Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 114
September 30, 2017
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast 14e: The Highwaywoman Special
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
When I expanded the LHMPodcast to a weekly schedule in August, I set up a rotating set of four monthly segments: On the Shelf (general discussion and listener questions), Author Interview, Author Book Appreciation, and the Historic Essay that I'd started out with. But four times a year, there's going to be a fifth Saturday in the month. For the moment, I'm planning to use those for some random surprise topics--something intentionally different from anything I do in the other segments. I also have some exciting long-term ideas that I may be ready to share soon.
The Highwaywoman Special is the first of these Week 5 surprises. I decided to take a trope that has some popularity in lesbian historic fiction and look at it from several angles: the historic roots, the literary history, and a discussion of some lesbian novels featuring the motif. So you get the history of some notorious female highwaymen, a few ballads, a discussion of some popular themes in highwayman fiction, and micro-reviews of five books that feature unexpected romance when the masked stranger on the road turns out to be a woman.
I'm adding another feature for some of the podcast episodes: transcripts! Because I work very closely from scripts for the history essays and On the Shelf segments, providing a transcript is simply a matter of proofreading the original script against what ended up on the recording. I won't be able to provide transcripts for the interview segments, unfortunately, becasue I simply don't have the time to do the transcription. To find the transcript for an episode, find the show in the cumulative index and click on the link that says "transcript". The transcripts appear as part of my blog feed, so the ones for older episodes will be backdated to have the date when the original show was released.
Have an idea for a Week 5 Special? Or a question about pre-20th century lesbian history or literature you'd like me to answer? Just click on the Contact link at the top of the page.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
September 24, 2017
Book Review: The Locket and the Flintlock by Rebecca S. Buck
(I recently did a podcast on the topic of female highwaymen in history and literature, and the motif in modern lesbian romance. This is one of several reviews resulting from my reading for that podcast.)
The Locket and the Flintlock has a solid historic romance concept: the carriage bearing Lucia Foxe, her father, and her sister is accosted on the road by a gang of highwaymen and they are robbed of their valuables, including the locket that Lucia’s dead mother left to her and which she loudly protests the loss of. (This is, by the way, lesbian highwaywoman romance standard plot point A.) Alternating points of view between Lucia and the leader of the highwaymen, Len Hawkins, leave us in no doubt of the gender of the latter and that she will be the love interest. A reference to the poetry of Byron and to Lucia’s brother being off in the Peninsular Wars appear to narrow the setting down solidly to ca. 1812-14 or so. The Foxes are members of the rural gentry and Lucia is starting to age out of expectations for an advantageous marriage. The set-up is perfect for her to be swept off her feet by a dashing highwaywoman with a heart of gold whose philanthropic interests extend to supporting the anti-industrial actions of the Luddites.
Unfortunately the core of the story is obscured by the prose style, including overly detailed descriptions of the setting, and the characters repetitiously examining their every emotion, regret, second thought, and aspiration. Beyond that, the writing is solidly workmanlike, other than a tendency for the characters to explain their actions to the reader rather than to experience them.
There are serious plausibility issues with the plot and setting. All the major characters are given to impulsive actions that should long since have proven fatal (especially to highwaymen). Two examples will suffice. Scant days after robbing the Foxes’ carriage, the highwaymen just happen to ride past Foxe Hall at a close enough distance that Lucia is able to recognize their faces (at night, in the dark) from her bedroom window. And having done so, Lucia sneaks out of the manor in the middle of the night, evidently in her nightgown (though with a cloak), and rides her horse bareback after the highwaymen to demand the return of her locket.
Plot holes and world-building holes abound, with the geography of the neighborhood being conveniently elastic depending on whether locations need to be nearby or completely unfamiliar. The author has done her research on many aspects of the historic setting (in particular the Luddite movement) but the presentation of the economics and logistics of early 19th century rural English society left me scratching my head. (There is a startling lack of servants at crucial points, and somehow the household and stable chores of maintaining a robbers’ hideaway don’t involve anyone actually doing domestic labor.)
That said, if you're forgiving regarding plausibility in your historic setting, and you’re willing to overlook the protagonists' suicidal impulsivity in exchange for lots of angsty self-examination and a few hot sex scenes, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy this book.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: Mask of the Highwaywoman by Niamh Murphy
(I recently did a podcast on the topic of female highwaymen in history and literature, and the motif in modern lesbian romance. This is one of several reviews resulting from my reading for that podcast.)
Mask of the Highwaywoman by Niamh Murphy aims to be a fast-paced romantic thriller punctuated not simply by double-crosses but triple and even quadruple crosses. It doesn’t successfully achieve that goal, unfortunately. Evelyn Thackeray is traveling to visit friends in advance of her upcoming marriage to a business associate of her widowed father when a band of highwaymen--and one highwaywoman--stops the coach she’s traveling in. Robbed of her money and a locket that Evelyn risked the anger of the highwaymen to try to keep, she’s now stranded penniless in a village, offering to work at an inn in exchange for a room for the night...and then Bess, the highwaywoman, climbs through her window out of the darkness.
The story uses a collection of popular highwayman story tropes: the soft-hearted thief, the keepsake stolen and then returned as an excuse to meet again, the sudden inexplicable attraction to an outlaw. It tries to add in the sort of off-balance, constant shifts of loyalty and reliability that make Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith such a roller coaster ride. But Murphy’s story never managed to make any of the scenarios plausible enough that it seemed reasonable to me for Evelyn to buy into them.
Evelyn and Bess’s relationship flips regularly between love at first sight and reflexive assumptions of betrayal the moment anything goes awry. Evelyn never seems to settle into a fixed character, but wavers between several personalities, none of them particularly likeable. Rather than a coherent plot, we get a sequence of dramatic emotional scenes linked by a repetitive string of chases and escapes. Much like a “Perils of Pauline” serial, every chapter seems to end with Evelyn either knocked unconscious, fainting, or metaphorically falling off a cliff.
A brief literary reference suggests that the story is set in the mid 18th century, which would have been hard to guess from the fairly generic descriptions of the countryside and everyday culture. There were various plot points that felt at odds with the setting, but it seems unfair to judge the story as serious history rather than an entertaining romp. I just wish it had been more entertaining.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: Daring and Decorum by Lawrence Hogue
(I recently did a podcast on the topic of female highwaymen in history and literature, and the motif in the lesbian romance genre. This is one of several reviews resulting from my reading for that podcast.)
Lawrence Hogue’s Daring and Decorum, stands out in the micro-genre of lesbian historic highwaywomen stories for its solid worldbuilding and the deliberation with which it builds the relationship between the two female protagonists, making both their attraction and the obstacles to it believable and solidly grounded in the social history of the times.
The plot follows what seems to be an obligatory formula for the micro-genre: a respectable young woman (though one with a yearning for something beyond her foreseeable fate) is one of the victims of a highwayman’s robbery, protesting the loss of a piece of jewelry that has deep sentimental meaning. The highwayman, in a change of heart, returns the jewelry, prompting (or encouraging) an inexplicable attraction between the two, and the highwayman is (eventually) revealed to be a woman who took to an outlaw life due to a tragic backstory. They, of course, fall in love, struggle with the personal, social, and legal barriers to their relationship, and eventually work their way through to a happy ending. This is actually the generic formula that applies to nearly every lesbian highwayman story I’ve encountered. What Hogue does is flesh it out into a well-written period piece.
The pacing--especially of the middle section where we learn the backstory of our second protagonist--was just on the edge of leisurely, but only because the adventures are being related to another character rather than being experienced in real time. Hogue notes in the introductory material that he was inspired in part by the Alfred Noyes poem “The Highwayman”, which may add a bit of tension for readers familiar with that work. Certain details of the book’s plot seemed a bit forced to fit the poem’s structure, but possibly not in a way that those unfamiliar with it would notice. Unlike some other similar books, the climax of the story was neither too rushed nor too pat and felt historically plausible as long as one accepts the motivations and actions of a certain third character.
Hogue has a solid grasp of the flavor of early 19th century novels without resulting in any stilted awkwardness of language. His familiarity with the historic and social background raises the book above the “erotic encounter in costume” level that is too common in lesbian historical romance. I’m not a good judge of erotic scenes in books, but those in Daring and Decorum didn’t seem any more awkward or inherently ridiculous than in any other story I’ve read. (Confession: I’m really not a fan of sex scenes in my historic fiction, so I’m not a good judge.)
Content warning: Unfortunately the book got off to a bad start for me with a sexual assault in the opening scene (although it didn’t go beyond groping) which was framed as inspiring the heroine’s erotic desire for the highwayman (much later revealed to be a highwaywoman). Given how much I liked the book overall, I don’t consider that one stumble a fatal flaw, but it’s certainly worth a content warning.
It wasn’t the gender perception issue in the assault scene that bothered me--to some extent when you’re dealing with historic gender-disguise plots in lesbian fiction, it really helps to view the characters as solidly bisexual, because any other framing tends to lead you down some sort of weird telepathic/gender-essentialism road. (The sort that was popular in medieval and Renaissance gender-disguise plots: “It’s ok that she fell in love with someone who she thought was a woman because it was really a man in disguise and she somehow unconsciously intuited this.”) But I digress.
No, what bothered me was invoking the trope that a woman will naturally overlook being forcibly assaulted and will find herself enjoying the assault and later fall in love with the person who assaulted her. Not only did I think that the story could have been made to work perfectly well with a different--or at least much less offensive--interaction, but the assault felt extremely out of character for the highwaywoman, as we later come to know her. It felt like cheap titillation. And given that the reader has no clue yet that this particular highwayman is our love interest (there are several people involved in the robbery), it felt like a slap in the face to readers who came to the book for some escapist woman-centered reading.
That said, most stories in this genre involve a requisite amount of fairly dubious consent, or at least of secretly enjoying a forced erotic encounter. The overall writing quality definitely makes this book worth checking out if you enjoy swashbuckling lesbian romantic adventure.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: The Second Mango by Shira Glassman
Shira Glassman writes self-described "fluffy queer Jewish princess fantasies" (ok, I may have reworded slightly but I think I've kept the essence of it). The Second Mango introduces the reader to Perach, a secondary-world fantasy realm where everyone just happens to be Jewish. I mean that in the most positive possible way -- when creating a fantasy setting completely separate from real-world history, why not set it up exactly as you choose? It's subversive in its own way, because every time I was tempted to trip over the concept, I thought about all the similar fantasy settings that never get questioned or challenged when they silently echo dominant real-world cultures without presenting any logical basis for why they should. But perhaps I digress too much into literary theory.
The Second Mango is a fairly straightforward quest adventure, where a young, newly-installed queen goes off on a quest to find a girlfriend. There is just enough heteronormativity in the setting that her quest leaves her advisors and courtiers baffled and confused, but not so much that everyone won't cheerfully accept the outcome when she succeeds. The quest is aided by a masked gender-bending swordswoman and her shapeshifting horse-dragon, with barriers and challenges being offered variously by scheming innkeepers and misogynistic sorcerers.
The book is very young adult in feel, not so much for the age of the protagonist, but for the relative straightforwardness of the plot. Characters are pretty much who they present themselves as, challenges are relatively straightforward and solvable, and the plot twists are foreshadowed well enough for a pleasant reading experience without being obvious enough to spoil it. The prose is on the explanatory side more than the immersive side, and various aspects of character identity (such as food sensitivities) are solidly rooted in contemporary discourse rather than being given a more oblique in-world presentation. For the target readership of this series, I assume this is a solid feature, not a flaw. If the phrase "fluffy lesbian Jewish queen with food sensitivities finds true love" makes your heart go pitter-pat, then you are solidly in the target demographic for The Second Mango and I strongly recommend it to you.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: Shadow Duet by Stephanie Burgis
"Shadow Duet" is a short story with the same setting and characters as her 18th century historic fantasy novel Masks and Shadows, featuring the famous castrato singer Carlo Morelli and his accompanist-lover Baroness Charlotte von Steinbeck. (Needless to say, their relationship--which was established after the end of the novel--is something of a scandal.) I'd call this work more of a character sketch than a short story, to tell the truth. Our characters are in London where Morelli is performing and the story is entirely encompassed by a society party where Charlotte encounters all manner of reactions to her existence and relationships from the upper class attendees and meets a number of real-world artists who have a somewhat broader-minded reaction. But there is no plot, as such, simply a great deal of delightful description and conversation.
I wouldn't recommend this work to anyone who hasn't already read Masks and Shadows, but if you have and you're thirsty for just a bit more of the characters, "Shadow Duet" should do the trick.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
I've been a fan of Donoghue's academic works on the history of same-sex relations between women, but although I've collected up a number of her novels, I've only recently decided to prioritize them on my reading list. One essential thing to know, going in, is that a Donoghue novel about romantic and/or sexual relationships between women in history is not a "lesbian historical romance." These aren't formulaic books with happily-ever-after endings, they're fictionalizations of the lives of real historic women. Messy, complicated lives that don't resolve easily into feel-good endings. But neither are they necessarily tragedies.
The Sealed Letter interprets the life of Emily Faithful (nicknamed "Fido"), a 19th century English feminist, writer, and printer, who became tangled up in the scandalous divorce trial of a friend, alternately being accused of abetting the woman's infidelity and--by extremely veiled suggestion--of being part of the woman's infidelities. The setting of the story explores the precarious lives and careers of women who tried to expand the options for women in all fields of life, while having to dodge accusations of being "unwomanly" for doing so and struggling for the necessary financial support. There is also a great deal of exposition regarding divorce law in England at the time.
All this necessary exposition sometimes teeters on the edge between presenting historic research in the guise of fiction and providing a fictional story with the necessary background for the reader. I found it to keep the right balance, but as a fan of historical research I may have a fairly high tolerance. To some extent the story works best as a mystery: doling out clues to how the present state of affairs came to be through the lens of an entire cast of unreliable narrators. (I don't think there's a single viewpoint character who is entirely honest with the reader.) This unreliability delivers a delightful payload at the very end of the story when we're treated to one last tidbit about Fido and her divorcing friend that throws the puzzle pieces up in the air and leaves them to settle in an entirely new configuration.
Donoghue is a skilled and polished writer and managed to pull off a technique that many writers would struggle with. The book is written in multiple first-person present-tense viewpoints. I really stumbled over the present tense aspect in the first several pages because it left me confused and uncertain exactly how the people and events that were being discussed were related to each other. But after needing to re-read the opening several times to settle in, this aspect of the writing style faded to invisibility. The shifting first person approach worked excellently to show the skewed and filtered understanding that each character had of reality, allowing the reader to build their own understanding of what might have happened. I thought this worked particularly well given how the story is based on actual fact--but a set of facts that are themselves incomplete and ambiguous.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
September 23, 2017
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast: What Medieval Lesbians did in Bed
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
When interviewing authors of historical fiction for the podcast, one of things that come up regularly is that people have a hard time finding research on what, specifically, women in earlier ages were doing in bed together. But both sexual practices and attitudes towards them are strongly influenced by culture. Imagination alone isn't a good guide to sex any more than it is to cuisine or clothing. Today's podcast takes a look at the types of documentary evidence we have for specific sexual techniques and practices, and what they tell us about medieval European women's sexual lives.
Listen to the podcast at The Lesbian Talk Show, or subscribe via iTunes, Podbean, or Stitcher.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
September 21, 2017
Sale: Mother of Souls ebook
Mother of Souls
Bella Books is holding one of its periodic surprise sales. This time the theme is relatively recent ebooks, so if you haven't gotten around to buying Mother of Souls yet (yes, I'm secretly tapping my foot impatiently) it's only $5.99 through this weekend. Plenty of other bargains as well!
Major category: PromotionPublications: Mother of SoulsTags: Salepromotion
September 19, 2017
Podcast: Creating Characters
Sheena (our fearless leader at The Lesbian Talk Show) was chatting with me on facebook about how I write characters, after the review of Mother of Souls came out at The Lesbian Review (her other project), and it ended up turning into an interview for her series The Write Stuff. So here you can listen to me talking about my approach to creating three-dimensional characters and how I let the characters themselves shape their stories. Plus, you get the very very short version of "stapling the octopus to the wall".
Major category: Writing ProcessPublications: Mother of SoulsTags: writingpodcast
