“What I enjoyed most was looking for queer women who are less well known than Sappho, Radcliffe Hall, and Anne Lister aka Gentleman Jack”
BY FIONA KEATING, PHOTO: STILL FROM SHANGAI EXPRESS, THE CRITERION COLLECTION
It’s been said to me on more than one occasion, “Aren’t there too many lesbians in your book? How do you know of their existence more than a century ago?” My reply? “There’s more of us than you think there are. We find each other.”
But it set me thinking. As a writer, how do I populate the past with queer characters, when the vocabulary for us didn’t exist back then?
Just because people didn’t label themselves as queer in the past, that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist – or have powerful sexual urges. They couldn’t post on social media to express their emotions as we can today, or reach out for someone else who feels the same way.
My debut novel Smoke and Silk is a queer historical crime novel set in London’s Limehouse, 1888. It’s also a love story between two women – one of Chinese-Irish heritage, the other newly arrived from Shanghai. Did these queer women exist? Most definitely. But there is no evidence they did in history books, newspapers or magazines of the day. So I made it up. That is the power of the writer, a leap of the imagination into a queer world.
The female characters in my book are not the Victorian ladies, so often depicted in fiction, given to fainting or requiring a hefty dose of smelling salts. They are on the fringes of conventional society. My hero, Pearl, is a publican’s daughter. She packs a punch, deals with drunkards spoiling for a fight, and can easily heft a beer barrel. Her lover, Mei, is a Chinese acrobat, trained in Ju Jitsu, and climbs up drainpipes. I decided she was a laundry worker, so it is literally hot and steamy, with women often working in their underwear. What erotic joy!
The past is what you make it. Daydreaming when I should have been working, I would stare at pictures of Hollywood actors Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich, who were rumoured to have had an affair. This was what I wanted to impart in my book: strong, sexy, sultry women.
The matchgirls feature loud and proud in my book. Show-offs who love singing a bawdy musical hall number, notorious for their brilliantly coloured feathered hats, and strong on self-defence, being very handy with their hatpins. I loved bringing them to life.
What I enjoyed most was looking for queer women who are less well known than Sappho, Radcliffe Hall, and Anne Lister aka Gentleman Jack. I was looking to add an inheritance dispute in the book, so I needed a lawyer. After an internet trawl, I found Eliza Orme, the first woman to earn a law degree in England, from University College London in 1888.Â
This was exactly the year my book was set in. I had hit gold. Even better when I found out that she had a close friend, Reina Lawrence, who she worked with for many years, sharing law chambers (sadly no evidence they shared a bed chamber). Eliza never married a man, and when she died, she left all her money to Reina. Now, I ask you, what more proof is necessary?
Looking for queer poets, I again hit lucky. I came across Amy Judith Levy (1861–1889) a British poet, novelist, and essayist. She fell in love with women all her life, and wrote passionately about her feelings. I have included one of Amy’s poems in my book, when Pearl is being wooed by a music hall singer.
When she committed suicide in 1889 (some say because of a doomed love affair with a woman), Oscar Wilde wrote her obituary. I feel very pleased to have brought Amy Levy’s long-forgotten poems back to a new audience who can appreciate them more fully than they were during her lifetime.
Queering the past is about opening up new possibilities of what might have been. It certainly opened up exciting ideas for me about what the past might have been like.
Talking to book groups who have read Smoke and Silk, I could feel there was a real hunger and need for our LGBTQIA+ forebears – a queer romp coming up from the past.
You can buy Smoke and Silk here.
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