Emma Donoghue
HarperCollins
1993

Even a devout nonfiction reader like myself is occasionally wary of books with colons in the title—that small bit of punctuation is often a sign of prose drier than melba toast. I was pleased, then, to discover that Emma Donoghue's history of British lesbians, Passions Between Women, was much more along the lines of a fresh sesame bagel. There are plenty of footnotes for those who would like to follow up with original sources, but it is rare to find a scholarly work that reads so smoothly and so well.

While Passions Between Women ostensibly focuses on a very specific period of time, the "long eighteenth century" as Donoghue puts it, the issues it raises have tendrils that reach down to current times. She discusses the sexual shyness of that time, while showing that there are plenty of lesbian references to find in the texts and tracts still remaining. More surprisingly, they are not always covert references; while there are the usual mentions of "particular friendships" and "unnatural fondness for women," there are also mentions of tribades and direct comparisions to that most notoriuous of classical lesbians, Sappho. As Donoghue says in the introduction,

Passions Between Women is not just about those women who seem to have perceived themselves as sexual deviants or rebels; it also includes many texts about spinsters, romantic friends and even women who passed as men…Passions Between Women is not just about the relatively small percentage of women who might have had the knowledge and courage to admit to themselves that they were (in Anne Lister's phrase) "too fond of women"; it is also concerned with stories of women's passionate fondness for women, whether or not the characters or authors seem to think this fondness excessive or deviant.

Donoghue divides her discussion into four main sections, which blend and overlap considerably: gender blurring (including female transvestitism and hermaphrodites, real and imagined), romantic/passionate friendships, sex, and communities of women (including religious communities). In each section, she carefully examines the historical records of the time, especially literature, newspapers and tracts, and medical writings. She documents many women lost to history who managed to live in various types of romantic partnership with other women. This was sometimes on their own terms and sometimes not, and Donoghue takes particular care not to place a a current cultural overlay onto these women and the way they saw themselves. It seems to have been true that while many of the women she describes were "lesbians" in modern terms, both sexually and socially, it is not always true that they saw themselves as different in any way or as members of a deviant class.

Passions Between Women is an important addition to the ever-growing library of lesbian history. Donoghue's scholarship and research are careful and wide-ranging, and her presentation of this dense historical information is well-written and entertaining.

[Originally published in OutNow!]