You ever imagine one of those so-crazy-no-editor-would-ever-buy-it romance plots? F/f regency romance with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a significant supporting character. Bastard daughter of a Scottish earl. Beautiful socialite whose baby-daddy fled to America. Marriage of convenience. Secret baby. Gender disguise. Beauty and the beast. Making a living by publishing under multiple pen names. Foreign travel. Brittle witty people engaging in flirtation and back-biting gossip in Parisian salons. Over-the-top Gothic poetry about dead loves. Mysterious chronic illness. Fleeing one step ahead of the creditors. Dying in a squalid debtor's prison.
One of the most consistent experiences I've had while working on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been: "How could I have had a book this marvelous sitting on my shelf for 20 years and never realized it?" I mean, really. I buy a lot of books. Books that look interesting, but then they get cataloged and put on the shelf and boxed and moved and boxed and moved. And then one day, for some reason, I pick them up and say, "Let's see what you've got." And sometimes what they've got is fireworks.
I knew--vaguely--what the topic of this book was. What I didn't realize until I started reading it was how wonderfully it was structured as a guided tour through the research process. What began as a quest to fill out the details of two footnotes turned into a research project that took over a decade and turned up a story so implausible that I'd have to tone it down to write it as fiction. I'd like to be clear that the story of Mary Diana Dods has not been proven to be a lesbian story--no more so than any early 19th century life involving romantic friendships, female husbands, and women's communities supporting each other. But it provides a model for how you could write a lesbian Regency romance that would blow expectations out of the water. I've previously emphasized how surprisingly easy it was to accomplish gender disguise in previous centuries. But Dods' story also points out how plausible it is for a passing woman to be supported in her disguise by friends and family. Too often, in historical fiction, we isolate our protagonists and depict them as struggling alone with a dangerous secret. Understanding that such protagonists could have been supported, encouraged, and protected by a community that knew all their secrets opens up a lot more plot possibilities. It also points out several avenues other than gender disguise that women could use to arrange to share independent lives together. Like: the number of women who seem to have moved to a new community and simply announced that they were wives of absent or deceased husbands and who thereafter achieved widow's privilege and respectability.
If, like me, you come out of the end of this academic mystery tour and want to look at the timeline of Dods' life in a more straightforward manner, I'll be posting my attempt at a rough timeline in a day or two and linking it both here and in the book entry below.
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