Explores the little-known literary tradition of love between women in Western literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Agatha Christie, and many more. Donoghue examines how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. She writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been retold throughout the centuries; explores the writings of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire; she writes about the ever-present triangle, in which a woman and a man compete for the heroine's love, and about how and why same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to that of P.D. James. Finally she examines the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman's life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, showing how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms--From publisher description.
A very cool and engaging history of lesbian representation in literature, with some surprising examples. It's worth noting that this is very much a history of Western literary traditions, and it doesn't go into the twenty-first century. (I suspect because representation tends to be much more straightforward and less subtextual these days.) Donoghue's academic background is clear, though this is an accessible popular text. This is an important work in making visible the histories that have been hidden from us.
