Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xxxv
ships with each other. Lister describes both romance and sex in detail.
She also documents her life as the transgender figure of a country
squire. The publication of Lister’s writings pushed back the historical
date at which scholars are willing to imagine something like a contemporary
lesbian identity. It is significant, however, that this identity existed
in carefully guarded, upper-class subcultural groups. Economics
are a central and often overlooked factor in the possibility for lesbian
expression in culture.
Mid-19th-century literature, at least in the middle- and high-brow arenas,
was clearly more sexually conservative than 18th-century literature.
A kind of conservative backlash was fed by Europe’s developing idea
of itself as the moral center of a Christian empire. Still, penny dreadfuls
and popular ballads, as well as a thriving pornography industry, kept
sexual inquiry alive, and found a willing audience. Until the end of the
century, English fiction of the middle and upper classes was dominated
by the 19th-century realist project, spearheaded by Jane Austen in direct
response to the decadence and frivolity of Gothic literature. Within this
fiction, however, the tradition of female romantic friendship continued
and developed. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette both describe
intense romantic friendships between young women. Nineteenth-century
women’s poetry began a tradition of passionate expressions of love and
desire between women. Christina Rossetti in England and Emily Dickinson
in the United States are two examples here. The two English
women writing together as Michael Field embodied a lesbian identity in
both life and work. Evidence suggests that they were aware of this to
some degree at least, that is, that they viewed their relationship as something
more contentious than romantic friendship. In the 1860s, sensation
fiction in Great Britain began to anxiously explore questions of female
sexual identity and agency, though it rarely, if ever, suggested
lesbianism directly.
In France, decadent literature continued to explore female gender
transgression and same-sex desire. In 1835 both Théophile Gautier’s
Mademoiselle de Maupin and Honoré de Balzac’s The Girl with the
Golden Eyes were published. By the 1880s both Guy de Maupassant
and Emile Zola were creating recognizably modern lesbian characters.
These women lived independent lives, transgressed the boundaries of
feminine passivity, loved each other physically and emotionally, and often
cross-dressed. The cross-dressing bisexual French novelist George