One of the serendipitiously enjoyable things about deep dives into history is discovering personal connections between unexpected people. When I did my podcast on actress Charlotte Cushman, I was stunned by how she fit into an enormous network of literary, political, and artistic women of the mid 19th century, operating across Europe and America. My imagined "girl gang" here is purely one of the imagination. Fanny Hill was a fictional character--the protagonist of John Cleland's novel about a "woman of pleasure" (i.e., prostitute) whose sexual initiation by another woman brings her under the scope of this project. Catherine Vizzani was a real person--a cross-dressing woman-loving adventuress--immortalized after death in a biographical and medical treatise by the Italian anatomist her performed her autopsy. Cleland produced a heavily abridged translation of that treatise for an English audience. Lady Mary Whortley Montagu was a traveller, a writer on Ottoman Turkey, a feminist, and a proponant of women's rights and freedoms, including sexual freedom (as practiced in her own life). Donato's article explores the intersection of those figures and puts forth a theory that one purpose of Cleland's translation of Vizzani's story was as a thinly disguised satire on Montagu. But I'm imagining a different intersection, somewhere in the historico-literary afterlife, where the three women get together to dish, compare stories, and laugh at the men who tried so hard to thwart them.
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