In reading current sapphic historical romance, a common motif is for the central characters to provide an early clue to their sexuality by resisting or rejecting the idea of marriage to a man. (Goodness knows, I've used that motif myself in Daughter of Mystery!) But is that historically accurate? No one generalization will hold for all times and places, but when examining the lives of Charity and Sylvia and the several other women that Charity had relationshps with, a common thread is an active disinterest in marriage, to the point where people who knew them had concluded that they'd end up "spinsters" entirely separate from any awareness of their romantic interest in women.
Now one might point out that, in a society with compulsory heterosexuality, a woman who is open to the idea of relationships with men is likely to go ahead and get married, even if she also has desires for women. And there are always women who resist heterosexual marriage for philosophical or health reasons. So a strict one-to-one connection between marriage resistance and sapphic desire isn't accurate. And I sometimes think the motif gets overused in fiction. But it isn't exactly wrong.
When I glanced at the calendar the other day and realized OMG I need a podcast topic for this Saturday, it was easy to decide that I'd write up a mini-bio of Charity and Sylvia this month. Usually, even when my essay research focuses around a specific publication or researcher, I have multiple sources to use, but this isn't the case for C&S. Pretty much there's just Cleves' book, so I'll introduce the topic with a lot more emphasis that I'm basically just doing a book report.
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