Twitter and Instagram are laden with sharp-tongued memes poking fun at historians for failing to acknowledge the existence of LGBT+ people in the past. The memes usually follow a similar format – a painting of two historic women intimately wrapped around each other with the words “historians say they were just friends” written cynically across the top. Admittedly, I follow more LGBT+ accounts than the average person so the quantity I see is not an accurate reflection of the amount present on social media generally. However, the memes raise an important question: why are historians perceived as refusing to acknowledge the existence of LBGT+ persons in the past? Historians today rarely, if ever, deny the existence of LGBT+ people, and a range of scholars including Martha Vicinus, Anna Clark, Matt Houlbrook, Rebecca Jennings, Rictor Norton, Amy Tooth Murphy, and Robert Aldrich (to name but a few) have devoted their careers to bringing the lives of LGBT+ people to the fore. I wonder if the answer relates to public engagement and historical scholarship not filtering through into public understanding.
I would like to consider fora moment the Ladies of Llangollen (Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831)) – Irish elite women who eloped to Wales in 1780 after escaping the pressures of heterosexual marriage – to help answer these questions. In a late eighteenth-century diary, historian Liz Stanley came across the words “damned sapphists”.[1] The diarist was Hester Lynch Piozzi, a popular writer and hostess of the period, and she was referring to the Ladies. Indeed, she later claimed that women were reluctant to visit them without a male chaperone present because they were “sapphic”.[2] Whenever the Ladies are discussed, the nature of their relationship becomes the focus.[3] In the final decades of the twentieth century, historians commonly argued that the Ladies were “romantic friends”.[4] This, I might add, even though the Ladies, for example, owned a succession of pet dogs named “Sappho”.[5] More recently, scholars have approached the Ladies’ relationship differently, emphasising that they were, in all likelihood, lovers.[6] Despite this, the memes would have us believe that we are still at the “romantic friends” stage in this debate.
Moreover, I would argue that, as a result of our preoccupation with hiding or drawing out the exact sexual identities of women like the Ladies, we are not only failing to reach the public, but also disregarding the women themselves, their actions and experiences. I attempted to remedy this in my Masters dissertation, which considered the experiences of sexually transgressive women in the period 1740-1840. I used the phrases “sexually transgressive women” and “queer” to refer to women who engaged in same-sex sexual and/or romantic relationships, and/or expressed any form of same-sex desire, and/or perceived that they were sexually attracted to women. Whilst not terms that would have been used in this context in the period, I used them as inclusive terms to encompass the diverse women who embraced, in their own way, what Mo Moulton calls ‘the possibilities of queer life, broadly defined’.[7] In adopting a broader, less rigid, approach to same-sex sexuality, I hoped that my research would not be impeded by the onerous burden of having to prove that these women engaged in same-sex sex, but would still ensure a ‘critical scope’ tight enough not to introduce ‘new opportunities for uncertainty in defining an object’.[8]
Indeed, we are better able to understand these women’s lives when we move beyond the “were they or weren’t they” question which has sometimes ‘bogged down’ analyses of sexually transgressive women in the past.[9] Evidence of queer intimacies is clear in the lives of many of these women, even in a period where they faced strong public condemnation for same-sex sexualities and thus had many reasons to disguise their same-sex sexual and romantic relationships.[10] Yet “queer” identities and models were not necessarily readily available to these women. Instead, as Anna Clark has suggested, they had to collate ‘fragmentary cultural materials’ to understand their sexualities, which led to the creation of ‘compartmentalized and contradictory’ sexual identities.[11] As a result, adopting a strict approach in requiring proof of active same-sex sexuality only serves to neglect those queer women in the past who did not conform to current understandings and articulations of sexuality.
In adopting this approach, I was able to discover more about these women, including how they related to themselves, society, and each other in their daily lives. For example, I considered how they used self-fashioning practices to explore the elements of their “selves” that society categorised as “non-normative”. For many, their self-fashioning was a form of resistance. They found creative ways to explore and articulate their queerness by, for example, reading same-sex desire into texts and expanding their wardrobes beyond the feminine. Considering self-fashioning in connection with transgression revealed that transgressive behaviour was an essential component in their quests for authenticity. I also considered how they were affected by British society’s condemnation of “sapphism”. Punishments included criminal sentences, withdrawn friendships, community hostility, family breakdown, stranger violence, emotional trauma, and economic ruin. Whether actual or threatened, they created a sense of fear that plagued these women, who could be attacked in print, socially, or physically. Considering their emotional responses highlighted the bravery in their transgression and explained further why many retreated into heteronormative “cover stories”. Finally, I examined considered how the lack and/or loss of same-sex love affected these women. I analysed how they attempted to alleviate their feelings of heartbreak and forge new forms of emotional fulfilment through the creation of queer families and communities, and forms of queer escapism (in fiction and through interactions with the afterlife) and distraction (including immersion in autodidacticism and the queer romances of others), indicating that feelings of loss and loneliness were powerful shaping forces in their lives.
Ultimately, whilst scholars of LGBT+ sexualities have carried out important work in establishing the presence and experiences of queer people in the past, I believe we must go further. We must consider them as subjects worth more than a rigid investigation of their exact sexual classification. Giving these women “the benefit of the doubt” that they lived queer lives and engaged in queer intimacies created a space within which I could examine their bold, complex lives. Looking beyond their sexualities also revealed the extraordinary variety of transgressive behaviours and activities that these women engaged with beyond the realm of sex. Indeed, Brideoake argues that ‘decoupling’ subjects ‘from the identificatory traditions of lesbian and gay history allows one to analyse their resistance to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century marital, reproductive, class, and gender norms’.[12] Likewise, in doing so, we may better appeal to today’s meme-making public audience, thereby (hopefully) updating our “meme persona”.
Anna is a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham. Having very much enjoyed her explorations into the history of sexuality during her Masters, she has now sidestepped onto a different path for her doctoral research and is considering how feelings and experiences of dislocation – be they temporal, social or emotional – caused by geographical mobility between Britain and India affected how imperial families in the long eighteenth century navigated their relationships with the self. She is funded by the Wolfson Foundation.
[1] Liz Stanley, ‘Romantic Friendship? Some Issues in Researching Lesbian History and Biography’, Women’s History Review, 1, 2 (1992), pp. 193-216, (p. 196).
[2] Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993), p. 150.
[3] In addition to the writings of their contemporaries like Piozzi, see for example: Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017); Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (Ludlow: Moonrise Press, 2011); and Donoghue, Passions Between Women.
[4] See for example: Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen. For scholarly assertions of “romantic friendship” unrelated to the Ladies see for example: Jean H. Hagstrum, Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone (eds), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989).
[5] Eugene Coyle, ‘LIFESTYLES: THE IRISH LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN: ‘the two most celebrated virgins in Europe’, History Ireland, 23, 6 (2015), pp. 18-20.
[6] See for example: Donoghue, Passions Between Women; Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen; and Timothy F. Murphy (ed.), Reader’s Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000).
[7] Mo Moulton, ‘Bricks and Flowers: Unconventionality and Queerness in Katherine Everett’s Life Writing’, in Brian Lewis (ed.), British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 63–86.
[8] Rick Incorvati, ‘Introduction: Women’s Friendships and Lesbian Sexuality’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 23, 2 (2001), pp. 175-186, (p. 179).
[9] Katherine Binhammer, ‘Accounting for the Unaccountable: Lesbianism and the History of Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Literature Compass, 7, 1 (2010), pp. 1-15, (p. 9).
[10] Catherine Craft-Fairchild, ‘Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth-Century English Representations of Sapphism’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15, 3 (2006), pp. 408-431, (p. 430).
[11] Anna Clark, ‘Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7, 1 (1996), pp. 23-50, (pp. 31, 49).
[12] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, p. 50.
