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Evolution of a Revolution in Lesbian Literature
TO assess where we are now with our books, let us look briefly at where we've been.
From the perspective of these relatively liberated times, the themes of lesbian literature in the period prior to the 1980's seem rudimentary. The mother novel of our literature, Radclyffe Hall's 1928 The Well of Loneliness, pleaded for the right to our existence, and if the novel ends in an agony of self-sacrifice--Stephen Gordon surrenders the woman she loves because she believes Mary Llewellyn will be better off with a man--it was also our first call for acceptance of our sexual orientation. Rarely over the next several decades would such a call be a factor again in our fiction.
Tragedy-ridden outlaws occupying the fringes of society, misfits destined for self-immolation--these characterizations would pervade lesbian novels, reinforcing the religious and "scientific" belief--and the corresponding conviction in society at large--that lesbianism was pathological. A few exceptions lighted these decades, among them Diana Frederics' 1939 Diana: A Strange Autobiography and Patricia Highsmith's 1952 The Price of Salt, a literary work of remarkable power and affirmation, and generally recognized as the first lesbian novel with a "happy" ending.
In the late 50's and early 60's, lesbian pulp fiction, led by popular authors Ann Bannon and Paula Christian, featured lesbian protagonists against a milieu that Lillian Faderman would sum up in the title of her indispensable 1991 study of 20th-century lesbian society, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. The beautiful, reflective novels of Jane Rule, beginning with Desert of the Heart in 1964, would modify the matrix over the next two decades, illuminating our literature with their intelligence, maturity, and humanity--culminating in perhaps the finest novel of the 1980's, Memory Board. In the late 60's, Isabel Miller would grace us with the eloquent, enduring historical classic, Patience and Sarah.
Clearly, the major sea change occurred during the 1970's. Charging forward under the bugle call of liberation, such revolutionary works as Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love's Sappho Was A Right-On Woman and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's Lesbian/Woman challenged society's opinion of our lives, and firebrand activism began to infuse our fiction. From this context, the reigning queen of lesbian fiction emerged. Rita Mae Brown's influence on the course...