Are you obsessed with The Buccaneers? Here’s some more sapphics from the past to root for
BY LARA IQBAL GILLING, IMAGE BY BBC
If you can’t get enough of the iconic lesbian characters in Victorian-era TV drama The Buccaneers, these are six sapphic couples from history you should know about as series two launches.
Audre Lorde and Frances Clayton
After divorcing her husband, American poet and author Audre Lorde met psychology professor Frances Clayton in 1968 during Lorde’s poetry residency at Tougaloo College, Mississippi.
Clayton gave up her position as the only woman in her department to move to New York and help raise Lorde’s two children. The pair travelled through the US and visited Ghana and Benin together, supported each other through depression, Lorde’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy, and led workshops about interracial queer love.
In the late 1980s, Lorde left Clayton for writer Gloria Joseph, who she had been having an affair with for five years. There is no record of any further communication between them, and Lorde passed away from cancer in 1992.
Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim
The wife of a Nazi soldier, Lilly Wust, met a Jewish woman Felice Schragenheim in 1942 Berlin. They fell in love. “It was the tenderest love you could imagine,” Wust says of the affair. “I began to feel alive as I never had before.”
They signed a (non-legally binding) marriage contract the following March. Wust knew nothing of Schragenheim’s Jewish identity, nor her work helping other Jewish people escape from Germany. When she found out, she said she loved her even more.
Schragenheim was arrested in August 1943. Wurst managed to visit her once in Theresienstadt, an internment town. Schragenheim died of tuberculosis in 1948, which Wurst only found out four years later.
Dorothy West and Marian Minus
Novelist and journalist Dorothy West’s longest relationship was with fellow writer and activist Marian Minus from the early 1930s, having met through mutual friends a few years earlier.
They lived together in Martha’s Vineyard and New York. Minus was an adept mechanic, often seen working under the bonnet of a car while West passed her tools.
Minus co-edited The Challenge, the literary magazine that West founded. Both are known as Harlem Renaissance writers, their work focusing on racism and social division within the black community. They split after 20 years but remained on good terms for the rest of their lives.
Nobuko Yoshiya and Chiyo Monma
Prize-winning Japanese author Nobuko Yoshiya’s writing frequently depicted lesbian romance and desire. She met mathematics teacher Chiyo Monma in 1923, and their relationship lasted for over 50 years.
Monma writes to Yoshiya, “If only on this night we were together in our own little house, lying quietly under the light of a lantern, then my heart would gradually warm and neither would you be so sad… I am forever yours.”
As was customary for queer couples at the time, Yoshiya adopted Monma as her daughter in 1957, enabling them to jointly own property and make medical decisions for each other in the absence of any legal recognition of lesbian relationships in Japan.
Anne Lister and Ann Walker
Anne Lister embarked on a relationship with wealthy heiress and landowner Anne Walker in 1832. Two years later, they exchanged rings and took communion together to symbolise marriage in a church in York. Although neither the Church nor the state recognised it at the time, it is now thought to be England’s first lesbian marriage.
They travelled together across Scandinavia and the Caucasus from 1839, but in Georgia Lister contracted a fever, meeting her untimely death in 1840.
Isabella of Bourbon-Parma and Maria Habsburg-Lorraine
In 1760, Isabella of Bourbon-Parma was sent to marry Archduke Joseph II to strengthen the political pact between France and Austria.
Despite pretending otherwise, she did not reciprocate the Archduke’s feelings and conducted a clandestine relationship with his sister, Archduchess Maria Christina of Habsburg-Lorraine. The two communicated via letters, meeting when the Archduke was away.
Their relationship continued until Bourbon-Parma died at age 21 from smallpox in 1763. Ironically, after her death Habsburg-Lorraine’s husband discovered their communication, and preserved the letters as a testament to their friendship. After her own death, a miniature painting of Bourbon-Parma was found in her prayer book.
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