Tuesday Top Ten… pieces of lesbian love literature

by Petit Fours

This all comes down to personal preference so I’ve given a list of books I like – mixing up a few classics and a few not-so-classics. I went for literature written about or by lesbians, some of them I go off on rants about, some I just mention.

There’s a lot of powerful brilliant ‘straight’ stuff about love that I could put in – because it’s just about people being in love with other people, which could apply to a lesbian graphic designer in London now just as much as did to a consumptive poet back in the 1820s or a schoolgirl in 1910. And of course there’s some great gay male writing as well.

Anyway – a bit of a personal tangent – do add anything else in the comments.

1. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

-glad I read this when I was out and happy otherwise it would probably have driven me to leave home and sit in the wilderness moaning about my status as an “invert”. Some highs, a lot of lows… Great for brooding melancholic doomed crushes. (Do these exist anymore? Not on the scene I bet.) Read some here.

2. Oranges are the Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

-it’s a classic, but a great classic. Killingly funny, it’s really sharply observed and a really honest fresh version of the old coming-out story. There’s not much directly about sexual love, except at the end, where she sleeps with a girl who has grey eyes and reminds her of a cat. Lovely. It’s slightly more about families, parental love and making your own mind up.

3. Poetry by Sappho

- the best-known lesbian ever, after perhaps only Shane McCutcheon, she wrote love poetry but only little tiny pieces of it have survived. Consequently, they’re very easy to read, in a nice modern translation. Couldn’t  resist sticking in a few snippets – it’s very sexy lush stuff: Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles me / bittersweet, / irresistible, / a crawling beast.

And another one:

For whenever I look at you even briefly
I can no longer say a single thing,
but my tongue is frozen in silence;
instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;
with my eyes I see nothing;
my ears make a whirring noise.

But also slightly political:

Some say an army of horsemen,
some of footsoldiers, some of ships,
is the fairest thing on the black earth,
but I say it is what one loves.

All Sappho’s fragments here.

4. Lesbiennes by Charles Baudelaire

Yes he is a straight man and by all accounts a man of a few sexual perversions – but he was fascinated by lesbians in an artistic and sociological way, as well as, probably, a pervy way. He was also a bit of a troubled genius, who lived in 19^th century France and wrote great taboo-busting poetry. He gave lesbianism a sort of lawless avant-garde glamour in poems Lesbos and Femmes damnées (damned women). He’s not fetishising unusual sexaulity, I think he’s just showing how there is really no such thing as abnormal sexuality, as the closer you delve into anyone’s life the more  it appears that we’re all just after love and a little sexual frisson now and then. Anyway, there are some meltingly sexy descriptions. Read about Baudelaire on GLBTQ’s literature section. See Lesbos and translations here. Again, I’m gonna quote y’all a bit, from Lesbos:

Lesbos, where kisses, languishing or joyous,
Burning as the sun’s light, cool as melons,

Lesbos, land of hot and languorous nights,
That make the hollow-eyed girls, amorous
Of their own bodies, caress before their mirrors
The ripe fruits of their nubility,

Here’s his description of Sappho – doesn’t she sound a bit like Shane? Yeah I reckon.

Of the virile Sappho, paramour and poet,
With her wan pallor, more beautiful than Venus!
— The blue eyes were conquered by the black eyes, ringed
With dark circles, traced by the sufferings
Of the virile Sappho, paramour and poet!

5. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters

- it’s a cheerful intelligent book, the stories is a merry romp, with some good sex but also some sadnesses. Tipping the Velvet is almost the antidote to Radclyffe Hall in being so upbeat. I want to read one of Waters’ other books, Affinity, which is supposed to be really good as well, in a darker more gothic, suppressed emotion way. (Also, not totally relevant here, but Sarah Waters is a bit of a hero for being so available for helping out with gay community stuff).

6. The Accidental – Ali Smith

– so soft, such a tender writer, all the details and the feelings are quite exquisite. All this light and colour and nature in her books makes the love very calm and beautiful while also being teasingly hot.

7. Rapture – Carol Ann Duffy

- Carol Ann Duffy (current Poet Laureate) wrote about her affair with a woman in this book of poetry, covering lust, love, helplessness, disappointment and loss.. aaah. A line I love from ‘ You’ – the first poem: “there you are on the bed / like a gift/ like a touchable dream”. Read some poems from Rapture here.

8. Plays by Sarah Kane

- Sarah Kane kinda fascinates me. She was a British playwright who died young, and left a handful of really startling plays, brutal and quite crass but also very tender. She was lesbian but didn’t write about it explicitly, though there’s a lot about sex and love and the difficulty of expressing emotions in what she writes about. The plays are slightly terrifying, and about pain, vulnerability and torture but love is very powerful and just redemptive. Sometimes.

She committed suicide aged 28 in 1999. You can get ‘Sarah Kane is my Kurt Cobain’ t-shirts but you’d be better off buying the plays really.

Haven’t read but on my to-do list:

9. Sputnik Sweetheart – by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, a slightly disorientating story about a lesbian love affair from this master of strange metaphors and word games.

10. The Colour Purple -  about race and being gay in the southern states of the US. I think it’s a really unusual book, a fascinating piece of history as well as a novel.