Linda Garber’s novel approaches to Lesbian history: the power of re-creating lesbian stories

Abstract

What purposes does lesbian historical fiction serve? What does the corpus of lesbian historical fiction illustrate? These are some of the questions that scholar Linda Garber answers in her latest volume Novel Approaches to Lesbian History (Springer Nature, 2021). Committed to both lesbian history and lesbian literary representation, Garber navigates lesbian historical novels as a genre that has served to depict a past that has systematically been denied. This volume examines a corpus of over 200 lesbian historical novels whose stories take place before 1930. Through a meticulous analysis of this corpus, the author invites her readers to explore the complexities of lesbian historical novels whose protagonists encompass “a wide-ranging cast of marauding pirates, Civil War scouts, Western bandits, homesteading pioneers, suffragists, schoolteachers, wealthy ladies, working class servants, prostitutes, and shopkeepers” (Garber 3). Garber’s academic work has extensively focused on lesbian matters. She is the author of important volumes in the field of Lesbian Studies such as Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (Columbia UP, 2001) and Lesbian Sources: A Bibliography of Periodical Articles, 1970-1990 (Routledge, 1993). She is also the editor of Tilting the Tower: Lesbians/Teaching/Queer Subjects (Routledge, 1994), an academic volume that addresses lesbian/gay studies in education from a variety of political and pedagogical perspectives. In addition, she has published on the fields of lesbian and queer studies as they have developed in academia since the 1990s. Her articles, including “Where in the world are the lesbians?” (2005) and "Weaving a wide net: The benefits of integrating campus projects to combat homophobia” (2002), signify important contributions to the field of lesbian/gay studies. The titles of these books and articles demonstrate Garber’s commitment to the reclamation and dignification of lesbian history. Since the 1990s, the genre of lesbian historical fiction has garnered attention from academic scholars in the field of lesbian studies. Bonnie Zimmerman’s The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989, published in 1990, provided an early account of lesbian literary fiction; five years later, Sarah Waters’ 1995 doctoral thesis “Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present” researched the role of historical references in lesbian/gay fiction in British Literature since the late nineteenth century. These two examples demonstrate academic interest in lesbian historical fiction in the field of Lesbian Studies. Novel Approaches to Lesbian History delves into the corpus of historical novels written by and for lesbians. Through a critical reading of the corpus, Garber proves the necessity of a movement that reclaims a past of their own. As Garber herself points out in her notes in chapter 1, the majority of works take place before 1930; this is indeed a revolutionary strategy, for it is a period in history where it has been established that women-loving women did not exist. It also seems relevant to mention that in terms of dates of publication, of those novels taking place before 1930, Garber points out that only six were published before 1980; twenty-two were published in the 1980s, thirty-five in the 1990s, and the rest between 2000 and 2021; this is something that manifests the great interest in this genre for the last few years.