Erotic bonds among women in victorian literature

Anne Lister, an early-nineteenth-century lesbian, wrote in her diary about using Byron's poetry to seduce – or flirt with – pretty women. She planned to give the fifth canto of “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” (1812) to one young woman, who, when Lister asked her if she liked Byron's poetry, responded “yes, perhaps too well”; when the girl haunted Lister's “thoughts like some genius of fairy lore,” she pondered sending her a Cornelian heart with a copy of Byron's lines on the subject. Women she knew blushed when they “admitted” to having read Don Juan (1819–1824) and spoke of being “almost afraid” to read Cain (1821). To one of her lovers, Lister read aloud Glenarvon (1816), Lady Caroline Lamb's melodramatic, fictionalized version of her affair with Byron; they found it a “very dangerous sort of book.” The novel's heroine cross-dresses, a practice women in Lister's social circle sometimes used to woo straight women. Lister even played with performing Byronism in her romantic dalliances. Like a bold Byronic hero, she gazed on attractive women with a “penetrating countenance,” and looked “unutterable things” at them, which led them to confess to wishing she “had been a gent.” She tried to “mould” young women “to her purpose,” treating them like toys. But it wasn't only Byron who provided Lister with ways to act on her own sexual identity. Like many in the nineteenth century who had little access to information about “deviant” types of sexuality, she read classical texts for their descriptions of same-sex desire, especially Juvenal's Sixth Satire, with its famous lesbian orgy. She discussed them with other educated women as a covert means to figure out if they were lesbians. At the other end of the century, two lesbian poets wrote erotic texts, rather than merely reading them – or employing them for amorous purposes. Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who considered themselves married, developed a collaborative writing practice under the name Michael Field. As a “man,” they wrote with passion about the lovely, sensual ways of women.