This book chapter very conveniently lays out the problem of the historical novelist: given a general life story that is compatible with--but not prescriptive of--lesbian experience, how do we fill in the more detailed social context that establishes both the plausibility of our proposed story and how our characters would experience it on a day to day basis? Not that this is what Hitchcock is trying to do. After all, historians are not supposed to be looking to prove theories about specific individuals, but to determine what is actually knowable about them. ("Not supposed to" though of course historians regularly work very hard to prove personal theories about historic people.)
This is the case in so much research about specific individuals whose lives appear briefly in the historic record and where we long to establish a more direct and concrete personal connection regarding identity. It's entirely too easy for "we can't really know how this specific historic person understood their life" to turn into erasure of entire categories of identification simply because those categories always involve ambiguous and incomplete data. But at the same time, when that data is ambiguous and incomplete, it's also easy for the drive for personal identification to turn into erasure of the other possible understandings a person had of their life.
Examining the people, beliefs, and practices of an era through the conceptual lens of same-sex relationships as Hitchcock does here can highlight many of those other possibilities as well, if only because it asks the question, "What if we utterly reject the normative paradigm?"
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