Intimate Friends ― Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928

Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings.

Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris.

In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

Martha Vicinus is the Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor of English, Women's Studies, and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author or editor of numerous works, includingHidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, andIndependent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.