Author Spotlight: Marianne Ratcliffe
This month, we're excited to bring you a guest post by Marianne Ratcliffe, author of the club read A Lady to Treasure. Marianne's post discusses historical sapphic books and how A Lady to Treasure addresses some common concerns about historical fiction - read on to hear more!
Why are so many lesfic readers wary of historical fiction?
As a writer of historical sapphic fiction, it pains me to see so many lesfic readers state they do not like it and/or will never read it. It also confuses me a little, because where sapphic books have hit the mainstream, many of them are historical (think Tipping the Velvet, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Gentleman Jack). What’s going on? I recently asked this question on Twitter and received some interesting responses.
Firstly, several people told me they loved sapphic historicals, and that there weren’t enough of them! As you can imagine, this was music to my ears. Of those that were wary, the main reasons were:
- Readers want joyful stories with Happily Ever Afters (HEAs), not another miserable story of oppressed queer folk who can never be together.
- Many people didn’t want to read about homophobic bigotry, or closeted gays.
- Some responders had issues with historical fiction when it is not well researched, and found inaccuracies or anachronisms are off-putting. (I completely agree with that one!).
- In too many historical novels, women have no agency and their lives and choices are dominated by men.
- Readers aren’t always sure what they’ll get with a historical novel (unlike the case with contemporary romance).
- Historical fiction is obsessed with wars, or endless descriptions of frilly dresses and lace.
A lot of this makes sense to me. We’ve had our fill of depressing stories. Some classic lesbian books have a lot to answer for (Well of Loneliness, I’m looking at you!). But I believe this makes it even more important to write positive stories about lesbians of the past, in order to redress the balance. For so many years our stories were hidden, unable to be told, or were permitted only if the lesbians came to an unhappy end (e.g the lesbian pulp fiction of the ’50s and ’60s). It is time to reclaim our past. Of course, it can be challenging to find the joy in less enlightened eras and make such stories convincing. But we historical fiction writers relish a challenge!
The good news is that there’s plenty of life-affirming, patriarchy-rejecting, HEA lesbian fiction set in the past. As it happens, I’ve written a couple of them myself. I’d love for you to give them a try. You can see what to expect (and what not to expect!) in A Lady to Treasure in the graphic below. The book has been described by best-selling Regency romance author Jane Dunn as “A terrific story…full of the love, wit and creativity of women.”
