The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
Those years with Winifred taught me that the type of
friendship which reaches its apotheosis in the story of David
and Jonathan is not a monopoly of the masculine sex.
Hitherto, perhaps owing to a lack of women recorders, this
fact has been found difficult to accept by men, and even by
other women. Some feminine individualists believe they
flatter men by fostering the fiction of women’s jealous
inability to love and respect one another. Other sceptics are
roused by any record of affection between women to suspicions
habitual among the over-sophisticated.
Too, too Chelsea!’ Winifred would comment amiably in
after years when some zealous friend related the newest legend
current about us in the neighbourhood. 54
David and Jonathan have been reclaimed by contemporary gay
men as homosexual lovers. We can only surmise that Vera
Brittain made no such assumption. She saw their relationship
as the epitome of innocent friendship, and is careful to record
her own scorn and that of Winifred of the ‘suspicions’ of the
‘oversophisticated’, which were presumably that the two women
were lesbian.
Rosamund Lehmann’s novel Dusty Answer (1927) provides
us with an interesting halfway house. It portrays a passionate
emotional involvement between two young women, Jennifer
and Judith, who engage in physical caresses and who are
obviously ‘in love’ with each other. The young women are
portrayed as reluctant to make a formal acknowledgement of
their love affair. This relationship is interrupted by the intrusion
of Geraldine, who casts the spell of explicit sexual attraction
over Jennifer, and sweeps her away into a lesbian affair.
Geraldine is described according to a stereotype of the
masculine, powerful, and slightly wicked lesbian. Judith
describes her thus:
At last it confronted her, the silent-looking face, watching
behind its narrowed eyes. The hair was black, short, brushed
straight back from the forehead, leaving small beautiful ears
exposed. The heavy eyebrows came low and level on the
low broad brow; the eyes were long slits, dark-circled, the
cheeks were pale, the jaw heavy and masculine. All the
meaning of the face was concentrated in the mouth, the
strange wide lips laid rather flat on the face, sulky,
passionate, weary, eager. She was not a young girl. It was
the face of a woman of thirty or more; but in years she might
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