[In the following essay, Castle discusses Warner's Summer Will Show as a lesbian novel.]

What is a lesbian fiction? According to what we might call the ‘Queen Victoria Principle’ of cultural analysis, no such entity, of course, should even exist. In 1885, after the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act outlawing homosexual acts in Great Britain, it was pointed out to Queen Victoria that the amendment only dealt with ‘acts of gross indecency’ between men; women, alas, were not covered. The queen responded—as if to a non sequitur—‘No woman would ever do that.’ Desire between men was conceivable, indeed could be pictured vividly enough to require policing. Desire between women was not.¹ The love of woman for woman, along with whatever ‘indecency’ it might entail, simply could not be represented. According to this primal (il)logic, it would follow, therefore, that ‘lesbian fiction’ is also inconceivable: a non-concept, a nothingness, a gap in the meaning of things—anything but a story there to be read.

We pride ourselves nowadays on having made some intellectual advances on the Victorian position. We know that lesbian fiction, like lesbianism itself, exists; we may even be able to name a few celebrated (or reviled) lesbian novels—The Well of Loneliness, Nightwood, Orlando, The Desert of the Heart, The Female Man, and so on. And yet on what theoretical basis do we make such denominations? What characteristics inform our definition of ‘lesbian fiction’ itself? Is a ‘lesbian novel’ simply any narrative depicting sexual relations between women? If this were the case, then any number of works by male writers, including Diderot's La Religieuse, for example, or some of the other pornographic or semi-pornographic texts of male voyeurism, would fall under the rubric of lesbian fiction. Yet this does not feel exactly right. Would a lesbian novel be a novel, then, written by a lesbian? This can't be the case, or certain of Willa Cather's novels, say, or Marguerite Yourcenar's, would have to be classed as lesbian novels, when it is not clear that they really are. ‘A novel written by a lesbian depicting sexual relations between women’ might come closer, but relies too heavily on the opacities of biography and eros, and lacks a certain psychic and political specificity.

The concept of ‘lesbian fiction’, one has to conclude, remains somewhat undertheorized. It remains undertheorized, paradoxically, even in those places where one might expect to see it brought under the most intense scrutiny—in critical studies specifically dealing with the subject of homosexual desire in fiction. To date the most provocative and influential study on this theme has undoubtedly been Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). This brilliant meditation on ‘homosociality’ in literature, which Sedgwick wrote, as she recounts in her introduction, out of a specifically ‘antihomophobic and feminist’ position, can justly be said to have galvanized the world of gay literary studies, at least as far as that world is presently constituted in the United States.²

And yet how is the question of lesbian fiction handled in this book? The answer, simply, is not at all. To be fair to Sedgwick, she is aware of the omission and candidly acknowledges it in her introduction. ‘The absence of lesbianism from the book,’ she writes, ‘was an early and, I think, necessary decision, since my argument is structured around the distinctive relation of the male homosocial spectrum to the transmission of unequally distributed power relations.’³ In other words, the very terms of Sedgwick's argument do not allow for any consideration of lesbian desire or its representation. But how can this be so?

Put in the most basic form, Sedgwick's thesis (which will already be familiar to many readers) is that English literature, at least since the late seventeenth century, has been structured by what she calls the ‘erotic triangle’ of male homosocial desire. Drawing on the work of René Girard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and especially Gayle Rubin, whose classic feminist essay, ‘The Traffic in Women’, underpins much of the thinking here, Sedgwick argues that just as patriarchal culture has traditionally been organized around a ritualized ‘traffic’ in women—the legal, economic, religious, and sexual exchange of women between men (as in the cherished institutions of heterosexual love and marriage)—so the fictions produced within patriarchal culture have tended to mimic, or represent, the same triangular structure. English literature is ‘homosocial’, according to Sedgwick, to the extent that its hidden subject has always been male bonding—the bonding mediated ‘between’ two men through, around, or over, the body and soul of a woman. In fiction as in life, the ‘normative man’, she writes, uses a woman ‘as a “conduit of a relationship” in which the true partner is a man’ (p. 26).

In a series of bravura readings Sedgwick traces the persistence of the male-female-male ‘homosocial paradigm’ in English writing from Shakespeare and Wycherley through the novels of Sterne, Hogg, Thackeray, Eliot, and Dickens. What she discovers along the way is that homosociality also has its discontents. These arise, not unexpectedly, from the ambiguous relationship between homosociality and homosexuality. The system of male domination, according to Sedgwick, depends on the maintenance of highly charged attachments between men. ‘It is crucial to every aspect of social structure within the exchange-of-women framework,’ she writes, ‘that heavily freighted bonds between men exist, as the backbone of social form or forms’ (p. 86). At the same time, she points out, when these male-male attachments become too freighted—that is, explicitly sexual—the result is an ideological contradiction of potentially crippling magnitude. If a man can become ‘like’ a woman in the act of homosexual intercourse, what is to distinguish such a man from any woman? By doing away with the ‘female middle term’ and blurring the putative difference between ‘male’ and ‘female’, the overt eroticization of male bonds undermines the very conceptual distinction on which modern patriarchy is founded.

How then to separate ‘functional’ male bonds—those which bolster the structure of male domination—from those which weaken it? In Sedgwick's insinuating rereading of patriarchal cultural history, literature itself has been a primary means of resolving, or of attempting to resolve, this potentially disruptive ideological problem. Its solution has been to emphasize, with an almost paranoiac insistence, the necessity of triangulation itself—of preserving the male-female-male ‘erotic paradigm’ precisely as a way of fending off the destabilizing threat of male homosexuality. The plots of classic English and American fiction, according to Sedgwick, are blatantly, often violently, homophobic: in Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, or Dickens's Our Mutual Friend—to take two of her more memorable examples—the homoerotic desire of man for man is shown to lead, as if by Gothic compulsion, to morbidity, persecution, mania, and murder. By activating what she calls the standard plot mechanisms of ‘homosexual panic’, these novels, along with many others, reveal themselves as none too subtly disguised briefs on behalf of the mediated eros of male homosocial desire. The triangular male-female-male figure returns at the conclusion of each story—triumphantly reinstalled—as a sign both of normative (namely, heterosexual) male bonding and of a remobilization of patriarchal control.

The obsession with vindicating male homosociality at the expense of male homosexuality has not been confined, writes Sedgwick, to the works of the English literary tradition. Indeed, in the most ambitious formulation of her argument, she asserts that the entire European literary canon since the Renaissance might be considered a massively elaborated (and ultimately coercive) statement on male bonding. What makes a literary work ‘canonical’, in her view, is precisely in fact the degree of its absorption in the issue of male homosociality. She makes this provocative claim in a crucial passage—once again from the introduction—in which she explains the somewhat idiosyncratic assortment of texts to which individual chapters of Between Men are dedicated:

The choices I have made of texts through which to embody the argument of the book are specifically not meant to begin to delineate a separate male-homosocial literary canon. In fact, it will be essential to my argument to claim that the European canon as it exists is already such a canon, and most so when it is most heterosexual … I have simply chosen texts at pleasure from within or alongside the English canon that represented particularly interesting interpretive problems, or particularly symptomatic historical and ideological modes, for understanding the politics of male homosociality.

(p. 17)

Literature canonizes the subject of male homosociality; in return, it would seem, the subject of male homosociality canonizes the work of literature.

Within such a totalizing scheme, with its insistent focus on relations ‘between men’, what place might there be for relations between women? Sedgwick is aware, or at least half-aware, that her theory in some way fails ‘to do justice to women's own powers, bonds, and struggles’ (p. 18). She freely acknowledges that her reluctance to distinguish between what she calls ‘ideologizing’ and ‘de-ideologizing’ narratives may have led her to present ‘the “canonical” cultural discourse in an excessively protean and inescapable … form’. Yet at the same time she makes it clear that she can offer little in the way of comment on ‘women's own cultural resources of resistance, adaptation, revision, and survival’. She is content to send out a somewhat perfunctory appeal to her readers for ‘better analyses of the relations between female-homosocial and male-homosocial structures’ (p. 18).

If the subject of female bonding sets up a kind of intellectual or emotional ‘blockage’ in Sedgwick's argument, the specialized form of female bonding represented by lesbianism seems to provoke in her, interestingly enough, even deeper resistance. In the one or two somewhat strained paragraphs of Between Men that Sedgwick does devote to women's bonds, she more or less summarily dismisses ‘lesbianism’ as a useful category of analysis. In contrast to the spectacularly polarized arrangement she finds in the realm of male desire, she can see no real cultural or ideological distinction, in the case of women, between homosociality and homosexuality:

The diacritical opposition between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual’ seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men. At this particular historical moment, an intelligible continuum of aims, emotions, and valuations links lesbianism with the other forms of women's attention to women: the bond of mother and daughter, for instance, the bond of sister and sister, women's friendship, ‘networking’, and the active struggles of feminism. The continuum is crisscrossed with deep discontinuities—with much homophobia, with conflicts of race and class—but its intelligibility seems now a matter of simple common sense. However agonistic the politics, however conflicted the feelings, it seems at this moment to make an obvious kind of sense to say that women in our society who love women, women who teach, study, nurture, suckle, write about, march for, vote for, give jobs to, or otherwise promote the interests of other women, are pursuing congruent and closely related activities.

(pp. 2-3)

Lesbians, defined here, with telling vagueness, only as ‘women who love women’, are really no different, Sedgwick seems to imply, from ‘women promoting the interests of other women’. Their way of bonding is so ‘congruent’ with that of other women, it turns out, that one need no longer call it homosexual. ‘The adjective “homosocial” as applied to women's bond’, she concludes, ‘need not be pointedly dichotomized as against “homosexual”; it can intelligibly denominate the entire continuum’ (p. 3; my emphasis). By a disarming sleight of phrase, an entire category of women—lesbians—is lost to view.

In the face of these rhetorically tortured and—for Sedgwick—uncharacteristically sentimental passages, one's immediate impulse may be to remark, somewhat uncharitably, that she has not ‘gotten the point’, so to speak, of pointedly dichotomizing lesbian from straight existence. What may appear ‘intelligible’ or ‘simple common sense’ to a non-lesbian critic will hardly seem quite so simple to any female reader who has ever attempted to walk down a city street holding hands with, let alone kissing or embracing, another woman. The homosexual panic elicited by women publicly signalling their sexual interest in one another continues, alas, even ‘at this particular historical moment’, to be just as virulent as that inspired by male homosexuality, if not more so.⁴ To obscured the fact that lesbians are women who have sex with each other—and that this is not exactly the same, in the eyes of society, as voting for women or giving them jobs—is, in essence, not to acknowledge the separate peril and pleasure of lesbian existence.

Are we then simply to blame Sedgwick for succumbing, albeit belatedly, to the Queen Victoria Principle? I think not—for what I am calling, perhaps too tendentiously, the ‘blockage’ in her theory, is intimately related, paradoxically, to its strength. It is precisely because Sedgwick has recognized so clearly the canonical power of male-male desire—and has described so well its shaping role in the plots of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American literature—that she does not ‘get the point’ of female-female desire. For to do so would mean undoing, if only imaginatively, the very structure she is elsewhere at such pains to elaborate: the figure of the male homosocial triangle itself.

To theorize about female-female desire, I would like to suggest, is precisely to envision the taking apart of this supposedly intractable patriarchal structure. Female bonding, at least hypothetically, destabilizes the ‘canonical’ triangular arrangement of male desire, is an affront to it, and ultimately—in the radical form of lesbian bonding—displaces it entirely. Even Sedgwick's own geometrical model intimates as much. …

Within this new female homosocial structure, the possibility of male bonding is radically suppressed: for the male term is now isolated, just as the female term was in the male homosocial structure.

But one can go still further. In the original male-female-male configuration, we may recollect, the relationship between the dominant male terms was not static. Indeed, this was the inherent problem in the structure from the patriarchal perspective: that the two male terms might hook up directly, so to speak, replacing the heterosexual with an explicitly homosexual dyad. Yet exactly the same dynamism is characteristic of the female homosocial triangle. In the most radical transformation of female bonding—i.e. from homosocial to lesbian bonding—the two female terms indeed merge and the male term drops out. At this point, it is safe to say, not only is male bonding suppressed, it has become impossible—there being no male terms left to bond.

A pleasing elaboration of the Sedgwickian model, perhaps—but does it have any literary applications? If we restrict ourselves, as Sedgwick herself does, to the canon of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American fiction, the answer would have to be no, or not really. Indeed, one might easily argue that just as the major works of realistic fiction from this period constitute a brief against male homosexuality (Sedgwick's point), so they also constitute, even more blatantly, a brief against female homosociality. Even in works in which female homosocial bonds are depicted, these bonds are inevitably shown giving way to the power of male homosocial triangulation. In Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, for example, a novel which explicitly thematizes the conflict between male and female bonding, the original female homosocial bond between Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone (a bond triangulated through the character of the mill owner Robert Moore) is replaced at the end of the novel by not just one, but two interlocking male homosocial triangles, symbolized in the marriages of Robert with Caroline and of Robert's brother Louis with Shirley. True, Shirley represents an unusually tormented and ambivalent version of the male homosocial plot: but even Brontë, like other Victorian novelists, gives way in the end to the force of fictional and ideological convention.

But what if we turn our attention to twentieth-century writing? Are there any contemporary novels that undo the seemingly compulsory plot of male homosocial desire? It will come as no surprise that I am about to invoke such a work, and that I propose to denominate it, without further ado, an exemplary ‘lesbian fiction’. The work I have in mind is Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1936 Summer Will Show, an historical fiction set in rural Dorset and Paris during the revolution of 1848. What makes this novel paradigmatically ‘lesbian’, in my view, is not simply that it depicts a sexual relationship between two women, but that it so clearly, indeed almost schematically, figures this relationship as a breakup of the supposedly ‘canonical’ male-female-male erotic triangle. As I shall try to demonstrate in what follows, it is exactly this kind of subverted triangulation, or erotic ‘counterplotting’, that is in fact characteristic of lesbian novels in general.

Summer Will Show is not, I realize, a well-known piece of fiction—indeed quite the opposite. Even among Townsend Warner devotees it is still a relatively unfamiliar work, despite a Virago reprint in 1987. Warner's earlier novel Lolly Willowes (1926) remains generally better known; later works, such as the novel The Corner That Held Them (1948), the biography of T. H. White (1967), and the short story collection The Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) have attracted more critical attention.⁵ What notice Summer Will Show has received has tended to be condescending in nature: because Townsend Warner wrote the novel during the period of her most passionate involvement with the British Communist Party and intended it in part as an allegory of the Spanish Civil War, it has often been dismissed as a ‘Marxist novel’ or leftist period piece. While not entirely an unread work of modern English fiction, Summer Will Show is at the very least an underread one.

Yet some of the resistance the work has met with must also have to do, one suspects, with its love story, which challenges so spectacularly the rigidly heterosexual conventions of classic English and American fiction. This story begins deceptively simply, in a seemingly recognizable literary landscape—that of nineteenth-century fiction itself. The tall, fair-haired heroine, Sophia Willoughby, is the only daughter of wealthy landed gentry in Dorset, the heiress of Blandamer House (in which she resides), and the wife of a feckless husband, Frederick, who, after marrying her for her money and fathering her two small children, has abandoned her and taken a mistress in Paris. At the start of the novel, Sophia is walking with her children, a boy and a girl, on a hot summer's day to the lime-kiln on the estate, in the hope that by subjecting them to a traditional remedy—lime-kiln fumes—she can cure them of the whooping cough they have both contracted.

Already in these opening pages, given over to Sophia's reveries on the way to the lime-kiln, we have a sense of her proud, powerful, yet troubled nature: like another Gwendolen Harleth or even a new Emma Bovary, she broods over her unhappy marriage and yearns ambiguously for ‘something decisive’, a new kind of fulfilment, some ‘moment when she should exercise her authority’ (p. 11).⁶ While devoted to her children, she also feels constricted by them and infuriated at her husband for leaving them entirely to her care. As for Frederick himself, she harbours no lingering romantic illusions there, only ‘icy disdain’, mixed with a sense of sexual grievance. It is not so much that she is jealous—their marriage has been devoid of passion—but that she resents his freedom and his predictably chosen ‘bohemian’ mistress:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way. Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better. A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old, as old as Frederick or older—this was the woman whom Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

(p. 31)

At the same time, however, Sophia feels an odd gratitude to the other woman: thanks to Minna, Sophia reminds herself, she is ‘a mother, and a landower; but fortunately, she need no longer be counted among the wives’ (p. 20).

All this is to change as a result of the lime-kiln visit itself. With Sophia looking on, the lime-kiln keeper—a silent, frightening-looking man with sores on his arms—suspends each of the children over the kiln. Though terrified, they inhale the fumes and Sophia takes them home. In the next few weeks her attention is distracted by the arrival of her nephew Caspar, the illegitimate mulatto child of an uncle in the West Indies. At her uncle's request, she takes Caspar to Cornwall to place him in a boarding-school. Returning home, she finds her own children mortally ill: the lime-kiln keeper was in fact carrying smallpox and has infected both children. Sophia delays writing to her husband to inform him; yet Frederick comes anyway, having been recalled by a letter written by the doctor who is attending the children.

At once Sophia senses a subtle change in her husband, a mystifying new refinement, which she attributes—balefully, yet also with growing curiosity—to the influence of his unseen mistress. Listening to him repeat the words ‘Ma fleur’ over his dying daughter's sickbed, it seems to Sophia as if a stranger were speaking through him: someone possessed of ‘a deep sophistication in sorrow’. The intrusive cadence, she reminds herself angrily, must be copied from ‘that Minna's Jewish contralto’. Yet afterwards, when both of the children are dead and Frederick has gone back to Paris, Sophia finds herself haunted by a memory of the voice—one that seems, ‘according to her mood, an enigma, a nettle-sting, a caress’ (p. 83).

With the death of Sophia's children, the crucial action of the novel commences. Distraught, grief-stricken, yet also peculiarly obsessed with her husband's other life, Sophia decides to seek him out in Paris, for the purpose (she tells herself) of forcing him to give her more children. Yet, as if driven by more mysterious urgings, she finds herself, on the very evening of her arrival, at the apartment on the Rue de la Carabine where Minna holds her salon. Entering the apartment unobserved, Sophia joins the crowd of guests (including Frederick himself) who are listening to their hostess tell a story.

The story, which is presented as an embedded narrative, is a hypnotic account of Minna's childhood in Eastern Europe—of the pogrom in which her parents were killed, of her own escape from the murderers, and of her eventual rescue by a vagrant musician. The experience of persecution has made her an artist, a story teller, a romantic visionary, and a political revolutionary. As Sophia listens, seemingly mesmerized by the Jewish woman's charismatic ‘siren voice’, she forgets entirely about Frederick and the putative reason why she has come. Suddenly the tale is interrupted: barricades are being put up outside in the streets; the first skirmishes of what will become the February Revolution are about to begin. Minna's listeners, mainly artists and intellectuals who support the revolt, depart, along with Frederick, who has not yet seen his wife. And Sophia, still as if under a spell, finds herself alone in the room with Minna.

She is utterly, heart-stoppingly, captivated. Not by Minna's beauty—for Frederick's mistress is a small, dark, and sallow woman, with ‘a slowly flickering glance’ and ‘large supple hands’ that seem to ‘caress themselves together in the very gesture of her thought’ (p. 127). Yet something in this very look, ‘sombre and attentive’, alive with tenderness and recognition, ineluctably draws Sophia to her. (‘I cannot understand,’ Sophia finds herself thinking, ‘what Frederick could see in you. But I can see a great deal’ (p. 154). Minna in turn seems equally delighted with her lover's wife. Together they look out on the barricades: Frederick is below and now sees Sophia; he is piqued when she refuses his offer of a cab. Minna also ignores him, so he leaves. Minna then confides in Sophia her hopes for the success of the insurrection. Sophia, entranced yet also exhausted, falls asleep on Minna's sofa. When she awakens the next day her hostess is sitting beside her. Inspired by the strange ‘ardour’ of the Jewish woman's attention, the normally reticent Sophia suddenly finds herself overcome by an urge to recount the story of her own life. As if freed from an invisible bondage, she finds herself talking for hours. When Frederick returns that afternoon, he is momentarily ‘felled’ to discover his wife and mistress ‘seated together on the pink sofa, knit into this fathomless intimacy, and turning from it to entertain him with an identical patient politeness’. For ‘neither woman, absorbed in this extraordinary colloquy, had expressed by word or sign the slightest consciousness that there was anything unusual about it’ (p. 157).

Nor, might it be said, does Townsend Warner. The attraction between Sophia and Minna is treated, if anything, as a perfectly natural elaboration of the wife-mistress situation. The two women, it is true, separate for several weeks, in part because Sophia is afraid of the depth—and complication—of her new attachment. While the political turmoil in the city grows, she stays with her wealthy, superannuated French aunt, Léocadie, who tries to reconcile her with Frederick. Yet she is drawn back into Minna's orbit soon enough, when she hears that Minna has given away almost all of her money to the striking workers and is destitute. Outraged with Frederick for ‘casting off’ his mistress (which is how Sophia describes the situation to herself), she determines to fulfil his ‘obligations’ herself. She returns to the now-shabby apartment on the Rue de la Carabine, and finding Minna weak with cold and hunger, decides to stay and care for her. As her absorption in the other woman grows—and is reciprocated—Sophia gradually feels her old identity, that of the heiress of Blandamer, slipping away. As if ‘by some extraordinary enchantment’, she is inexorably caught up in Minna's world and in the revolutionary activity in which Minna is involved.

Meanwhile Frederick, incensed by the alliance between his wife and his (now) ex-mistress, cuts off Sophia's allowance in order to force her to return to him. Yet his machinations serve only to intensify—indeed to eroticize—the intimacy between the two women. When Sophia tells her friend that Frederick has told the bank not to honour her signature ‘as he is entitled to do being my husband’, they suddenly comprehend their desire for what it is:

‘You will stay? You must, if only to gall him.’

‘I don't think that much of a reason.’

‘But you will stay?’

‘I will stay if you wish it.’

It seemed to her that the words fell cold and glum as ice-pellets. Only beneath the crust of thought did her being assent as by right to that flush of pleasure, that triumphant cry.

‘But of course’, said Minna a few hours later, thoughtfully licking the last oyster shell, ‘we must be practical.’

(p. 274)

Townsend Warner, to be sure, renders the scene of their passionate coming together elliptically—with only a cry (and an oyster) to suggest the moment of consummation—yet the meaning is clear: Sophia has severed all ties with the past—with her husband, her class, and with sexual convention itself.

In the final section of the novel spring gives way to summer; the popular insurrection, dormant for several months, flares once again. Inspired by her new-found love for Minna, Sophia throws herself into political activity, becoming a courier for a group of communists who are collecting weapons in preparation for open civil war. Her last contact with her husband comes about when her nephew Caspar suddenly turns up in Paris, alienated and sullen, having run away from the school in Cornwall: Sophia is forced to ask Frederick for money to pay for the youth's schooling in Paris. Without her knowledge Frederick, who now cynically supports the government, instead buys Caspar a place in the Gardes Mobiles, the force opposing the now-imminent June rebellion.

Returning from one of her courier missions, Sophia finds that street fighting has begun in the neighbourhood around the Rue de la Carabine. Minna is already on the barricades. Together they join in the battle, loading and reloading the workers' rifles. The Gardes Mobiles launch an attack on the barricade and Sophia, to her surprise, recognizes Caspar in their midst. He plunges a bayonet into Minna, who falls, apparently mortally wounded. Sophia shoots Caspar in retaliation, but is herself captured and taken away with some other prisoners to be executed, only to be freed the next day because she is a woman. She searches frantically for Minna but cannot discover if she is alive or dead. The revolt has been put down and the workers' hopes seemingly destroyed. Returning to Minna's apartment, yet still harbouring a hope that her lover will return, Sophia opens one of the pamphlets that she had been delivering the previous day. It is Marx's Communist Manifesto. As she settles down to read—exhausted but also arrested by its powerful opening words—the novel comes ambiguously to an end.

I will return to this somewhat curious denouement in a moment: I would like to draw attention first to the more obviously revisionist aspects of Townsend Warner's narrative. For Summer Will Show—as I hope even my highly compressed account of its characters and incidents will have indicated—is a work obsessed with ‘revising’ on a number of counts. In the most literal sense the novel is a kind of revisionist fantasia: in recounting the story of her pseudo-Victorian heroine, Sophia Willoughby, Townsend Warner constantly pastiches—yet also rewrites—Victorian fiction itself. The opening scene at the lime-kiln, for example, both recalls and traduces the episode in Great Expectations in which Pip is dangled over a lime-kiln by the infamous Orlick: the ‘great expectations’ here belong, ironically, to the observer, Sophia herself. The early episodes involving the mulatto Caspar and the uncle in the West Indies likewise rework and subvert elements from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. After Sophia's arrival in Paris, a curiously erotic scene in which Minna shows her her duelling pistols (pp. 154-6) is an almost direct parody of a similar moment in Shirley: Minna's guns are about to be given up to the striking workers of Paris; the guns that Caroline Helstone shows to Shirley Keeldar are their protection against the striking workers of Briarfield. Minna herself is a kind of revolutionary variant on a George Eliot heroine. Her Jewishness and political radicalism bring to mind characters and situations from Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt; her appearance—and passionate intelligence—may be modelled on Eliot's own. Yet she is far more deviant than any Eliot heroine is ever allowed to be. Tellingly, her very name appears to originate in the famous passage in The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie Tulliver declares her wish to ‘avenge’ all the unfortunate dark-haired heroines of English literature—‘Rebecca, and Flora MacIvor, and Minna, and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.’⁷ Maggie's Minna is the hapless heroine of Sir Walter Scott's The Pirate, abandoned by her lover on a frigid Scottish beach. By contrast, Townsend Warner's Minna—with her freedom from convention, her sexual charisma and survivor's instinct—is at once a satirical rewrite of the first Minna and a more resilient version of Maggie herself.

But it is not only English fiction that Townsend Warner is rewriting in Summer Will Show. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek note composed in the 1960s, she revealed that in order to write the book she ‘re-read Berlioz's Mémoires, and with an effort put the French novelists out of my mind’.⁸ Berlioz is certainly there, but so too are the French novelists. The scenes at Minna's Parisian salon have the flavour of Staël and Hugo, as well as of Stendhal and Balzac; Sophia's right-wing aunt Léocadie, along with her egregious confessor Père Hyacinthe, are straight out of La Comédie humaine. But it is Flaubert, obviously, and his novel of 1848, that Townsend Warner is most deeply conscious of displacing. Anyone who doubts the subterranean importance of L'Education sentimentale to Summer Will Show need only consider the name Frédéric—or Frederick—and the parodistic relationship that exists between Flaubert's anti-hero, Frédéric Moreau, and Townsend Warner's comic villain, Frederick Willoughby.⁹

To invoke Flaubert's masterpiece, however, is also to return—with a vengeance—to the Sedgwickian issue of erotic triangulation. For what is L'Education sentimentale if not a classic work, in Sedgwick's terms, of male homosocial bonding? Flaubert's Frédéric, we recall, acts out his emotional obsession with his friend Arnoux by falling in love first with Arnoux's wife, then with his mistress. Townsend Warner's Frederick, by contrast, not only has no male friend, his wife and his mistress fall in love with each other. In the very act of revising Flaubert—of substituting her own profoundly ‘anti-canonical’ fiction in place of his own—Townsend Warner also revises the plot of male homosocial desire. Indeed, all of her revisionist gestures can, I think, be linked with this same imaginative impulse: the desire to plot against the seemingly indestructible heterosexual narrative of classic European fiction.

This work of counterplotting can best be figured, as I suggested at the outset, as a kind of dismantling or displacement of the male homosocial triangle itself. Granted, at the beginning of Summer Will Show, the hoary Sedgwickian structure still seems firmly in place: Sophia is more or less mired in the ‘in between’ position that patriarchal society demands of her. As the only heiress of Blandamer, ‘the point advancing on the future, as it were, of that magnificent triangle in which Mr. and Mrs. Aspen of Blandamer House, Dorset, England, made up the other two apices’ (p. 3), she has functioned, we are led to deduce, as the social mediator between her own father, who has been forced to give her up in marriage in order to perpetuate the Aspen family line, and Frederick, the son-in-law, who has enriched himself by allying himself with the Aspen patrimony.

Yet instabilities in this classic male-female-male triad soon become apparent. The deaths of Sophia's children are the first sign of a generalized weakening of male homosocial bonds; these deaths, we realize, are not just a transforming loss for Sophia, but for Frederick also, who loses, through them, his only remaining biological and symbolic connection to Sophia's dead father, his partner in the novel's original homosocial triangle. Significantly, perhaps, it is the son who is the first of the children to die: in a way that prefigures the symbolic action of the novel as a whole, the patrilineal triangle of father-mother-son here disappears, leaving only a female-male-female triangle, composed of Sophia, Frederick, and their daughter. Even at this early stage, one might argue, Townsend Warner represents the female-dominant triangle as ‘stronger’, or in some sense more durable, than the male-dominant one.

Yet other episodes in the first part of the novel suggest a disintegration of male homosocial structures. When Sophia delays writing to Frederick during the children's illness, her doctor, thinking the absence of her husband a scandal, writes to him without her knowledge. The letter is intercepted by the doctor's young wife, who brings it to Sophia and offers to destroy it. ‘Why should all this be done behind your back?’ exclaims the outraged Mrs Hervey, ‘what right have they to interfere, to discuss and plot, and settle what they think best to be done? As if, whatever happened, you could not stand alone, and judge for yourself! As if you needed a man!’ (p. 72). Admittedly, Sophia decides in the end to let the letter be sent, but the intimation here of an almost conspiratorial bonding between the two women—against both of their husbands—directly foreshadows the more powerful bonding of Sophia with Minna. And as will be true later, a strong current of erotic feeling runs between the two women. ‘She might be in love with me’, Sophia thinks after Mrs Hervey ‘awkwardly’ embraces her during one of their first meetings. Now, as she looks at the letter ‘lying so calmly’ on Mrs Hervey's lap, it suddenly seems only a pretext: ‘some other motive, violent and unexperienced as the emotions of youth, trembled undeclared between them’. Later, they walk hand in hand in a thunderstorm, and Sophia briefly entertains a fancy of going on a European tour with Mrs Hervey—‘large-eyed and delighted and clutching a box of watercolour paints’—at her side (p. 78).

With the love affair between Sophia and Minna, one might say that the male homosocial triad reaches its point of maximum destabilization and collapses altogether. In its place appears a new configuration, the triad of female homosocial desire. For Frederick, obviously, is now forced into the position of the subject term, the one ‘in between’, the odd one out—the one, indeed, who can be patronized. Sophia and Minna do just this during their first supper together, following the memorable colloquy on the pink sofa. Sophia takes it upon herself to order the wine, a discreetly masculine gesture that inspires Minna to remark, ‘How much I like being with English people! They manage everything so quietly and so well.’ Sophia, catching her drift, instantly rejoins, ‘And am I as good as Frederick?’ ‘You are much better’, Minna replies. After a short meditation on Frederick's shortcomings, the two women subside into complacent amity. ‘Poor Frederick!’ says one. ‘Poor Frederick!’ says the other (pp. 161-2).

We might call this the comedy of female-female desire: as two women come together, the man who has brought them together seems oddly reduced, transformed into a figure of fun. Later he will drop out of sight altogether—which is another way of saying that in every lesbian relationship there is a man who has been sacrificed. Townsend Warner will call attention to this ‘disappearing man’ phenomenon at numerous points, sometimes in a powerfully literal way. When Sophia returns, for example, to the Rue de la Carabine to help the poverty-stricken Minna, only to find her lying chilled and unconscious on the floor, she immediately lies down to warm her, in ‘a desperate calculated caress’. Yet this first, soon-to-be eroticized act of lying down with Minna also triggers a reverie—on the strangeness of the season that has brought them together, on the vast distance each has traversed to arrive at this moment, and on the man ‘between them’ who is of course not there:

It was spring, she remembered. In another month the irises would be coming into flower. But now it was April, the cheat month, when the deadliest frosts might fall, when snow might cover the earth, lying hard and authentic on the English acres as it lay over the wastes of Lithuania. There, in one direction, was Blandamer, familiar as a bed; and there, in another was Lithuania, the unknown, where a Jewish child had watched the cranes fly over, and had stood beside the breaking river. And here, in Paris lay Sophia Willoughby, lying on the floor in the draughty passage-way between bedroom and dressing-closet, her body pressed against the body of her husband's mistress.

(p. 251)

The intimacy, here and later, is precisely the intimacy enjoined by the breakup of monolithic structures, indeed, by the breakup of triangulation itself. For what Sophia and Minna discover, even as they muse over ‘poor Frederick’, is that they need him no longer: in the draughty passageway leading to a bedroom, the very shape of desire is ‘pressed’ out of shape, becoming dyadic, impassioned, lesbian.¹⁰

What is particularly satisfying about Townsend Warner's plotting here is that it illustrates so neatly—indeed so trigonometrically—what we might take to be the underlying principle of lesbian narrative itself: namely, that for female bonding to ‘take’, as it were, to metamorphose into explicit sexual desire, male bonding must be suppressed. (Male homosocial bonding, that is; for lesbian characters in novels can, and do, quite easily coexist with male homosexual characters, as Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, or even Orlando in its final pages, might suggest.)¹¹ Townsend Warner's Frederick has no boyhood friend, no father, no father-in-law, no son, no gang, no novelist on his side to help him re-triangulate his relationship with his wife—or for that matter, with his mistress either. To put it axiomatically: in the absence of male homosocial desire, lesbian desire emerges.

Can such a principle help us to theorize in more general ways about lesbian fiction? Obviously, I think it can. It allows us to identify first of all two basic mimetic contexts in which in realistic writing plots of lesbian desire are most likely to flourish: the world of schooling and adolescence (the world of pre-marital relations) and the world of divorce, widowhood, and separation (the world of post-marital relations). In each of these mimetic contexts male erotic triangulation is either conspicuously absent or under assault. In the classically gynocentric setting of the girls' school, for example, male characters are generally isolated or missing altogether: hence the powerfully female homosocial/homosexual plots of Colette's Claudine à l'école, Dorothy Strachey's Olivia, Christa Winsloe's The Child Manuela (on which the film Mädchen in Uniform is based), Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Catherine Stimpson's Class Notes or more recently, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in which the juvenile heroine woos her first love while attending a female Bible study group.

Yet the figure of male homosociality is even more pitilessly compromised in novels of post-marital experience. In the novel of adolescence, it is true, male homosocial desire often reasserts itself, belatedly, at the end of the fiction: the central lesbian bond may be undermined or broken up, usually by having one of the principals die (as in The Child Manuela or The Children's Hour), get married (as in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) or reconcile herself in some other way with the erotic and social world of men (as in Claudine à l'école or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). We might call this ‘dysphoric’ lesbian counterplotting. To the extent that it depicts female homosexual desire as a finite phenomenon—a temporary phase in a larger pattern of heterosexual Bildung—the lesbian novel of adolescence is almost always dysphoric in tendency.¹²

In post-marital lesbian fiction, however, male homosocial bonds are generally presented—from the outset—as debilitated to the point of unrecuperability. Typically in such novels, it is the very failure of the heroine's marriage or heterosexual love affair that functions as the pretext for her conversion to homosexual desire. This conversion is radical and irreversible: once she discovers (usually ecstatically) her passion for women, there is no going back. We might call this ‘euphoric’ lesbian counterplotting: it is an essentially comic, even utopian plot pattern. A new world is imagined in which male bonding has no place. Classic lesbian novels following the euphoric pattern include Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies, Jane Rule's The Desert of the Heart, and Claire Morgan's The Price of Salt, as well as numerous pulp romances of recent vintage, such as Anne Bannon's Journey to a Woman and Katharine V. Forrest's An Emergence of Green. In that it too begins with a failed marriage (that of Robin Vote and Felix Volkbein) even such a baroquely troubled work as Nightwood, paradoxically, might be considered euphoric in this respect: though its depiction of lesbian love is often malign, the novel takes for granted a world in which female erotic bonds predominate—so much so that the very possibility of male homosociality seems negated from the start.¹³

With its insouciant, sometimes coruscating satire on male bonding, Summer Will Show typifies the post-marital or conversion fiction: its energies are primarily comic and visionary. It is a novel of liberation. As Minna says to Sophia at one point: ‘“You have run away. … You'll never go back now, you know. I've encouraged a quantity of people to run away, but I have never seen any one so decisively escaped as you”’ (p. 217). Yet is this the whole story? Given that the novel concludes with Minna herself apparently slain on the barricades, a victim of Caspar (who in turn is the pawn of Frederick), how complete, finally, is what I am calling, perhaps too exuberantly, its ‘undoing’ of the classic male homosocial plot?

That the ending of Summer Will Show poses a problem cannot be denied: Wendy Mulford, one of Townsend Warner's most astute critics, calls it an unconvincing ‘botch’—though not, interestingly, for any purely narratological reason. For Mulford, Minna's bayoneting by Caspar is symptomatic of Townsend Warner's own emotional confusion in the 1930s over whether to devote herself to her writing or to revolutionary (specifically Marxist) political struggle. To the extent that Minna, the story-telling romantic, represents the potentially anarchical freedom of the artist, she has to be ‘sacrificed’, Mulford argues, in order to ‘free the dedicated revolutionary’ in Sophia, who functions here as a stand-in for the novelist herself. At the same time, Mulford conjectures, ‘[Townsend Warner's] unconscious was unable to consent to such a move’—hence the novel's descent into bathos and melodrama at this point.¹⁴

Yet Mulford already oversimplifies, I think, in assuming without question that Minna is dead. Granted, Minna seems to be dead (during the onslaught on the barricade Sophia sees Caspar's bayonet ‘jerk’ in Minna's breast) yet in a curious turnabout in the novel's final pages, Townsend Warner goes out of her way—seemingly gratuitously—to hint that she may in fact still be alive. Though unsuccessful, Sophia's attempts to locate Minna's body raise the possibility that her lover has survived: a witness to the scene on the barricades, Madame Guy, concedes that Minna was indeed alive when she was dragged away by soldiers; her daughter confirms it (pp. 397-8). Later visits to ‘all the places where enquiries might be made’ turn up nothing, but the man who accompanies Sophia reminds her that the officials in charge may be misleading her on purpose—the implication being that her friend may in fact be held prisoner somewhere (p. 399). The ambiguity is hardly resolved even at the last. When Sophia returns to Minna's apartment and takes up the Communist Manifesto, her peculiarly composed attitude seems as much one of waiting as of tragic desolation: far from being traumatized by seeing ‘the wine that Minna had left for her’ or Minna's slippers on the floor, she merely sits down to read, as though Minna were at any moment about to return. The utopian tract she peruses in turn hints symbolically at the thematics of return: if we take seriously the analogy that Townsend Warner has made throughout the novel between her heroine's political and sexual transformation, the inspiriting presence of the Manifesto here, with its promise of revolutionary hope resurrected, may also portend another kind of resurrection, that of Minna herself.

The novelist here seems to test how much implausibility we are willing to accept—for according to even the loosest standard of probability (such as might hold, say, in Victorian fiction) the possibility that Minna should survive her bayoneting by Caspar, an event which itself already strains credibility, must appear fanciful in the extreme. Yet it cannot be denied that Townsend Warner herself seems drawn back to the idea—almost, one feels, because it is incredible. Having offered us a plausible (or semi-plausible) ending, she now hints, seemingly capriciously, at a far more unlikely plot turn, as if perversely determined to revert to the most fantastical kind of closure imaginable.

Without attempting to diminish any of the ambiguity here, I think Warner's restaging of her conclusion—this apparent inability to let go of the possibility of euphoric resolution however improbable such a resolution must seem—can tell us something useful, once again, about lesbian fiction. By its very nature lesbian fiction has—and can only have—a profoundly attenuated relationship with what we think of, stereotypically, as narrative verisimilitude, plausibility, or ‘truth to life’. Precisely because it is motivated by a yearning for that which is, in a cultural sense, implausible—the subversion of male homosocial desire—lesbian fiction characteristically exhibits, even as it masquerades as ‘realistic’ in surface detail, a strongly fantastical, allegorical, or utopian tendency. The more insistently it gravitates toward euphoric resolution, moreover, the more implausible—in every way—it may seem.

The problem with Townsend Warner's novel—if in fact it is a problem—is not so much that it forfeits plausibility at the end but that it forfeits it from the start. There is nothing remotely believable about Sophia Willoughby's transformation from ‘heiress of Blandamer’ into lover of her husband's mistress and communist revolutionary, if by ‘believability’ we mean conformity with the established mimetic conventions of canonical English and American fiction. The novelist herself seems aware of this, and without ever entirely abandoning the framing pretence of historicity (the references to real people and events, the ‘Berliozian’ local colour), often hints at the artificial, ‘as if’ or hypothetical nature of the world her characters inhabit. Metaphorically speaking, everything in the novel has a slightly suspect, theatrical, even phantasmagorical air. Revolutionary Paris resembles a stage set: the rebels near Minna's house are arrayed like ‘comic opera bandits’ (p. 177); a bloody skirmish in the streets is a ‘clinching raree-show’ (p. 171). Trying to convince her to return to her husband, Sophia's aunt Léocadie becomes a ‘ballerina’, with Frederick ‘the suave athletic partner, respectfully leading her round by one leg as she quivered on the tip-toe of the other’ (p. 203). Elsewhere Frederick is a ‘tenor’ plotting with the ‘basso’ Père Hyacinthe (p. 192). The captivating Minna, in turn, is a ‘gifted tragedy actress’ (p. 217), a ‘play-acting Shylock’ (p. 212), or someone ‘in a charade’ (p. 268). Sometimes Minna leaves the human realm altogether, metamorphosing into something from fairy-tale or myth—a ‘Medusa’, a ‘herb-wife’, a ‘siren’, a ‘sorceress’—or a creature out of beast fable or Grandville cartoon. She is a ‘macaw’, Sophia thinks, a ‘parrot,’ ‘some purple-plumaged bird of prey, her hooked nose impending’, or perhaps the ‘sleekest’ of cats (p. 326). Her passion for Minna, Sophia concludes, is like the poet's—‘of a birth as rare / As 'tis of object strange and high … begotten by despair / Upon impossibility’ (p. 289).

These built-in intimations of artifice and romance, of delight and high fakery, present on almost every page of Summer Will Show, work against the superficial historicism of the narrative, pushing it inexorably towards the fantastic. Of course a hankering after the fantastic is present elsewhere in Townsend Warner's writing: Lolly Willowes, we recall, begins as a seemingly straightforward tale about a spinster in an ordinary English village, but swerves abruptly into the marvellous when the spinster joins a coven of witches led by the Devil. Indeed the development of Townsend Warner's writing career as a whole suggests a progressive shifting away from realism toward the explicitly anti-mimetic modes of allegory and fable: in her last published stories, collected in The Kingdoms of Elfin, she dispensed with human subjects entirely, choosing to commemorate instead the delicate passions of a race of elves.

Yet the fantastical element in Summer Will Show, is not, I think, simply a matter of authorial idiosyncracy. Other lesbian novels display the same oscillation between realistic and fabulous modes. One need only think again of Orlando or Nightwood, or indeed of Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Elizabeth Jolley's Miss Peabody's Inheritance, Lois Gould's The Sea Change, Sarah Schulman's After Delores, Margaret Erhart's Unusual Company, Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, or any of Jeanette Winterson's recent novels, to see how symptomatically lesbian fiction resists any simple recuperation as ‘realistic’. Even as it gestures back at a supposedly familiar world of human experience, it almost invariably stylizes and estranges it—by presenting it parodistically, euphuistically or in some other rhetorically heightened, distorted, fragmented, or hallucinatory way. In the most extreme manifestations of this tendency the pretence of mimesis collapses completely. In Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères or Sally Gearheart's The Wanderground, for example, two explicitly utopian lesbian novels, the fictional world itself is fantastically transfigured, becoming a kind of sublime Amazonian dream space: the marvellous inversion, in short, of that real world—‘between men’—the rest of us inhabit.¹⁵

What then is a lesbian fiction? Taking Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show as our paradigm, we can now begin to answer the question with which we started. Such a fiction will be, both in the ordinary and in a more elaborate sense, non-canonical. Like Townsend Warner's novel itself, the typical lesbian fiction is likely to be an underread, even unknown, text—and certainly an under-appreciated one. It is likely to stand in a satirical, inverted, or parodic relationship to more famous novels of the past—which is to say that it will exhibit an ambition to displace the so-called canonical works which have preceded it. In the case of Summer Will Show, Townsend Warner's numerous literary parodies—of Flaubert, Eliot, Brontë, Dickens and the rest—suggest a wish to displace, in particular, the supreme texts of nineteenth-century realism, as if to infiltrate her own fiction among them as a kind of subversive, inflammatory, pseudo-canonical substitute.

But most importantly, by plotting against what Eve Sedgwick has called the ‘plot of male homosociality’, the archetypal lesbian fiction decanonizes, so to speak, the canonical structure of desire itself. In so far as it documents a world in which men are ‘between women’ rather than vice versa, it is an insult to the conventional geometries of fictional eros. It dismantles the real, as it were, in a search for the not-yet-real, something unpredicted and unpredictable. It is an assault on the banal: a re-triangulating of triangles. As a consequence it often looks odd, fantastical, implausible, ‘not there’—utopian in aspiration if not design. It is, in a word, imaginative. This is why, perhaps, like lesbian desire itself, it is still difficult for us to acknowledge—even when (Queen Victoria notwithstanding) it is so palpably, so plainly, there.

Notes

1. To judge by how frequently it is repeated, the story of Queen Victoria's pronouncement has taken on, alas, the status of cultural myth—the ‘truth’ of which is that lesbians don't really exist. Whenever it is retold—even seemingly jokingly, by anti-homophobic historians and critics—it almost always prefigures the erasure of lesbianism from the discourse that is to follow, usually through some equation of homosexuality with male homosexuality only. For an example of this phenomenon see Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 409n., in which lesbianism—and Queen Victoria's views thereupon—are mentioned in a footnote, then never referred to again.

2. Theoretical writing on lesbian fiction remains sparse. Since Jane Rule's somewhat impressionistic Lesbian Images (New York: Doubleday, 1975), most of the criticism written on the subject has tended to be either biographically oriented or focused on lesbian readers, as in Judith Fetterley's ‘Writes of Passing’, Gay Studies Newsletter, 14 (March 1987). Several important exceptions must be noted, however: Monique Wittig's ‘The Straight Mind’, Feminist Issues, 1 (1980), pp. 103-11; Catherine Stimpson's ‘Zero Degree Deviancy: the Lesbian Novel in English’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1980), pp. 363-80; Marilyn R. Farwell's ‘Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination’, Signs, 14 (1988), pp. 100-18; Sherron E. Knopp's ‘“If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?”: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando’, PMLA (1988), reprinted as chapter 7 in this volume; and most recently, Bonnie Zimmerman's The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1988 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990; London: Onlywomen Press, 1991). The most useful bibliographic study of lesbian fiction is still Jeannette Foster's classic Sex Variant Women in Literature (1955; New York: Diana Press, 1975).

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Page numbers of citations are noted in parentheses, Since the publication of Between Men, it is true, Sedgwick has begun to explore the subject of lesbianism (and of lesbian authorship) more fruitfully, notably in relation to what she calls ‘the epistemology of the closet’—the peculiar way in which the reality of homosexuality is at once affirmed and denied, elaborated and masked, in modern cultural discourse. Two of her recent essays are especially relevant here: ‘Privilege of Unknowing’ (on Diderot's La Religieuse), Genders, 1 (1988), pp. 102-24; and ‘Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), pp. 53-72. Even in these seemingly more encompassing pieces, however, Sedgwick's unwillingness to separate herself from the spectacle of male bonding is still in evidence. In the Diderot essay Sedgwick chooses a work which can be labelled ‘lesbian’ only problematically, if at all: as Sedgwick herself says at one point, ‘because of the mid-eighteenth-century origin of the novella and because of its conventual venue, the question of lesbian sexual desire—is what is happening sexual desire, and will it be recognized and named as such?—looks, there, less like the question of The Lesbian than the question of sexuality tout court’. This may be true, but Sedgwick's immediate and seemingly reflexive transformation of the ‘lesbian sexual desire’ she admits to seeing in La Religieuse into a figure for ‘sexuality tout court’—the site at which the ‘privilege of unknowing’ is manifest—might also be taken as a symptom of a certain ‘unknowingness’ regarding lesbianism itself: whatever it (lesbianism) is, Sedgwick implies, it is not worth bothering about in and of itself; it is simply a metaphor for other things that can't be talked about, such as (no surprise here) male homosexuality. Having disposed, at least theoretically, of any lesbian element in La Religieuse, Sedgwick then proceeds to slot the novel comfortably back into the framework of male homosocial desire. Citing approvingly Jay Caplan's observation that ‘this novel has the form of a message addressed by one father to another about their symbolic (and hence, absent) daughter’, Sedgwick concludes that La Religieuse displays the ‘distinctively patriarchal triangular structure’ of male homosocial bonding (p. 119)—thus foreclosing any more complex reading of its erotic relations. Tellingly, Sedgwick wonders at one point whether her own resistance to lesbian desire may perhaps have limited her understanding of the novel, but decides that this can't be so: ‘it would not be enough,’ she reassures her reader, ‘to say that it is my fear of my own sexual desire for Suzanne [Diderot's heroine] that makes me propulsively individuate her as an “other” in my reading of this book’ (p. 120). In the Cather piece, Sedgwick's resistance to lesbianism manifests itself less openly but is still palpable: she is interested in Cather, whom she refers to as ‘the mannish lesbian author’, primarily to the extent that Cather exemplifies a ‘move toward a minority gay identity whose more effectual cleavage, whose more determining separatism, would be that of homo/heterosexual choice rather than that of male/female gender’ (pp. 65-6). In choosing in the story ‘Paul's Case’ to depict a young homosexual man sympathetically, argues Sedgwick, Cather at once performed an act of symbolic contrition for writing a hostile editorial in her youth about Oscar Wilde (‘cleansing,’ in Sedgwick's lurid phrasing, ‘her own sexual body of the carrion stench of Wilde's victimization’) and provided a wholesome model of ‘cross-gender liminality’. That Sedgwick prefers such ‘liminality’ to what she disdainfully labels ‘gender separatism’ (of which lesbian separatism is a sub-category) is obvious: Cather is praised, because like ‘James, Proust, Yourcenar, Compton-Burnett, Renault’ and others she is part of the ‘rich tradition of cross gender inventions of homosexuality of the past century’ (p. 66). Sedgwick concludes with a swooning paean to Cather's The Professor's House, that ‘gorgeous homosocial romance of two men on a mesa in New Mexico’ (p. 68). Lesbian authors, it seems, are valuable here exactly to the extent that they are able to imagine and represent—what else?—male homosocial bonding. Thus the elevation of Cather, Yourcenar, Compton-Burnett and Renault (significant choices all) to an all-new lesbian pantheon: of lesbians who enjoy writing about male-male eros, triangulated or otherwise, more than its female equivalent. What is missing here is any room for the lesbian writer who doesn't choose to celebrate men's ‘gorgeous homosocial romances’—for whom indeed such romances are anathema, precisely because they get in the way, so damagingly, of women's homosocial romances.

4. Witness one of the findings of a survey conducted by lesbian sex therapist Joanne Loulan among 1,566 lesbians between 1985 and 1987. While 80 per cent of all lesbians surveyed reported that they liked to hold hands with their partners, only 27 per cent said they felt able to hold hands in public. This ‘poignant’ finding, writes Loulan, is ‘a statement about the oppression of lesbians in our culture. Heterosexuals assume they have the right to hold hands with their partner in public; most lesbians do not.’ See Loulan, Lesbian Passion: Loving Ourselves and Each Other (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p. 205.

5. Townsend Warner's brilliant and varied writings, many of which touch on the theme of homosexuality, have been sorely neglected since her death in 1978-not least by gay and lesbian readers and critics. Her most enthusiastic admirer, somewhat unexpectedly, remains George Steiner, who in the pages of the TLS (2-8 December 1988) pronounced The Corner That Held Them a ‘masterpiece’ of modern English fiction. Claire Harman's biography, Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), will no doubt help to rectify this curious situation, as should Wendy Mulford's This Narrow Place—Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930-1951 (London: Pandora, 1988), a superb study of the relationship between Townsend Warner and the poet Valentine Ackland, her lover of thirty years. Also of great interest is Townsend Warner's correspondence, edited by William Maxwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982). Besides displaying Townsend Warner's matchless wit and unfailingly elegant style, the letters also demonstrate that she was capable of imagining Queen Victoria's sex life, even if Queen Victoria could not have imagined hers (see letter to Llewelyn Powys, 7 December 1933).

6. Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936; London: Virago, 1987). All page numbers noted parenthetically refer to this edition.

7. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, book. 5, ch. 4.

8. Townsend Warner, Letters, p. 40. Townsend Warner seems to have had Berlioz in mind—and his despairing comment on the hardships suffered by artists and musicians during the 1848 revolution—when she created the character of Guitermann, the impoverished Jewish musician befriended by Sophia late in the novel. See The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, ed. and trans. David Cairns (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969), pp. 44-5.

9. Frederick Willoughby is condemned by his name on two counts of course: if his first name recalls the stooge of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, his last he shares with the unprincipled villain of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. In Austen's novel, we recall, the more hapless of the two heroines is abandoned by (John) Willoughby in favour of a rich heiress. To the extent that (Frederick) Willoughby—now married to his rich heiress—is himself abandoned by wife and mistress both, one might consider Townsend Warner's novel a displaced sequel to Austen's: a kind of comic postlude, or ‘revenge of Marianne Dashwood’.

10. A very similar plot twist occurs, interestingly, in a novel that Townsend Warner certainly knew—and paid homage to in Summer Will Show—Colette's L'Autre, first published in 1929 and translated into English (as The Other One) in 1931. In Colette's novel as in Townsend Warner's, a wife and mistress discover to their mutual delight that they vastly prefer each other's company to that of the man they are supposedly competing for. Colette, it is true, does not eroticize the relationship between her two women characters as explicitly as Townsend Warner does, but her depiction of their alliance (scandalous to the husband) is exhilarating none the less. The Colettian ‘wife-husband-other woman’ configuration turns up again in Townsend Warner's writing, in the slyly comic short story ‘An Act of Reparation’ in Stranger with a Bag (London: Chatto & Windus 1961). Here a divorced woman named Lois accidentally meets the young, somewhat befuddled new wife of her former husband while out shopping. After the young woman confesses her anxiety about cooking, Lois goes home with her and shows her how to make oxtail stew. The husband, returning home, smugly concludes that Lois is trying to win him back by showing off her superior culinary skills; but Lois herself knows she is merely performing an ‘act of reparation’ to the young wife, whom she now pities, with unexpected tenderness, for being stuck with the boorish ex-husband.

11. That overtly lesbian and gay male characters often end up inhabiting the same fictional space makes a kind of theoretical as well as mimetic sense: if the imperative toward heterosexual bonding in a fictional work is weak enough to allow one kind of homosexual bonding, chances are it will also allow the other. Two lesbian novels lending support to this idea are May Sarton's Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and Jane Rule's Memory Board, both of which include important male homosexual characters.

12. I borrow the euphoric/dysphoric distinction from Nancy K. Miller, who in The Heroine's Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) uses the terms to refer to the two kinds of narrative ‘destiny’ stereotypically available to the heroines of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. A euphoric plot, Miller argues, ends with the heroine's marriage; a dysphoric plot with her death or alienation from society. That the terms undergo a dramatic reversal in meaning when applied to lesbian fiction should be obvious: from a lesbian viewpoint, marriage can only be dysphoric in its implications; even death or alienation—if only in a metaphoric sense—may seem preferable.

13. The reader may object, rightly, that the most famous lesbian novel of all, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, does not seem to fall clearly into either the euphoric or the dysphoric category. It may well be that we need to devise a new category—that of ‘lesbian epic’—to contain Hall's manic-depressive extravaganza. True, in that it manages to work unhappy variations on both the pre-marital and the post-marital plot types (Stephen's first love, Angela, is a married woman who refuses to leave her husband; her second, Mary, leaves her in order to marry a male friend), The Well of Loneliness often leans in a dysphoric direction. Yet the introduction midway through the novel of the Natalie Barney character, Valérie Seymour, and Hall's tentative limnings of a larger lesbian society in Paris, also seem to promise an end to Stephen's intolerable ‘loneliness’—if only in some as yet ill-defined, unknown future. With its multiplying characters and sub-plots, constant shifts in setting and mood and powerfully ‘ongoing’ narrative structure, The Well seems more a kind of Homeric or Tennysonian quest-fiction—a lesbian Odyssey—than a novel in the ordinary sense.

14. Mulford, This Narrow Place, op. cit. pp. 121-2.

15. That lesbian novelists have been drawn to science fiction should come as no surprise; to the degree that science fiction itself is a form of utopian fantasy, one that posits a fictional world radically different from our own, it lends itself admirably to the representation of alternative sexual structures.