Why being "a cute, if ordinary, love story" is NOT enough

[Stephy]

97521 How Writing Works is different for every writer. In the case of Alma Routsong, (Isobel Miller was her pen name) told me back in the late sixties or early seventies that she had been interested in the painter, and the more she learned about the painter and her life partner, the more the two women became a fascinating part of her life, revealing their stories to her.

Then she wrote the book, and, when she was done telling there stories, there was a happier ending than any two women back in Greene County might ever have expected, except that it had a hard kernel of truth. As part of history and fiction that meld into one, and call it Historical Fiction.

You can have no conception the effect this book had on my life. I grew up reading "Well of Loneliness", and the standard "'I am the man' Bertha shouted as she fell upon young Gloria, making her shudder with her touch" novels men wrote about lesbians in the thirties through the seventies.This was the first normal, naturally unfolding Lesbian Love Story I ever read in which no woman killed herself because she couldn't face life in the "Lavender half-world"; no woman murdered her girlfriend's husband and children in a mad lust to keep the younger woman with her.

Patience and Sarah didn't have to be exemplary writing. It never won a Pulitzer Prize. But it won our hearts immediately. I still own it, I still read it occasionally. It does my heart good to see the courage Alma Routsong had, dragging that manuscript from publisher to publisher in a shopping bag. She was a late middle aged scholar, trying to sell a story that so desperately needed hearing by so many lesbian women everywhere.

What a wonder that she succeeded! You don't have to like it, but it is necessary to recognize the importance of the work at it's first publishing.

I know. I was there. I am a lesbian. I love women, and, thanks to Alma Routsong, I have NEVER denied who I am. I have never lived closeted. There are many like me, who were freed to live their lives truthfully because of Patience and Sarah.

I liked Alma Routsong. She was a nice woman, a good person, gentle as a lamb, sharp as a tack, and a foremother, deserving of recognition.

And a last word about Martha and her feelings about Patience. I think you put your finger on it with the word "jealous."
It has been said that lesbians hate men. To really hate a man you have to live with him and with his often untidy habits bordering on filth.

Some men are constitutionally incapable of wiping poop off a toilet if they put it there. Can't even make it to the laundry with dirty socks & underwear, yet they can keep a 250 piece socket wrench set in exactly perfect order. Clearly they can, yet they don't. Something else to think about. Women allow it by tolerating it.

Perhaps Martha was Jealous that Patience was getting Freedom! She was also put off by the fact that her husband's personal wealth would diminish because he shared their inheritance with his sister. By law, he was not required to do so. These details are left for each reader to figure out.

Today, we have the luxury of criticizing a book like Patience and Sarah. It was not always so. Books like this just didn't exist.

[Renee]

Some people say the simplicity of this love affair wouldn't be possible in the early 19th century. But women then would do what women always have--take advantage of whatever mores existed at the time (including the presumed impossibility of female romance) and quietly follow the dictates of their hearts. In an era of distaff physical affections that included kissing and cuddling (mostly without sex), it would be easier to mask a lesbian relationship than it would be in today's acknowledging, frequently accepting, but overexposed culture.