Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 74
September 17, 2019
Teaser Tuesday: Sometimes it Creeps Up on You
Floodtide
Disasters aren't always sudden and extreme -- sometimes they creep up on you slowly, like the water rising along the steps of the plaiz one at a time. Sometimes disasters consist of tedious waiting as the news dribbles in from those who are harder hit. Sometimes disasters are mere inconveniences to be avoided until they ebb away again. Floodtide in Rotenek has always shown different faces to different people. In the previous Alpennia books, we've mostly seen the "inconvenience" side. Floodtide as a holiday excuse to leave the city.
Knowing the shape of what was to come after the events of Mother of Souls, it was important to me to show the other side. The people who had no where to go. Who had to carry on with their lives, no matter whether the river only left a mess or carried away lives and livelihoods. The people who watch the aristocracy and monied classes hurry out of town in their fine carriages and resent that ability to escape.
Even the upper crust of Rotenek can't always pick up and leave with no warning and no preparation. An unexpected floodtide can democratize disaster. But for a little while yet, the two cities continue their separate ways...
* * *
At Tiporsel House, they talked about floodtide like it was a holiday. The maisetra was always down at her school, making a place for the families of her students who’d been flooded out. Mesner and Maisetra Pertinek left town to go visiting. They wanted to take Maisetra Iulien with them, “to be safe from fever” she told me after she’d refused to go.
“I can’t think that the fever would be worse than sitting around in a parlor listening to all the Pertinek cousins reminiscing about things I don’t know anything about,” she said. “I wish Cousin Margerit would let me go down to Urmai. I want to do something.”
There was plenty to do in the flooded parts of the city, but that wasn’t work for a proper young lady. There wasn’t anything for a proper young lady to do with no parties or visiting. That meant no one asked why I was still giving half-days to Mefro Dominique, when anyone with sense would know we couldn’t be dressmaking right now. I came home bone-tired every afternoon and it was all I could do to keep awake after supper until I saw her tucked into bed. For now I kept going back and forth between worlds—the one where floodtide was a holiday and the one where it was a disaster.
* * *
We're now two months out from the Floodtide release date. I've just plunged into the whirlwind of setting up publicity, arranging for review copies, and making sure the book gets the best launch possible. Just as a reminder, here's some key information about pre-orders, availability, and whatnot.
Pre-orders: Currently you can pre-order the hard copy at Amazon (possibly other online retailers but I haven't checked them all), but pre-orders of both the hard copy and the ebook won't be available from the publisher (Bella Books) until one month before release, i.e., mid-October. If you like buying hard copies from a bookstore, now is the time to check with them and ask if they've ordered it.
Ebooks: Bella Books has a policy of restricting ebook sales to their own site for the first month after release. (I have no control over this.) But if you buy from Bella and especially if you set up an account with them, you get access to all formats (epub, mobi, pdf) in DRM-free format with the ability to re-download anything you've bought in the past if something happens to the file. Otherwise, ebooks should be available through other venues in mid December.
Review copies: Bella is now using NetGalley for review copies. I haven't learned all the details yet, so I don't know whether reviewers have to be individually authorized or simply have accounts in good standing with the right book preferences. NetGalley should have the book a month in advance, so around mid-October. If you're on the list of reviewers I'm putting together, I'll be sending out a notification when I've confirmed it's available there. Bella does not provide hard-copy ARCs (Advance Reading Copies).
Release Party: It looks like I'll be doing a virtual release party in November, given that Chessiecon (my usual November convention) has been cancelled this year, and given that I don't know of any local bookstores that will be stocking the book. So expect to see me doing some serious online blow-out activities, including a few giveaways. So keep an eye out and join the celebrations!
Major category: TeasersPublications: FloodtideTags: teaserspromotionFloodtide
September 15, 2019
Defining Sex and Gender - Thomas Laqueur
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
I'm not sure I'm going to manage to do a different publication every week during this "foundational texts" series. This is some fairly dense material. But on the other hand, I'm going to try to be a bit more concise in the future than I was for this work. (I'm fumbling my way to the right balance.) The idea behind this series is that when some other publication makes reference to, for example, "Laqueur's one-sex model," readers will have a basis for understanding what that means. I've tended to pick up that understanding simply by interpolating from how other texts engage with the concepts this series will be covering, but that isn't the ideal method. Anyway, I hope that people will find the choice of these texts useful or at least interesting.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #270 Laqueur 1990 Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
About LHMP
Full citation:
Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-674-54349-1
This is one of a number of foundational publications on the history of sex, gender, and sexuality that can provide useful context for the field. It does not address lesbian-relevant topics specifically.
The basic premises of Laqueur’s work may seem more obvious now than it did in 1990 when this book was first published. The briefest summary is something like this:
Sex (anatomy) and gender (social status) have always been separate concepts (though often described with the same vocabulary) and neither has ever existed in as simple clear-cut categories as cultures pretend to believe.
Western cultures have, at various times, had (at least) two different models of the relations of the sexes.
Under what Laqueur calls the “one-sex” model, male and female anatomy is understood as topographical variants of the same underlying reality. This model includes a belief in the possibility of anatomical transformation between male and female configurations, as well as embracing the existence of a continuum of intermediate configurations.
Under what Laqueur calls the “two-sex” model, male and female are understood as being qualitatively different types of beings. Transformation between male and female anatomy is not part of this model and intersex anatomy must be assigned to one or the other category.
Under both models, social gender (man and woman) are cultural constructs that are associated with distinct sets of expected characteristics, behaviors, and are assigned distinct sets of legal and social rights and properties. There is an expected association of sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman) but it is not always fixed, and the logic behind that association may be variable.
Attributes of the one-sex and two-sex models existed in parallel in pretty much every era, but at particular times one model or the other may have predominated in philosophical, medical, legal, or cultural discourse.
The book examines the evidence for how these concepts can be identified and examined in a historical context, and how they shifted, overlapped, and evolved across the centuries, with particular focus on the cultural and political contexts of those shifts. The rest of this summary will be a bit stream-of-consciousness.
Preface
Laqueur’s study started with the question of why the 17th century (European) belief that female orgasm was essential to conception disappeared. Looking closer, he shifted to the question of the relationship between the body and sexual difference, and the nature of sexual difference in general. A historical biological framework suggests the question should be straightforward with sex being defined by the presence or absence of a penis. But even limiting the definition of sex to anatomy, the question has never been simple when it considers physical alterations, chromosomal testing, etc. There has never been (and still is not) any understanding of sexual difference that is based on undisputed “facts” about bodies.
The erasure of the role of female orgasm in conception occurred at a similar time to the shift from viewing female bodies as “lesser men” (the one-sex model) to seeing male and female as opposites without any common properties. But both the one-sex and two-sex models were always available, even when one or the other predominated.
Chapter 1
The chapter opens with anecdotal framings of the role of female orgasm for conception, e.g., a man having sex with a comatose woman who became pregnant. But if female orgasm was not essential, then it became irrelevant (in male understanding) and opened the door to the model of female passivity/passionlessness. Female sexuality could now be redefined. The previous image of women as sexually voracious changed to an image of women as uninterested in sex.
The earlier model had an image of female sexual organs as an inversion of male organs. But around 1800, scholars began relating the supposed fundamental differences between the sexes as biological differences. In essence, female and male became viewed as different species. This was used as a basis for enforcing social/legal distinctions between the sexes.
The earlier model allowed for what later became considered impossibilities: spontaneous change of (anatomical) sex, and the ability of actions to cause somatic sex changes. Laqueur mentions intersex conditions as a basis for some of these beliefs, but in general does not focus on this topic. To some extent, he proposes, pre-Enlightenment society “considered gender categories as ‘real’ and the sexual body to be the epiphenomenon (i.e., the resulting consequence). Gendered actions could cause anatomy to align to the sex associated with that gender. Man and woman were social/legal/cultural roles, not physical facts.
What changed? Perhaps as scientific observation determined that female orgasm was not essential to conception, culture converted this to a devaluation of the female role in conception entirely? Except that’s not what happened. The conceptual change was not actually predicated on “scientific knowledge” but followed from cultural demands. Both one-sex and two-sex concepts were available, but neither could be “proven” scientifically at the time of the conceptual shift.
“Scientific” data has never been able to conclusively distinguish the sexes in absolute terms. The development of more sophisticated anatomical and developmental knowledge, in fact, supported an understanding of similarity between the sexes, not difference.
The social context of the shift to the two-sex model included marriage as a contract, feminism, restructuring the sexual division of labor due to the factory system, the rise of the market economy. None of these were “causes” but they occurred in the same time-frame. Sexual difference clearly exists, but how it is understood or defined is a product and context for conflicts over gender and power in general.
An outline is given for the remaining chapters: Ch 2 the one-sex body; Ch 3 the relationship of models of sexual difference and science; Ch 4 cultural investment in the one-sex model and the feminist pressures on it; Ch 5 the shift from dominance of the one-sex to the two-sex model; Ch 6 cultural investment in the two-sex model.
Chapter 2
The basic elements of the “one sex, two genders” model is that male and female anatomy are identical except for topography. That is, female anatomy is an inversion of male anatomy and vice versa. This still allows for two genders, as men (gender) are interpreted as having everything in the “right” place, whereas women are variants of the ideal model and therefore less perfect.
The text examines many details of how classical philosophers envisioned and explained this. Behvavioral differences in men and women are due to assumed associations with the anatomical differences. Behavior is not an essential difference but more of a functional one.
In this model, bodily fluids are not clearly distinguished and--as in humoral theory--represent different balances of a set of qualitative attributes. Thus blood, milk, semen, and “female semen” were considered the same underlying substances with difference aspects prevailing. This aligned with the idea that both male and female orgasm were necessary to produce the fluids that combined to form a fetus.
How does the one-sex model allow for social boundaries between men and women? And how did it account for the existence of heterosexual orientation? There is a discussion of philosophical models for sexual desire in Plato’s Symposium (where the anecdote is attributed to the playwright Aristophanes) as based on a “like loves like” principle, but where different types of desire originate in dual-bodied entities, some m/m some f/f some m/f. People desire others of their own type/species but that “type” could be same-sex or different-sex. But at the same time, same-gender love was socially disapproved, at least for the partner who acted “against gender.” It was the conflict of social roles and biological functions that came under disapproval.
Aristotle considered the (anatomical) sex of slaves to be irrelevant as only the social roles belonging to free people had “gender”. In Plato’s Republic, he appears to make a case for the social equality of (free) men and women, but elsewhere adheres to the principle of “male = elevated/perfect” and “female = imperfect.”
The “logical arguments” for this association in pre-Christian philosophy followed humoral principles, but with Augustine and other Christian philosophers, the logic turned to moral precepts where good/evil and salvation/fall were aligned with sex and gender as factors. This allowed for contrasting understandings of the same basic people/functions/acts depending on motivation and purpose.
An essential feature of the one-sex model is that the one sex is male and that female does not exist as a distinct category, only as a variant (and imperfect) form of male. Just as women existed as quantitatively "lesser men," men could also deviation from the ideal male and be considered "less male" on that basis.
Chapter 3
The one-sex model of classical writers continued to be transmitted in medical texts up through the Renaissance, typically without serious question or analysis. Examples are given of vernacular terminology for the reproductive organs that are based on the one-sex model. These terms could add different shades of metaphoric meaning, as in the use of “matrix” versus “purse” for the uterus (a “matrix” has a generative function while a “purse" is simply a container). Within these writings, female orgasm is still strongly associated with reproductive function.
But a more experimental and observational approach to anatomy was shifting people’s understanding, such as the “discovery” of the clitoris. Under the one-sex anatomical model, the vagina was considered to be the direct analogue of the penis -- simply turned inside out. In theory, it couldn’t be both true that the vagina was an inverted penis and that the clitoris was the direct equivalent of the penis, but this contradiction wasn’t noted or considered at the time because philosophy was still predicated on the one-sex model. If the "scientific" evidence didn't fit the dominant model, it was set aside.
In part, the problem was that the state of observable knowledge during the Renaissance could not offer conclusive evidence. And even with observation taking a more central place, anatomical “facts” followed from cultural politics, not the other way around. Women were still asserted to produce semen, female orgasm was still considered essential to conception, despite the continued awareness that there was no direct correlation between the two. Even as women began writing and publishing medical texts in the Renaissance, they followed the mainstream models on sex and gender.
Laqueur points out that many of the principles of the one-sex model still persist in popular culture today, including the necessity of female orgasm to conception. [Note: just look at conservative nonsense in the USA today around pregnancies resulting from rape.]
There is an extended look at illustrated anatomy manuals and gendered examples of cadavers as participants in their own dissection (in artwork). Drawings of male and female genitalia are arranged to emphasize the similarities and supposed correspondences between the sexes.
There is a continued association of “heat” and vital fluids with orgasm and fertility. Medical manuals discuss and recommend foreplay to encourage reproductive success, including the use of embraces, lascivious words, kisses, and flirtation. Men are encouraged to caress their wife’s genitals and breasts in the belief that near-simultaneous orgasm helped conception. Medical treatments for infertility could include a midwife masturbating the woman to orgasm to facilitate conception.
But even while this was the prevaling model, there also existed an anatomical theory that females were unique from males and that the uterus did not have a male analogue.
Chapter 4
The one-sex model had the force of medical prestige behind it but was always in tension with social and political models of two clearly distinct genders. Discussion of the principle of signs, how visual similarity = functional connection. Lots of metaphors for reproduction. Increase in the overlap and mingling of male and female signifiers in the 16th century, e.g.,, in the person of Queen Elizabeth I. Belief in “natural” transformation between sexes and that gender-transgressive behavior could either cause or be caused by physiological blurring.
The (excess) love of women was thought to make men more feminine. Women acting vigorously made them more masculine. But was this metaphor or believed to be physical?
The “sliding scale” of sexual difference on the one-sex axis did not mean that gender was open to free choice or accepted in intermediate proportions, but rather that individuals were positioned relative to the polar “perfect examples” of masculine and feminine.
Just as class-based sumptuary laws enforced rather than reflected distinctions, gendered “sumptuary” rules acted to enforce the stabilization of gender, rather than reflecting a “natural” system. Writers such as Castiglione (The Courtier) reflect deep anxieties about the permeability of gender boundaries and work to police activities that transgress them.
The anxiety about female-to-male transformation is made concrete in the writings of authors like Michel de Montaigne and Ambrose Paré who catalogue examples of cross-gender presentation or cases of anatomical sex change. The latter reflect the one-sex “inversion” concept in how they are described and explained.
Sex is assigned on the basis of the presence/absence of an (external) penis. That, in turn, granted access to or restriction from a vast set of cultural accessories and activities. For the anatomically ambiguous, the question was not “what is their ‘real’ sex?” but what gender could they best perform as. In early modern debates, ambiguous (anatomical) sex was resolved by reference to gendered attributes of personality and behavior. But by the 19th century, anatomy was considered the only metric for sexual categorization. Thus, in early modern views, women engaging in same-sex acts were classified according to the assigned gender of their behavior, but their sexual category could not be reassigned unless anatomy required it.
An example of a how these ideas played out can be seen in the case of Marie de Marcis. Marie was categorized as female/woman until participation in same-sex sexual activity led to a medical examination to look for evidence of male anatomy (i.e., masculine sex). The examiners identified a hidden penis-analogue (i.e., either an enlarged clitoris or a micro-penis) but it was deemed inadequate for reclassification into the legal/social (gender) category of man. Based on this, legal requirements for Marie’s social presentation were imposed. [Note: the case is complicated and I will try to track down the original text, but in essence Marie was required to perform socially as a woman but was forbidden from having any type of sexual relations, but with the conditions only extending to age 25.]
Self-identity was not considered in either the evaluation or imposition of gender/sex categorization in ambiguous cases. And for those with ambiguous genitalia, the requirements for being classified as male set a high bar. One could be recognized as having an ambiguous (anatomical) sex but binary classification into a gender was done according to cultural privilege, not physical form.
The belief in spontaneous anatomical sex change did not view this as equally likely in both directions. The universal belief was that it could only occur from female to male. Philosophical arguments to “explain” this were rationalizations of established gender hierarchies. By this thinking, culture constrains biology. Up through the 17th century, gender was a social rank, not a physical fact.
Scientific observation does not provide new insight into “reality,” rather the prestige of science is used to bolster the culturally prevalent model. Harvey’s observations of the fertilization process is offered as an example of relevant scientific writing of the time. But scientific techniques were not adequate to observe sperm, as such, and preconceptions meant that wrong questions were being asked and answered about the process of conception.
Chapter 5
“Sex as we know it was invented sometime in the 18th century” by which Laqueur means that the dominant model of the sexes shifted to one of two distinct "species" with separate spheres/functions in society, between whom the question of equality or superiority/inferiority doesn’t apply. Various shifts in the rhetoric and representation of male and female bodies accompanied this. The organs and acts related to reproduction were given distinct names when associated with female or male bodies, rather than being treated as analogous. This established physical distinction was then used as the basis for distinguishing the social genders. Among other things, this shift made possible the erasure of female orgasm and erotic desire.
But the one-sex model continued to exist and be promulgated throughout the 18-19th centuries, especially in new medical publications based on the classical texts. A clearer scientific method contradicted much of the supposed physical proof of the one-sex model, such as claims of male lactation, spontaneous sex-change, and miraculous/monstrous births. A distinction between possible and impossible events relating to sex became sharper.
The second process was shifting the cultural work of gender distinction on to sexual distinction. The one-sex model simply assumed women’s inferiority. The two-sex model claimed to prove it. The uterus was no longer an “imperfect” inverted penis, but an entirely different and unrelated organ whose existence in a body caused inferiority. Female and male were no longer polar inversions of each other but complementary opposites. Now desire was assumed to derive from a principle of “opposites attract” rather than being generated by differences in humoral balance that influenced people to attempt to achieve the "ideal" humoral balance (which was the same for both genders).
But new medical knowledge did not actually require the two-sex model that it was invoked to support. (The book goes on to discuss many details of various scientific discoveries relating to the topic of sex.) Political theory, even as it argued against any “natural” hierarchy of class, birth, or gender as being divinely ordained, still fell back on a hierarchy that proceeded from immutable social “facts” such as women’s vulnerability during pregnancy and motherhood.
Medical illustrations shifted from emphasizing the similarity of female and male reproductive organs to depicting them in ways that emphasized difference and distinction.
Pregnancy from rape was the key context for evaluating the role of female orgasm in conception. In 1785, English legal texts still argued that conception required female pleasure and thus contradicted a conclusion of rape, but this seems rarely to have been applied as a legal standard. By the 1820s, even as a legal theory this concept had been rejected as “ignorant.”
Chapter 6
This chapter discusses two topics that show the persistence throughout the mid-18th though 20th centuries of both the one-sex and two-sex models via discourse around ovulation cycles and Freudian sexual theory. The discussion is primarily an examination of how both models were more political than scientific in nature. Even feminism used the rhetoric of the two-sex model to argue that women’s interests could only be represented in the political and social spheres by women. The chapter includes extensive discussion of philosophy around the nature and purpose of menstruation. There is also a discussion of the “natural” purpose of differential desire (i.e., preference for a particular sex partner rather than simply for the sex act in general).
Misc tags: sexology
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September 12, 2019
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 38c - Book Appreciation with Olivia Waite
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 38c - Book Appreciation with Olivia Waite - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/09/21 - listen here)
Transcript pending
Notes and Links
Books mentioned
The Ladies’ Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite
Proper English by KJ Charles
Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn
A Thin Bright Line by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
A transcript of this podcast is pending.
Links to Olivia Waite Online
Website: oliviawaite.com
Twitter: @O_Waite
Instagram: o_wow_waite
If you enjoy this podcast and others at The Lesbian Talk Show, please consider supporting the show through Patreon:
The Lesbian Talk Show Patreon
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 38b - Interview with Olivia Waite
The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 38b - Interview with Olivia Waite - transcript
(Originally aired 2019/09/14 - listen here)
A transcript is pending.
Notes and Links
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
What attracted her to writing historical stories
How the Ladies’ Guide started as a straight romance and the contrast in social dynamics
Exerience versus imagination in writing romance
Bi representation in romance
Figuring out how your characters understand their sexuality
What it’s like to publish f/f romance with a mainstream publisher
The experience of being a bisexual woman reading lesfic
Classical erotic literature and the range of sexual experiences
Trying to get into the heads (or other organs) of people in history
The next two books in the “Feminine Pursuits” series
Books mentioned
The Ladies’ Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite
Rule Breaker by Cathy Pegau
An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole (m/f historical romance)
Links to Olivia Waite Online
Website: oliviawaite.com
Twitter: @O_Waite
Instagram: o_wow_waite
If you enjoy this podcast and others at The Lesbian Talk Show, please consider supporting the show through Patreon:
The Lesbian Talk Show Patreon
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMPpodcast
September 10, 2019
Teaser Tuesday: Disasters and Bells
Floodtide
Even in this modern age of broadcast communication and instant messaging, there are places in our lives where simple, loud, public sounds carry essential meaning. Most of the time, we experience them only in “test” mode—checking on their functionality and accustoming us to the particular form of the alert and the expected response. In my own everyday life, there are fire drills at work, the monthly ammonia-release alert siren test, the interruption of tv or radio shows with the Emergency Broadcast System horns and message, "This is a test. This is only a test..." There are a few that aren’t “test mode”: the bells of a level railroad crossing, even the fog horn at the local marina.
Thinking about all those, perhaps Rotenek’s floodtide bell seems more familiar. It shares characteristics with the churchbells that mark the hours or sound funeral knells, but despite the close association with the church of Saint Nikule, the purpose is civic and secular: a way of communicating the threat of environmental peril to those who aren’t watching the river closely. It’s a close cousin of the flash flood warnings we get in California when the winter rains come, or the net-yet-realized dream of an alarm system that would give a few minutes warning of earthquakes.
Except for purely mechanical systems such as railroad crossings, behind every alert system is a person who must make the decision of when to invoke it. What happens when that person makes the wrong decision? Or waits too long to decide? Where is the balance point between trusting to authority and the chaos of impulse?
***
[Note: ellipses are bits of omitted text that are a bit spoilery for something that isn’t essential for this excerpt.]
The tower had been part of a warehouse once long ago, but all that was left was the tower and the arcade along the front where the charmwives sat. The bell didn’t belong to the church, even though it was the priest who rang it. It belonged to the city and the merchants. To all of us. There were other bells in the tower besides the floodtide bell: a deep one for thick fog on the river, to warn barges where the channel turned, or to sound an alarm during the fires a year past. There was no door or lock on the stairs to the bell tower for that reason.
[…] After a slow creak, the first peal rang out sweet and high over the Nikuleplaiz, followed by the double tone. Around me the stones shivered. Nothing else sounded like it. You could tell the floodtide bell even with other chimes ringing.
Once the first notes rang out, my ears were full of the sound. […] I counted off the peals. Nine. Ten. There were voices and shouts from the plaiz below. Through the window of the bell tower I could see two of the deacons come out on the church steps to stare. Fifteen. Sixteen.
I had counted to twenty-four when I saw men in the uniforms of the city guard come into the Nikuleplaiz on the far side, walking determinedly across the cobbles toward the tower. […]
If the floodtide bell belonged to the church, it would have been no business of the Guard. And of course if the priest had rung the bell, that would have been authority enough. […]
The sweet peals of the bell trailed off to echoes and were still. But […] I could hear other bells taking up the floodtide call. Someone might send a command to silence them, but for now the two-tone cry spread throughout the city, “Alarm! Alarm!”
Major category: TeasersPublications: FloodtideTags: teasersFloodtidewriting
September 7, 2019
Book Review: Proper English by KJ Charles
This Edwardian country-house murder mystery follows the usual script of assembling an odd assortment of family, friends, and what-the-heck-are-they-doing-here characters, identifies certain characters (ideally more than one) as worthy of murder, establishes murderous motivations for most of the cast, with a handy storm to pen everyone in at the crisis. The mystery here is solid and even--if you haven’t read the book this is a prequel to--carries just enough doubt regarding the motivations and guilt of some of the more likeable characters to keep one on edge. If the primary viewpoint character--a Ladies Shooting Champion--were not our window on events, she’d be one of the prime suspects, simply on the grounds of no-nonsense efficiency.
The primary set-up, of course, is not so much the murder but the romance that develops in its shadows. Pat realizes she’s falling in love with her best friend’s apparently air-headed fiancée, though the engagement is dispensed with quickly enough that she’s never faced with serious ethical conflicts over it. Instead, the moral conflict is over how to handle the possibility that either her brother Bill or Bill’s male lover committed the murder in reaction to blackmail over that relationship.
Charles deftly lays out the contrasting experiences of men and women in same-sex relationships at the time: men’s relationships being criminalized and exactly the sort of thing one might murder to conceal, and women’s relationships being considered of little importance and not the sort of thing anyone was expected to organize her life plans around.
The development of Pat and Fenella’s relationship from wary companionship to attraction to “gosh, in the wake of murder we all need to stick together to protect each other so of course we should move into the same bedroom” proceeds apace, following the needs of the compressed structure of the story. (OK, so it all felt very rushed to me, but for at least one of them it wasn’t her first rodeo, so I’m willing to allow the benefit of the doubt for allosexual impulsiveness.)
If you like cozy mysteries and enjoy your romances to be layered with regular explicit sex scenes, this should be just up your alley.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: Two Wings to Fly Away by Penny Micklebury
Penny Micklebury braids together the historic, romance, and thriller genres in a story about personal and racial relationships and found family in Philadelphia on the eve of the Civil War. Eugenia Oliver (who sometimes operates as Eugene) escaped slavery and navigated the complexities of establishing herself as a professional seamstress and supporting less fortunate community members while also participating in the Underground Railroad. Some of her priorities change when chance brings her together with Abigail Read, a wealthy woman who traded the expectations of high society to turn her family home into a boarding house. Initially, the two are allies in solving a mysterious disappearance, but then they fall in love and things get more complicated.
Micklebury depicts the free black community of Philadelphia in vivid detail, including the layered complications of navigating a society that isn’t as free as it pretends to be. (Note: Micklebury is black and specifically focuses on telling black women’s stories across the whole range of genres she writes in.) Her descriptive prose painted the setting so you could feel the cobblestones and the bite of the winter chill. Eugenia is a complex and engaging character and I look forward to reading more about her. (A sequel is evidently in the works.) The multiple layers of the plot kept the story moving forward (even when they didn’t quite connect with each other) without backgrounding the romantic thread.
There were a few aspects of the story that worked less well for me. The point of view was a bit erratic and I often had to re-read passages to be clear whose emotions we were feeling. The economic and social context of Abigail Read felt out of sync with my understanding of upper class white society of the time. (An unmarried woman who had enough wealth to be sought after as a wife probably wouldn’t need to convert her home into a boarding house to support herself.) And the romance between Eugenia and Abby felt rushed in the beginning, especially for two women experiencing their first same-sex attraction. But overall, this was a delightful read and adds some valuable diversity to the field of f/f historicals.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
September 3, 2019
Teaser Tuesday: Doing For
Floodtide
The character trope of the "personal assistant" -- the person in a subordinate position whose job consists of providing support and devalued labor for a character with more pubic agency -- is tricky to portray. Particularly in an intensely class-stratified culture when that role is not typically freely chosen from among other options. Given her family's background and her work history, Roz sees the position of lady's maid as a desirable goal, but that isn't meant to erase the ways in which being a household servant are exploitative, exhausting, and often degrading.
And yet...in fiction, there's an undeniable appeal to the special bond and experience that comes when your job is to go all out to make someone else's life easy and beautiful and enjoyable, to be the invisible hands that turn out someone else's life as a work of art. There have been occasions in my life when--on a temporary and limited basis--I had roles like that, whether in supporting a manager on a project, or within historic re-enactment events play-acting the role of servant in a context where I was also providing real, logistical support to my fictive employer. I've felt that appeal--with the knowledge that it was within a limited scope and the person I was "doing for" had no power over my life as a whole.
Further, one can be in a subordinate, supportive role and have the agency to perform that role as a piece of artistry, or begrudgingly as a chore to be endured.
Roz is torn between aspiring to perfect the skills of a real lady's maid--to become an artist with her maisetra's life as the medium of her art--and the more concrete and enduring art of the dressmaker. Neither of them is a certain path. Both are skill sets she has yet to master in full. But in this scene I've tried to show some of the appeal of the former.
* * *
Tiporsel House was still all upside down when Maisetra Iulien’s father arrived. I’d almost forgotten about that. Futures seemed so far away. I know it doesn’t belong to me to say so, but he was a sour-looking man, all puffed up with his own importance. I didn’t like the way he talked to the maisetra, like she was a child. I could tell Maisetra Iulien loved him the same as I loved my father, but I could tell why she might have wanted a look at the wider world, without him standing over her.
Dressing became a chore every morning and evening. It wasn’t that Maisetra Iulien had so many gowns to choose from, but she’d try them all on and toss them on the bed and try again until I was ready to send her down to breakfast in her chemise.
“This one makes me look too young! He’ll think I’m a child who shouldn’t be allowed out of the house. That one makes me look too sophisticated. Look at the décolletage. It’s not my fault my bosom has grown this year.”
“Then wear it with your fichu,” I suggested. “And you should put the ear-bobs away until evening. I know girls wear them for everyday in the city, but Mefro Dominique says it isn’t done in the country, and that’s what your father will expect.”
I’d been asking Mefro Dominique a lot of questions about what was and wasn’t done since Maistir Fulpi had come. I could have asked Maitelen, but she was so worn down from looking after the baroness. Maisetra Iulien was in such a dither, I needed somebody’s word that weighed more than mine to keep her from wearing anything foolish.
Maisetra Iulien looked up and said, “What would I do without you, Roz?”
“I’m sure you’d do well enough,” I replied as I put the earrings back in her jewelry box. “Now let me do up your hair. You’ll feel better once this business is settled.”
I’d learned more hairdressing and was proud of how I turned her out, but it was a very long week.
Major category: PromotionPublications: FloodtideTags: teaserswritingFloodtide
September 2, 2019
Book Review: Frederica and the Viscountess by Barbara Davies
I wrote something of a mini-review of this when I included it in a podcast for The Lesbian Talk Show on five reasons why the Regency era is great for f/f romances and five books that illustrate each reason. I might as well let it do double-duty:
Reason Why the Regency is Great for F/F Romances: Gender Imbalance
The Napoleonic wars were a major defining feature of the Regency era. There were significant casualties among the British military (though not as serious as among the French population). Taking the population from the 1801 census as a starting point, as much as 5% of the male population were killed in the next decade, and men of marriageable age were the target demographic for military recruitment. There was also a preference for recruiting single men. This all combined to leave a surplus of unmarried women--many of whom had no hope of ever finding husbands, simply for lack of opportunity. A dynamic like this meant that it was normal, though not desirable, for a woman never to marry. Such women typically would live with a member of their extended family, contributing to the domestic economy of the household. Another option was to be a “companion” to a woman of better means who had no immediate family of her own. While these companion relationships typically would involve a difference in age as well as economic status, it set a precedent for households composed of two women of theoretically equal social status.
Book that Illustrates This: Frederica and the Viscountess by Barbara Davies
Frederica Bertram is at that delicate edge of spinsterhood where she must seriously contemplate that if she refuses the expected marriage proposal from the tedious Mr. Dunster she will never have another opportunity to leave her parents’ roof. Her sister Amelia is still young enough to dream of romantic adventure. Into their quiet country neighborhood comes their neighbor’s scandalous sister Joanna, Viscountess Norland. Her scandal goes beyond having abandoned her husband and infant to go gallivanting around the continent, but also encompasses a taste for sometimes wearing trousers and a rumored duel with pistols. And she attracts visitors like the libertine Lord Peregrine who finds it amusing to turn the head of young Amelia Bertram to no good end.
Why it fits
Frederica and Joanna, of course, fall unexpectedly in love and their eventual solution to what society thinks is for Frederica to take up the post of companion to the Viscountess. Such an arrangement is considered a poor second choice to marriage by friends and relations, but gives both women a more respectable social presence than they had previously. This is a short, very sweet romance that draws heavily on the tropes and motifs of Jane Austen’s books, almost more than on the modern Regency romance tradition.
Further Comments
The book’s homages to Jane Austen novels are endearingly transparent. Mr. Dunster is the tedious Mr. Collins and Lord Peregrine’s attempted seduction of Amelia is a close echo of Lydia Bennet’s willing elopement with Wickham. Viscountess Norland, on the other hand, is a trope solely belonging to f/f historicals: the scandalous cross-dressing devil-may-care aristocratically-privileged icon of Not Like Other Girls. Frederica and the Viscountess is a delightfully tropey addition to the genre.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
Book Review: Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan
I can’t be anything other than delighted to find romance authors with established reputations and readerships venturing out into the field of f/f historic romance. Courtney Milan has tackled not only same-sex romance but a later-life discovery of love, as well as tossing our two protagonists into a “burn down the patriarchy!” (literally) adventure. I admire the enthusiasm and cheerful fury of the non-romance plot, but certain aspects of this historic setting fell a bit flat for me.
I mean: servants. Where are the servants? I don’t care how eccentric a rich elderly woman is, she doesn’t flit off to London for an unspecified period of time without at least one lady’s maid. And even the impoverished property manager whose plight she comes to address would be expected to have at least a part-time maid-of-all-work to do the heavy labor. Erasing the servants may be a convenient way of allowing your protagonists privacy to explore their new-found attraction, but it inevitably gives a novel a very modern feel for me.
The story is far more focused on the logistics of Mrs. Martin’s crusade of retribution against her Awful Nephew than on the romance itself. The women seem to get together on the basis of little more than bonding over “isn’t it awful that the world thinks old single women are of no value?” Their romantic attraction never really clicked for me. The revenge plot is a delightful wish-fulfillment story but the very over-the-top nature of the actions made it harder for me to sympathize with the women (or at least with Martin). Deliberately setting fire to buildings in the heart of mid 19th century London is not a harmless prank but the act of a psychopath.
So...mixed feelings on this one. It’s solidly written and the plot is well structured. I’m cheered by the existence of the book and its reception, but it didn’t really hit the spot for me either as a historic novel or as a romance.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
