Both a personal pleasure and an historical resource, this wide-ranging and highly individual collection traces the teasingly elusive figure of the lesbian down the centuries from the ancient world to today.
Lesbians appear both in fact and in fiction, in works by both men and women (Sappho and Swinburne, Emma Donoghue and Charles Dickens); in letters, diaries, trial transcripts and epitaphs, medical pamphlets and case histories as well as in fables, songs, poems and stories. From a kaleidoscopic array of astrological curiosities, marriage resisters, female husbands, bluestockings, runaways, pioneers and menaces, not to mention revolutionaries, gardeners and neglected murderesses, the phenomenon we know as the lesbian emerges.
