Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 325 - On the Shelf for October 2025

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 325 - On the Shelf for October 2025 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/10/04 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2025.

It’s been quite a month! As I mentioned in the last On the Shelf show, I spent the first two weeks of September visiting New Zealand as my official retirement celebration trip. It sounds strange to talk about taking a “vacation” in retirement, but I disconnected from all my online projects—didn’t even take my laptop with me—and not only enjoyed the wonderful scenery, delightful people, and delicious food, but I spent a lot of time just relaxing and reading. As you’ll find out in the “what I’ve been reading” segment later.

Now I’m back to the routine of rotating between working on the blog and podcast, revising material for the history book, writing some fiction, and other projects. One of those projects needs to be getting back in practice on my harp, because it will feature in one of the podcast stories next month.

And speaking of the podcast fiction series, remember that we’ll be open for submissions for the 2026 series in January. That’s plenty of time for you to brainstorm, write, and polish up your sapphic historical short story! See the link in the show notes for the guidelines.

Publications on the Blog

No new book shopping for the blog, but in spite of the vacation, I’ve been working through my current folder of journal articles. In some cases, this is more like house cleaning than research. Works that I noted as being of minimal or no relevance include Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Brian Arkins’ “Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens”, Christine Downing’s Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, and Martha Reineke’s response to Downing in “Within the Shadow of the Herms: A Critique of ‘Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love’."

A separate article by Christine Downing, “Lesbian Mythology,” summarized some of the classical references to female same-sex desire without muddling it up with the Freudian psychology that was the main point of her book.

Jan Bremmer’s “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty” touches very briefly on the fragments of evidence for sexualized female mentorship in ancient Greece. And finally Max Nelson’s “A Note on the ὄλισβος” discusses the ancient Greek vocabulary for dildos and why this one specific word is erroneously considered to be the proper name for the object.

I have another 15 articles lined up, but I’m trying to spread them out a bit to avoid spending all my creative time on the blog.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

Let’s move on to the new and recent releases, of which there are quite a few. Remember that I’m always eager to have authors, publishers, or even knowledgeable fans tell me about upcoming sapphic historicals. With the demise of a few very useful book blogs, my primary source of information for releases is doing keyword searches in Amazon, and we all know how flawed that site is. I’d love it if authors of sapphic historicals started adding “notify the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast” to their pre-publication checklist. But for now, here’s what I’ve found.

I found three more August releases.

Florence Syndrome by Catherine Martini from Djuna Publishers reflects the role Italy played in expatriate queer communities.

Alessandra Corsi, a 25-year-old Florentine artist, lives for the quiet company of her easel and sketchbook. Her days are spent sketching the masters in the Uffizi, avoiding society, content with paint and silence. Until one August morning she notices a woman falter in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

Elizabeth Hughes is an Englishwoman of thirty-five, visiting Florence after her father’s death, carrying her grief and her careful manners like heavy luggage. Overwhelmed by beauty, she experiences what locals call “La sindrome di Firenze”—a dizzying spell of awe in the face of art. Alessandra goes to her aid, and so begins a journey neither expected: through sun-bleached streets, secret osterie, and the countryside by steam train to Siena, and into the hidden world of an artist’s studio.

As Elizabeth sheds her English restraint, she becomes both muse and lover, discovering a sensual and emotional freedom she never imagined. Alessandra, who thought she knew passion, is undone by the quiet boldness of a woman stepping into her own desires. Against the backdrop of Botticelli’s masterpieces, they find not just beauty but its dizzying cost: to be seen, to be loved, to love beyond rules.

I could swear that I already covered Red Wake, Black Flag by Dahlia Quinn, but it must have been a different novelization of the legend of pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read. There are a lot of them!

Nassau burns with rum, rumor, and the last embers of the Pirate Republic. Anne Bonny—sharp-tongued, knife-sure, and married to a man she doesn’t love—meets Jack Rackham, a swaggering rogue with a smile like a drawn cutlass, and Mary Read, a soldier in men’s clothes with secrets stitched into every seam. As the King’s Pardon curdles and the gallows in Jamaica grow busy, Anne stakes her life on one impossible wager: that love, desire, and a fast sloop can outrun the Empire.

Torn between a dangerous man and a forbidden longing, Anne fights storms, betrayals, and the relentless hunt of a Crown privateer. The sea is cruel—but love can be crueler. And Anne Bonny has never been good at choosing the safe harbor.

Boardwalk Desire by Melody Ashford from Brythonic Publishing adds to the burgeoning genre of jazz era romances.

Atlantic City, 1931. The boardwalk pulses with jazz, secrets, and sin.

Seraphina Rossi, the young wife of a ruthless mob boss, loathes the blonde flapper who once warmed her husband’s bed. But when she crosses paths with Lilly Moreau again—now a dazzling dancer at the club her husband owns—Seraphina finds herself drawn to the very woman she swore to despise.

Lilly is bold, brash, and unapologetically herself. Seraphina is polished, poised, and quietly suffocating. Their collision is electric. What begins as icy disdain melts into forbidden desire, and soon, Seraphina must decide: will she remain the loyal wife in a gilded cage, or risk everything for a love that defies the rules of the underworld?

It's not surprising that I’ve found a few more September books, given that I recorded September’s episode rather early. In fact, I expect to find more September releases next month.

Edale Lane continues her “Tales from Norvegr” fantasy-viking series with Thrall of Deception from Past and Prologue Press.

Ravn Fierceblade, a war hero, is renowned for her loyalty, unshakable duty, and formidable glare. When children in Vestfold go missing, she heeds the king’s call to lead an expedition to recover them.

Svana longs to see more of the world, but as a widowed single mother carrying on her husband’s work as a fisher while raising her baby, she barely has time to dream. Will she ever meet someone who can lift her beyond a mundane existence?

While searching for the kidnapped children, Ravn and her crew travel to Svana’s hamlet. Ravn’s attraction to Svana is inescapable, yet she must not let it distract her from the mission. Uncovering a clue, she investigates further, unsure of the culprit’s identity. Who can Ravn trust? And is a scheme more devious than she could imagine at play—one that could cost the shieldmaiden her life?

Many years ago, Elizabeth Bear put out a fabulous sapphic steampunk duology starting with Karen Memory. Now we get a third story in the cycle, Angel Maker from Sobbing Squonk Press.

Every cowboy story needs a horse no man can ride.

No man—but Miss Karen Memery is all woman. When she and her beloved Priya sign on to do stunts for a motion picture about a rogue Mechanical named Cowboy and a Wild West show, she finds the horse of her dreams: Angel Maker.

Her plans to rescue him from a deadly stunt are ambitious enough, but she’s soon beset by even greater threats when two men are murdered brutally. Cowboy and Priya are arrested for the crime, and Karen must prove them innocent—and save the life of the wild stallion too!

Secrets of the Night by Shelby Banks features a solidly historic Victorian social set-up, though perhaps it overemphasizes a need for the protagonists to keep their relationship secret?

In an age where silence was demanded and passion condemned, two women find themselves bound by fate, yearning for a truth the world would never permit.

Eleanor lives within the grandeur of a vast Victorian estate, yet her days are filled with emptiness. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she drifts through candlelit corridors and echoing rooms, her heart restless for a companionship she cannot name aloud. Clara tends quietly to her ailing father in a modest house, her life one of devotion and sacrifice, her dreams buried beneath duty.

When chance draws them together, a spark is struck in the shadows. What begins as a glance becomes a bond, a recognition that defies the silence around them. In secret meetings by firelight, in gardens heavy with winter frost, in the hush of rain against glass, they discover a love both forbidden and eternal.

And finally we have a solid selection of October releases, though I’m saving one title out for next month when I’ll have the author on the show.

We start with Gold for the Dead (Cantor Gold #7) by Ann Aptaker from Bywater Books.

Early November, 1958

New York City

Art thief and smuggler Cantor Gold's latest underworld caper begins when she arrives at big-time bookie Nick Fortunato's apartment to celebrate his birthday, a ritual the two friends have enjoyed for years. But Nick is missing, and there’s blood on the living room carpet. It’s not Nick’s blood, though. Nick’s death still awaits him. Despite crime lord Sig Loreale’s best plans to protect Nick, with whom Sig has financial dealings, a killer finds Nick hidden away in a cheap hotel owned by Loreale.

The beautiful and possibly deadly Abbey O’Brien was Nick’s right hand in his bookie operation, and now that he’s dead, she stands to either gain big or lose even bigger.

But there’s a surplus of people who have a stake in Nick’s death…and motives to either solve his murder or get him out of the way. And always circling are the cops.

The previous books in Darcy McGuire’s The Queen’s Deadly Damsels series from Boldwood Books all involve male-female romances, but A Lady Most Wayward is sapphic.

Phillipa, Duchess of Dorsett is not your average demure lady in society. For behind her charming smile, she hides a secret and a wicked reputation. Tasked by Queen Victoria to protect the innocent, she’s recruited the most formidable women of the ton - The Queen’s Deadly Damsels. And now they have one final mission…but this time it’s anything but simple… It’s personal.

Lady Olivia Smithwick sold her soul to save her daughter, and in return has made an enemy of the Duchess. But when she’s faced with an offer of Phillipa’s protection and a promise to bring down The Devil’s Sons, she can’t refuse.

As they attempt their mission, together and alone, their simple deal becomes dangerously complicated. Because when their tension makes way for an unexpected desire, the heat between them becomes impossible to ignore. To reveal their true selves is a risk, especially when even one touch is strictly forbidden. But who said it was a good idea to follow the rules?

The Impossible Act of Georgia Cline by Eline Evans involves a cross-dressing plot, but the character identifies as female.

California 1938. Georgia would be pretty happy with her job as a painter in her uncle’s business if it wasn’t for her dream of becoming a cartoon animator. When her application to Disney’s training school is rejected because she’s a woman, she takes on the identity of a man and travels to Los Angeles. Disney hires her as an apprentice, and Georgia steps into a complicated life as George.

On a night out at a swanky Hollywood nightclub with her fellow animators, she meets the beautiful socialite Cara, who suggests they see each other again. Cara, witty and mysterious, is impossible to resist, and Georgia’s mouth speaks a yes when she knows she ought to say no. The job at Disney is as exciting as Georgia has imagined, but her charade as a man is hard to maintain — especially after she falls hard for Cara, who has her own secrets.

Georgia rises quickly in the Disney ranks, but the movie industry is full of ruthless ambition. When Georgia gets on the wrong side of the son of a powerful Hollywood mogul, the lie she has so carefully crafted falls apart. And with it both her dream and her love for Cara.

There are some settings that authors of lesbian and sapphic romance return to again and again. The voyage of the Titanic is one of those, as in Iceberg by Gun Brooke from Bold Strokes Books.

A recent widow, Lady Arabella Grey hires the young and unconventional Zandra Lancaster as governess to her children. Despite Zandra’s impressive recommendations, Arabella is skeptical and unimpressed by Zandra’s youth and artistic nature. But Zandra is brilliant with her daughters, and Arabella’s inexplicably drawn to her.

Zandra harbors secret reasons for needing this position, and when she reciprocates their attraction, her feelings escalate. Impropriety abounds as she craves Arabella’s company and increasingly intimate touch.

An extended trip to Manhattan with Arabella and the children changes everything. As they embark on the RMS Titanic’s maiden voyage, their love is undeniable, but so is their course toward unforeseen danger, risking not only love but their very lives.

A Legacy of Blood and Bone by Millie Abecassis from Row House Publishing feels on the edge of the line between pure fantasy and historic fantasy, but it references a specific historic setting.

Blood is life. Bones are strength. Flesh is control. Skin is death.

Every blessed family knows this mantra, and Aubeline, gifted with blood magic and heiress of the Sterraux family, is no exception.

Aubeline becomes the new Countess of Sterraux after her father’s unexpected passing. But when her brother Renan challenges her and claims the title of count for himself, his ambitions don’t end there. Soon, he also takes control of Aubeline’s guardianship over their niece Damarisse, for reasons tied to the family’s magic. Backed into a corner, Aubeline must seek allies to protect Damarisse, uncover her brother’s hidden agenda, and stop the magical catastrophe instigated by him and his somber allies wielding forbidden, deadly magic.

She never expected her best ally to be Damarisse’s new private teacher, Vinnie—a young woman cursed with an uncontrollable gift of clairvoyance. Nor did she expect to fall in love with her, defying the rigid rules of early twentieth-century France.

Following the pattern that stories set in the classical world always bring myths and gods into the mix, we have Gladiator, Goddess by Morgan H. Owen from Gallery YA.

The Roman Goddesses have grown weary of the rule of Gods and men.

They seek to change the fortune of the world by backing a brilliant young woman.

In Pompeii, Gia dreams of being a female Gladiator, but there is no such thing.

When she wins the favour of Claudia – the beautiful daughter of the Emperor – her star begins to rise in the arena, but so does the risk to her life.

Together, the girls must battle conspiracies to overthrow the Empire, and their growing feelings for one another. Feelings the Goddesses had not planned on.

For a while, we seemed to be getting a lot of re-tellings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Re-tellings of Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla are always popular. But I’ve also started to see a persistent thread of retellings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic gothic story, Rappaccini’s Daughter, as in Her Wicked Roots by Tanya Pell from Gallery Books.

Cordelia Beecher is on the run. In search of her missing brother Edward, she has fled the oppressive charity school she was raised in, desperate to find the only family she knows. Using clues from his past letters, she sets off for the sleepy town of Farrow but everyone there claims to have never heard of Edward—not even the man he was supposedly working for as an apprentice.

With nowhere to go, Cordi turns to Lady Evangeline, a local botanist who owns the magnificent Edenfield estate. The benevolent lady of the manor has made it her mission to take young, often traumatized, women into her employ and protect them from man’s world of wicked desires and deceits. Hired as a maid and companion to her enigmatic daughters, Prim and Briar, Cordi quickly settles into Edenfield. Even as her relationship with Briar blossoms, Cordi can’t help but suspect that there are secrets in the estate…and when she stumbles across evidence that Edward was once there, she’s determined to find answers.

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri from Hachette sounds a bit more on the fantasy side than the historic side, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt because of how much I’ve loved her previous books.

In an England fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.

Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen’s court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other?

As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them.

But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?

Skipping halfway around the world and many centuries later, just on the cusp of what I’m willing to consider “historical” we have When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee from Tor.

Singapore, 1972: Newly independent, a city of immigrants grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters are the last conduits of the gods their ancestors brought with them, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place where magic has not been assimilated and legislated away.

Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight—a girl with a butterfly tattoo–she discovers she’s far from alone.

Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline’s mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she’s dead, Adeline’s bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother’s killer and the gang’s succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls’ dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.

But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.

Other Books of Interest

This next book isn’t historical fiction, but I’m always a sucker for books about historic re-enactment or costume dramas. Check out Toni and Addie Go Viral by Melissa Marr from Bramble.

Hot new author and her lead actress stun fans in a secret wedding—is it all a publicity stunt? Or something more…

On a whim—and hoping to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt her grifter father left behind—Victorian history professor Toni Darbyshire sells her lesbian detective novel in a massive deal. Suddenly thrust into the overwhelming new world of publishing, plus a television adaptation, Toni’s life gets even more complicated when her one-night stand turned pen pal (and the namesake for her main character) shows up in person for casting of the show.

Aspiring actress Addie’s had a crush on the professor ever since she watched her lectures on the Victorian era to prep for a stage role. Now, getting cast in Toni’s TV series could be her big break. But Addie’s in over her head when promo pictures of their fake Victorian wedding go viral. She could lose more than just her heart … and her historically accurate underthings.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been reading? Due to the recording schedule last month, this list covers a month and a half of reading, including my vacation reads. About half of it is audiobooks, but I read a fair amount in print during my travels.

First up are two T. Kingfisher fantasies. Both involve a fairly standard no-nonsense Kingfisher heroine. Illuminations is more on the YA side about a girl in a family of magicians who unwittingly releases a malicious force and needs the help of a talking raven to catch it again. Hemlock and Silver is a bit more on the horror side, featuring a spinster who dedicated her life to finding antidotes for poisons who gets dragged into a command performance treating a king’s daughter with a mysterious wasting condition. The story is structured around Snow White, but the magic mirrors are…something else entirely.

I’ve been enjoying the podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones which is doing chronological deep dives into the late fantasy author’s extensive catalog. This inspired me to check out (or revisit) some of Diana Wynne Jones’s work, starting with the Chrestomanci series, specifically A Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and The Magicians of Caprona. The books are clearly aimed at a younger readership and have certain issues due to being of a particular time (such as the somewhat wince-worthy Italian stereotypes in Caprona), but it’s easy to see why Jones’s book are classics.

The audiobook queue at my local library served up the second Murderbot book, Artificial Condition by Martha Wells, and now I’m about to start the third. These tend to have a long wait-time at the library, so it’ll probably take me a while to get through the series. Back before I started being more careful about my budget, I hadn’t looked into library opportunities for audiobooks. It definitely changes my habits, in that I’m looking at what’s available rather than what I want to read right now.

There were two ebooks that I’ve been meaning to get to for quite some time where I ended up quitting about a quarter of the way through. The Rosetti Diaries by Kathleen Williams Renk just had a few too many plausibility issues in the story of investigating forgotten archives in a church. I also had issues with it being written as diary entries yet not reading like what anyone would actually write in a diary. The second DNF, The Illhenny Murders by Winnie Frolik, simply never grabbed me in terms of the writing style.

On the flip side, I think K.J. Charles could write a shopping list and make it gripping and a page-turner. Her recent release Copper Script combines a mystery involving graphology with a gay romance. I liked the plot, even though it felt a bit rushed at the end.

That Self-Same Metal by Brittany H. Williams is a book that I wouldn’t have heard of except it turned up in my keyword searches for the new releases. It’s the first book in a YA trilogy set in early 17th century England with an engaging heroine who wields metal-based magic, plus Shakespeare, fairies, and a bisexual “why choose” romantic triangle.

In part inspired by the trope series I’ve been doing on the podcast, I picked up the first volume in Cindy Dees’ non-fiction “Tropoholic’s Guide to Romance Tropes” series. It’s more of a reference work than a read-through book. Interesting, but I’m not sure I’ll get the whole series.

And to finish up this month’s reading, I just finished Alexandra Vasti’s Regency romance Ladies in Hating, about two rival gothic romance authors. I haven’t quite made up my mind about the book yet. I stayed up late to finish it, which is a plus, but it felt like the characters cycled through the same crisis over and over again, making it hard to believe in the stability of their relationship. But on the third hand, I got a shout-out in the author’s notes at the end as a research source, so I can forgive a lot.

Author Guest

We have an author guest this month. I managed to miss Raven Belasco’s lesbian vampire pirate story when it came out several months ago, but thankfully she reached out about coming on the show and I was able to make up for that omission.

Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Bray, Alan. 1996. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 9780231102896
- Downing, Christine. 1989. Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love. The Continuum Publishing Company, New York. ISBN 0-8264-0445-6
- Reineke, Martha & Christine Downing. 1993. “Within the Shadow of the Herms: A Critique of "Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love" [with Reply] in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 19, No. 1: 81-101, 103-106
- Downing, Christine. 1994. “Lesbian Mythology” in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 20, No. 2, Lesbian Histories: 169-199.
- Nelson, Max. 2000. “A Note on the Olisbos” in Glotta, 76. Bd., 1./2. H.:75-82
- Bremmer, Jan. 1980. “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty” in Arethusa, Vol. 13, No. 2, Indo-European Roots of Classical Culture: 279-298.
- Arkins, Brian. 1994. “Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens” in Classics Ireland, Vol. 1: 18-34.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
Other Titles of Interest
- Toni and Addie Go Viral by Melissa Marr
What I’ve been reading
- Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher
- Illuminations by T. Kingfisher
- A Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones
- The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones
- The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones
- Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
- The Rosetti Diaries by author
- The Illhenny Murders by Winnie Frolik
- Copper Script by K.J. Charles
- That Self-Same Metal by Brittany H. Williams
- The Tropoholic's Guide to Internal Romance Tropes by Cindy Dees
- Ladies in Hating by Alexandra Vasti
Call for submissions for the 2026 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
This month we interview Raven Belasco and talk about:
- The real historic background of Sadie the Goat and Gallus Mag
- Vampire stories and time-travel stories as mirror images
- Expanding formats
- World-building and inventing languages
- Lesbian sex in the 19th century
- That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story by Raven Belasco
- Sadie the Goat (Wikipedia)
- Gallus Mag (Wikipedia)