Author Carmella Lowkis goes on an exploration of sapphic stories this LGBT+ History Month
BY CARMELLA LOWKIS, IMAGE BY BBC
What was it like to exist as a lesbian in the past? As an author of sapphic historical fiction, this is a question I ask myself often. Yet while researching my debut novel, Spitting Gold – a story set in nineteenth century Paris – I discovered the difficulty of finding sources on everyday queer lives.
Throughout most of Western history, LGBTQIA people have needed to live discreetly, meaning it can be hard to find rich detail about their daily lives. The majority of what remains is evidence of things going wrong: arrest records, public scandals, police reports on sex work, denunciations from the Church, and – soberingly – executions. Information on gay women can therefore be even harder to come by than detail on our male counterparts, as our relationships have been less criminalised historically. So what about the countless sapphic women who never got “caught”? They must have existed.
My search started with Anne Lister – perhaps the most famous figure in nineteenth century lesbian history, thanks to the extensive, coded personal journals she left behind, and the highly entertaining BBC series about her, Gentleman Jack. A businesswoman and landowner from Yorkshire, Anne diarised her numerous relationships with women in frank detail. In 1834, she (unofficially) married Ann Walker, with whom she spent the rest of her life.
But Anne and Ann didn’t invent sapphic domesticity: they were in turn inspired by Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, an upper-class Irish couple better known as the Ladies of Llangollen. The Ladies eloped to Wales a decade before Anne Lister was born, escaping the threat of unwelcome marriages to men. Rather than becoming social pariahs following this decision, they in fact attracted much fascinated attention, and their Gothic cottage was open to all manner of interesting guests, including Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth. Wordsworth even wrote a sonnet about these “Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb / Even on this earth, above the reach of Time”.
Of course, women like Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen enjoyed a certain level of protection thanks to their wealth and social standing, so could afford to live with their lesbianism as a sort of open secret. But what about the lives of working- and middle-class women?
Some pointers here can be found in the landmark work Sexual Inversion by Henry Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds. Beneath the layers of medicalisation and racism (Havelock Ellis was a prominent eugenicist), this textbook contains countless case studies and anonymous interviews with so-called “sexual inverts”, opening a window onto queer women from all walks of life and from around the globe: seamstresses, hotel staff, schoolgirls, prisoners, hunters and actresses to name a handful.
One interviewee – a musician named Miss M. – shared with Havelock Ellis and Symonds that “She would like to help to bring light on the subject (of homosexuality) and to lift the shadow from other lives.” I don’t know whether she ever imagined that a twenty-first century author would one day be plumbing her words as inspiration for a work of lesbian fiction, but I like to think that she would approve!
So, to return to my opener: what was it like to exist as a lesbian in the past? I realise now that this question was far too basic. Sapphic lives in history were just as varied, unique and diverse as they are today, from circumstantial college flings to country-house marriages. The only thing we can say with certainty is that we did exist – even if it wasn’t always written down.
Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis is out now in paperback (Penguin, £9.99)
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