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University of Wollongong Research Online University of Wollongong Thesis Collection University of Wollongong Thesis Collections 2013 And that night they were not parted: lesbian romance fiction 1928-2008 – an exegetical essay, and, Silver lining: a lesbian romance novel Diana Pamela Simmonds University of Wollongong Recommended Citation Simmonds, Diana Pamela, And that night they were not parted: lesbian romance fiction 1928-2008 – an exegetical essay, and, Silver lining: a lesbian romance novel, Master of Arts - Research thesis, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2013. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4030 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] And That Night They Were Not Parted Lesbian Romance Fiction 1928-2008 – An Exegetical Essay And SILVER LINING: A Lesbian Romance Novel Diana Pamela Simmonds – 3336906 A thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirement for the Award of the Degree of Master of Arts (Research) of the University of Wollongong November 2013 CERTIFICATION I, Diana Pamela Simmonds, declare that this exegetical essay and manuscript, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Master of Arts (Research), in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The documents have not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution. Diana Simmonds 11 November 2013 2 ABSTRACT This Master of Arts (Research) involves two components: a critical essay and a creative writing project. In the essay I discuss the romantic fiction genre and its constraints as they apply to lesbian romantic fiction. In the creative writing project my aim was to write a lesbian romance novel that both fulfilled and subverted the rules of the genre. The resulting manuscript, Silver Lining, was accepted and published this year by Bella Books, USA and is now a bestseller according to Amazon.com. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Dr Ruth Walker without whose rigour, humour, patience and encouragement I would not be acknowledging anyone for this work. My heartfelt thanks also to the worldwide group of friends and colleagues whose advice and expertise have been freely and enthusiastically given whether or not I asked for it. Writers Clare Ashton (Birmingham) and Kate Genet (Dunedin) were indispensable in the novel editing process even at the odd hours of global online communication. Gary Simpson AM indefatigably put up with my mid-research grizzles as – for the past 14 years – has my very dear Suzi Whitehead Pope, who also saved my life when the first of three heart attacks threatened during what consequently turned out to be a very drawn out MA project. Thanks too to Blanche d’Alpuget who was my first self- confessed straight reader and stayed up to finish Silver Lining until 2am. Susie Eisenhuth at UTS and Jenny-Lee Heylen at UWS both gave pats on the head when they were most needed. Dr Phyllis M Betz (Philadelphia) not only took lesbian romance writing seriously but one of mine in particular in her invaluable text Lesbian Romance Novels: A History and Critical Analysis. The late, legendary publisher Barbara Grier rang in the middle of the night from Tallahassee, Florida to unwittingly open my eyes to romance when she elected to publish Heart On Fire in 1996. Following on from that, my appreciation for their kindness, warm welcome and professionalism goes to fabled romance authors and editors Linda Hill, Katherine V Forrest and Karin Kallmaker of Bella Books. And lifelong thanks to Professor Mandy Merck and Professor Laura Mulvey for so long ago starting me down the rabbit hole of inspiration in search of representations of women in popular culture. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………...4 Lesbian Romance Fiction 1928-2007 – An Exegetical Essay………………………...6 Addendum……………………………………………………………………………34 References……………………………………………………………………………41 Silver Lining – a lesbian romance novel……………………………………………..44 5 Lesbian Romance Fiction 1928-2007 – An Exegetical Essay In this essay I will discuss the development and changes perceived in the literature of “female sexual deviance” as described by Katherine V Forrest (2005: 51) from its recognizable beginnings in the second decade of the 20th century, through the pulp fiction of the 1950s to the popular romantic fiction of the second half of the 20th century. I will argue that the foundational publication of US lesbian magazine The Ladder from 1957 to the late 1970s marks a social and literary turning point. I will also argue that the wide gap between the high output-low literary quality of modern “lesfic” publishers versus the popular literary novels of contemporary lesbian- identified author Sarah Waters, is directly related to the pulp fiction of the 1950s and the positive reception of The Ladder. It was the democratization of the site of production and consumption, through The Ladder, that led directly to the phenomenon of popular lesbian romantic fiction. The disjuncture between the mainstream success of identifiably lesbian literary fiction and the parallel ghetto popularity of lesbian popular fiction will be traced in this essay from 1928, when The Well of Loneliness was first published. The Well of Loneliness, the novel commonly regarded as the first modern lesbian literary novel by an identifiable lesbian author Radclyffe Hall (1928), was first published in the UK amid considerable controversy and scandal, in contrast to the unremarked mass-market popularity of lesbian-themed pulp fiction. This developed as a genre within pulp fiction during the 1940s-50s and according to Forrest the genre was written by both male and female authors and was not aimed at the lesbian market, as its titillating cover art suggests (illustrated by Figures 2 and 6 below). Although as pointed out by Clare Bermingham: Lesbian pulp novels emerged in 1950s and 60s America, as a genre that was marketed to both a mainstream audience, and a marginalized sub-culture, just beginning to organize and articulate a social and political stance. Pulps provided a restricted space for women to enter the literary field, and a significant number of lesbian pulp novels were authored by women who self- identified as lesbians (2010: 1). 6 Nevertheless, it was rare for pulp fiction to represent lesbians other than salaciously and as the dangerous outlaw “other”, hence what could be argued as the eventual inevitability of the lesbian-specific The Ladder. Edited for its final four years by Barbara Grier, who worked on the magazine for a total of sixteen years before founding Naiad Press, she said in an interview published in online journal bigbadbutch.com, Customers tell you that there are no other lesbians where they live, but you look at your mailing list when taking the order and know that there are other lesbians in their zip code. And then one day, these same women will write and give a brief history of their lives, saying, ‘You won’t remember this, but nine years ago you spent 20 minutes talking to me, and I was in a really bad place.’ Or that ‘Without you I don’t think I could’ve survived/gone on living/made it’ (Grier, 2008: 3). Although Grier was referring to her own Naiad Press, letters and articles she published in The Ladder spoke of similar experiences. The latter years of The Ladder magazine in the US therefore marked a social and literary turning point as lesbians became somewhat less constrained in their personal lives and, in many instances, were able to live in ways that lesbians of the 1940s and 50s could not even dream about. Of course, this applies in the main to those living in Western countries. The significance of The Ladder for women isolated by fear and geography may be seen in Grier’s unusually positive parental acceptance of her own lesbianism. Grier’s experience would be unusual in the 21st century, let alone in 1945: She told her mother that she was homosexual, and her mother replied, ‘No, because you’re a woman, you’re a lesbian. And since 12 years old is too young to make such a decision, let’s wait six months before we tell the newspapers’ (Grier, quoted in an interview by R Ellen Greenblatt, 1997: 3). 7 Figure 1: The Ladder, 1957. Humour and levity were not common in 20th century lesbian fiction – skillfully written humour remains a rare commodity in what has become popularly referred to by authors and readers as ‘lesfic’ – and is one symptom of the gap between the high output-low literary quality of modern American lesfic romance publishers and the mainstream. This is, I argue, related to the content formula of The Ladder: skilled writers alongside amateur writing – encouraged for sound political and social reasons. The establishment of the lesbian romantic fiction genre through specific lesbian- owned and run publishing houses, notably Naiad Press in 1973, developed in close parallel with the heterosexual women’s romantic fiction of Mills & Boon. Both exhibit a similar literary quality and virtually identical stylistic linguistic norms and structures. This essay interrogates the origins of these norms, rules and traditions. This is, I argue, because the formulae and constraints of popular romantic fiction and the way both heterosexual and lesbian fiction have responded to political and social change in the dominant culture bear examination. Similarly this applies to an examination of the specificities of lesbian romantic fiction – a genre written by and for what was a radically marginalized sub-culture and which is now more visible and correspondingly more mainstream and conservative than hitherto. Joan Nestle, American author, archivist and activist, has described lesbian pulp and romantic fiction of the first half of the 20th century as ‘survival literature’ because it helped to overcome the restrictions and prejudice experienced by lesbian women at that time, when isolation, personal ignorance and fear played a large part in daily lives.

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