family, sirens, indigenous and latine inspired characters, anti-colonialism, and people fighting injustice and abuse.

How to Breathe Ash - Alex Nonymous (2023) / “Eleanor Perrault doesn't know if there's a right way to handle being suddenly orphaned at sixteen, but it's definitely not the way that she's been coping with it. It's been two months since her parents died and despite her autism normally causing her to be even more emotionally volatile than most of her peers, she still hasn't even managed to cry over them yet. On top of trying to learn how to grieve properly, Eleanor's juggling starting a new semester in a new town with an aunt who seems eternally disappointed in her and a cousin who's randomly decided to start hating her. And a crush on the incredibly pretty president of her new school's QSA. How to Breathe Ash is a contemporary YA Cinderella retelling following Eleanor through elaborate dances, anonymous chat rooms, and learning the right way to not be alright.” Autistic mc! While I haven’t read anything from this author (yet) they have lots of wlw/nblw/nblnb books with autistic main characters.

War and Solace: A Tale from Norvegr - Edale Lane (2023) / “A battle-hardened shieldmaiden. A pacifist healer. Can the two find love amid the chaos of war? From Edale Lane, the award-winning, best-selling author of Sigrid & Elyn, comes a new Tale from Norgevr! Tyrdis is a stalwart warrior raised to value honor, courage, and military prowess. When a traumatic injury renders the powerful protector helpless, she depends on the lovely, tender-hearted Adelle to restore her from the brink of death. Is it merely gratitude or true love that draws Tyrdis to the healer? Defying cultural norms, Adelle despises violence and those who propagate it, but when her shieldmaiden patient saves the life of her beloved little girl, she must reexamine her values. Could Tyrdis be more than a stiff, efficient killer with an amazing body? In a kingdom steeped in conflict with their neighbors and internal strife, shocking secrets are revealed, and both women strive to ensure justice prevails. Can they overcome their differences to safeguard their friends, end the war, and fall in love, or will fate prove to be a cruel sovereign?” Historical fiction set during 643. The author also has another two sapphic books set in the same time period.

Maddalena and the Dark - Julia Fine (2023) / “A novel set in 18th-century Venice at a prestigious music school, about two girls drawn together by a dangerous wager Venice, 1717. Fifteen-year-old Luisa has only wanted one thing: to be the best at violin. As a student at the Ospedale della Pietà, she hopes to join the highest ranks of its illustrious girls' orchestra and become a protégé of the great Antonio Vivaldi. Luisa is good at violin, but she is not the best. She has peers, but she does not have friends. Until Maddalena. After a scandal threatens her noble family's reputation, Maddalena is sent to the Pietà to preserve her marriage prospects. When she meets Luisa, Maddalena feels the stirrings of a friendship unlike anything she has known. But Maddalena has a secret: she has hatched a dangerous plot to rescue her future her own way. When she invites Luisa into her plans, promising to make her dreams come true, Luisa doesn't hesitate. But every wager has its price, and as the girls are drawn into the decadent world outside the Pietà's walls, they must decide what it is they truly want—and what they will do to pay for it. Lush and heady, swirling with music and magic, Maddalena and the Dark is a Venetian fairytale about the friendship between two girls and the boundless desire that will set them free, if it doesn't consume them first.”

Greasepaint - Hannah Levene (2024) / “Set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, this experimental novel follows an ensemble cast of all-singing, all-dancing butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists through eternal Friday nights, around the table, and at the bar. In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie's childhood sweetheart, Lily, turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there's always dinner at Marg's. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene and Yiddish anarchist tradition, Greasepaint is a rollicking whirlwind of music and politics- the currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.”

Perfume & Pain - Anna Dorn (2024) / “A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer's group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli. When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid's worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes-and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events. Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet—and celebrity-obsessed world”

How It Works Out - Myriam Lacroix (2024) / “Surreal, darkly comic and achingly tender, Myriam Lacroix's debut sees a queer love story play out in many alternate realities. What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out? After Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in run-down punk house, their relationship starts to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam's depression was Allison's flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker-or sexier-would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love's many promises and perils. Equal parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a formally inventive, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.”

All the Painted Stars - Emma Denny (@a-kind-of-merry-war) (2024) / “Oxfordshire 1362. When Lily Barden discovers her best friend Johanna's hand in marriage is being awarded as the main prize at a tournament, she is determined to stop it. Disguised as a knight, she infiltrates the contest, preparing to fight for Jo's hand. But her conduct ruffles feathers, and when a dangerous incident escalates out of Lily's control, Jo must help her escape. Finding safety with a local brewster, Lily and Jo soon settle into their new freedom, and amongst blackberry bushes and lakeside walks an unexpected relationship blossoms. But when Jo's past caches up with her and Lily's reckless behaviour threatens their newfound happiness, both women realise that choices must always come at a cost. The question they need to ask is if the cost is worth the price of love…” The cover of the edition coming out in November is SO pretty and lately I’ve been looking for medieval sapphic books like crazy.

Gentlest of Wild Things - Sarah Underwood (2024 - out august 15th) / So this book is by the same author as Lies We Sing to the Sea, and I’m in no rush to read that book (a so-called odyssey retelling even tho the author has admitted to never actually reading the odyssey??) but this one looks compelling. “On the island of Zakynthos, nothing is more powerful than Desire-love itself, bottled and sold to the highest bidder by Leandros, a power-hungry descendent of the god Eros. Eirene and her beloved twin sister, Phoebe, have always managed to escape Desire's thrall. Until Leandros' wife dies mysteriously and he sets his sights on Phoebe. Determined to keep her sister safe, Eirene strikes a bargain with Leandros: if she can complete the four elaborate tasks he sets her, he will find another bride. But it soon becomes clear that the tasks are part of something bigger; something related to Desire and Lamia, the strange, neglected daughter Leandros keeps locked away. Lamia knows her father hides her for her own protection, though as she and Eirene grow closer, she finds herself longing for the outside world. But the price of freedom is high, and with something deadly-something hungry- stalking the night, that price must be paid in blood…” The author said that “Gentlest of Wild Things is a sapphic vampiric twist on the story of Eros and Psyche”

The End Crowns All - Bea Fitzgerald (2024 - out on July 18th) / “Princess. Priestess. The most beautiful girl in Troy. Casandra is used to being adored - and when her patron god, Apollo, offers her the power of prophecy, she sees an opportunity to rise even higher. But when she fails to uphold her end of the agreement, she discovers just how very far she has to fall. No one believes her visions. And they all seem to be of one girl - and the war she's going to bring to Troy's shores. Helen fled Sparta in pursuit of love, but it's soon clear Troy is a court like any other, with all its politics and backstabbing. And one princess seems particularly intent on driving her from the city before disaster can strike... But when war finally comes, it's more than the army at their walls they must contend with. Casandra and Helen might hold the key to reweaving fate itself - especially with the prophetic strands drawing them ever closer together. But how do you change your future when the gods themselves are dictating your demise?” Sapphic retelling of the iliad where Helen and Kassandra end up together

If asked, I’ll also do one with gay books

(No 1950s lesbians because I don’t like pulp fiction :( )

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