She looks at the furore surrounding Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, the subject of an obscenity trial in 1928 and banned because of its lesbian content. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was published in the same year but escaped the censor. The programme includes a rare BBC recording of Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration behind Woolf’s modernist masterpiece.
Contributors include Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters and Ali Smith.
(Thanks, Evecho.)
I’ve listened to the first segment (it’s about 35 minutes) and it’s fascinating. I’m hoping the second part might offer a clue as to why lesbian books (written by or about lesbians) in this country (the US) have cooties while those from the UK no longer do. (Sarah Schulman let off steam on this issue a while ago.)…
…though of course I have theories–which I’m making up as I go along but, okay, here goes. Basically, size matters.
In a big country (like the US), there’s room for burly fiction niches. The sheer number of, for example, SF readers or quiltbag (LGBTQuIA) readers are enough to keep specialised imprints, and publishers, and booksellers, afloat. In a small country (like the UK), they’re not. So in a small country, communities are forced to intermingle. The genre DNA stays mixed. The subspecies (queer books, SF books) don’t diverge too far from the main branch–or perhaps they pull the main branch along with them. Then once societal stigma is lifted (in the UK dykes can get married, adopt children, serve in the armed forces) lesbian literature is quickly reintegrated. Here, lesbian literature is ghettoised. Here, good novels that happen to be written by lesbians and feature lesbian protagonists are doubly shunned: once by mainstream society and then once by the queer literati who want the novel to be about, y’know, The Struggle.
Then there’s class. In the UK the production of literature is historically an upper class pursuit. Eccentricities like, say, fascination with girls or weird science are forgivable if you have enough money, education, and lead in your cut-glass accent to quash objections. In the US, though, writers have been fairly aggressive in fighting for the Man of the People mantle. (All crap, of course, but it’s the legend; all the upper class eccentrics fled to Paris.)
I think Sarah Waters is absolutely right: you can tell when the writer of ostensibly straight fiction is a dyke. There are weird resonances. Ever since I read Daphne du Maurier’s short fiction I knew, as surely as I know this keyboard on which I’m typing exists, that Daphne liked girls. I had no idea if she’d done anything about it, but I knew with vast certainty that she had Those Feelings. One day someone will come up with the same kind of programme to spot textual queerness that the people over at The Gender Genie use to rate text in terms of masculine or feminine (thanks Elisabeth). Then we’ll all have some fun.
Anyway, go listen and let me know what you think.
*** EDIT: Part one has now been taken down, but part 2 is available here for the next five or six days. It’s worth listening to. ***
Nicola Griffith 
I’ve been lurking around here for a little while. I find your theory intriguing: niche marketing actually creating and maintaining stigma.I’m a US citizen. I’ve been the UK a couple of times and have several friends from there. In general, I find the Brits and Europeans more mature when it comes to most things, including homosexuality. The US is like a big gawky teenager, outgrowing her jeans and experimenting with a variety of hatreds in order to soothe a childish inferiority complex and establish some sort of boundary between herself and the more wise. I write a lot of fiction, some of it has homosexual characters. My European friends have never even mentioned it, but Stateside, it’s often the first thing that comes up. Shame, really.Enjoying your blog here. Now I guess I’m going to have to go buy all your books. : )
sex scenes, welcome. Buying my books = a Good Thing :)Yes, the US is very young, culturally. I think it has some important decisions to make about its future, very soon.
I haven’t been able to get that video to work all day. It keeps saying ‘unavailable at this time.’ Maybe all the people you sent there are overloading their server :). Am I the only one with this problem?
Jennifer- I can’t get it to work either. duff
“Sex scenes at Starbuck’s”? Man, did that have me confused. I totally did not get that this was an e-mail handle and kept trying to figure out WHAT sex scenes were at Starbucks, thinking I never saw any sex scenes when I’ve been to Starbucks. So of course, Nicola, its must be much too late in the day for me to understand everything you wrote. But I will come back to it, as I’m sure when my mind is working again it will be interesting.duff
jennifer, duff, huh, it’s definitely offline at the moment. Perhaps the BBC (btw, it’s a radio programme, not tv) is having server problems. Perhaps lesbian books are more popular than they expected. (Wouldn’t that be cool?)
For me it was that I didn’t have the right version of RealPlayer installed apparently. But a freaky thing happened once I re-installed RealPlayer. When it opened up it was supposed to automatically go to the Ban to the Booker show, but instead it started playing something about Hild! Very odd. I dug around and found that it is this show – In Our Time:http://tinyurl.com/5or33oNow, I might have to listen to that too. So far they keep calling her Hilda.Try downloading RealPlayer, Duff:http://tinyurl.com/dgy8dYeah, intriguing name that, SS at S.
Ok, I take it back. The Hild program works, but not the McDermid show. It does not appear to be in RealPlayer format. The same BBC player keeps opening and not working.I did find this page, which indicates the 1st episode is gone, but the 2nd one doesn’t work for me either, says the clip is missing. Determination failed me this time. Time to let it go.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d0hvz
Fran, your problem might have been a RealPlayer problem, but even if you get it sorted, the BBC audio stream is currently down.As for the other programme, yes, I’m familiar with it. I linked to it on this blog a while ago (perhaps that’s why it’s in your RP memory). Melvyn Bragg (i.e. Lord Bragg) the presenter does correct himself to Hild later on. But it’s a nifty programme. Worth listening to.
jennifer, that link works for the second half. I’m listening to it right now…
Well, hell, I guess my RealPlayer’s memory is better than mine…. Maybe I never fully listened to it. I’ll check it out later.Funny thing is after all of that messing around I found a window still open with the BBC player of the 2nd clip loaded up even though when I click on it from their site archive it no longer works. The first epsiode seems to have expired – no longer available.
Not really on topic, but it might amuse (or annoy) you that I’ve just read and sent in my review of a new Swedish crime novel to be published August 28, the third in a series set in a medium-sized Swedish city up north. In this one, the murderer is a predatory lesbian, who seduces less than happily married assumedly straight women, then strangles them when they decide to go on with their husbands. The author is male and a doctor; his preceding novel, sad to say, sold in excess of 50,000 in paperback, which is a lot for a country of nine million. Where, incidentally, the number of novels by Swedish authors featuring lesbian protagonists can probably still be counted if not on your fingers, then almost certainly on your fingers and toes together. So, in a cramped effort to tie this to what someone else has said here, possibly Europeans are more mature in some ways, but at least Swedish literature has some way to go still.
<>So in a small country, communities are forced to intermingle. The genre DNA stays mixed. The subspecies (queer books, SF books) don’t diverge too far from the main branch–or perhaps they pull the main branch along with them.<>It’s a nice theory, but — and I can only speak from the sf side, here — I’m not sure how well it maps on to reality. To me, it looks like the US scene is the one throwing up the confidently genre-straddling writers: Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Karen Joy Fowler, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, etc etc etc. Here in the UK we don’t really have any comparable figures; when Jeanette Winterson writes an sf novel she goes out of her way to insist it’s not sf, and Scarlett Thomas and Nick Harkaway get their books bitchslapped by Newsnight review for daring to be fantastic.
Also: < HREF="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/08/if_lesbian_author_gets_me_publ.html" REL="nofollow">this<> just popped up on the Guardian blog.
Niall, I don’t pretend that this post is a well thought out position. I did warn I was making things up as I typed. Having said that, I do think in years past UK writers of SF have had just a wee bit more respect–e.g. actual reviews in places like The Guardian and The Independent–than writers here. And I’m certain of it with regard to lesbian writers.Are things changing here? In terms of SF, yes. Well, maybe. The big SF novels of the last two years–Chabon, McCarthy–were not labelled as such (skiffy cootes aren’t as powerful as girl cooties, but they’re still infectious). Lesbians, not so much.I liked the link you sent. Sex will always sell and, sigh, we’ve a way to go yet…
john-henri, you know, you’ve really been spoiling my vision of Swedes being practically perfect… :)
Sorry, didn’t mean to come over as dismissive. Just providing some possible counter-arguments. I think you’re right about being taken more seriously in mainstream reviews, although it’s not always a given; I remember the Guardian review of Un Lun Dun, which basically said that sf/f fans would like it because they don’t care about characterisation. On the other hand, Mieville got a sort of honorable-mention we-almost-listed-him in the last Granta Best Young Writers issue.And yes, Ali Smith/Sarah Waters/et al do seem to be doing ok at not being pigeonholed.
You didn’t sound dismissive. Sorry if I sounded touchy–I didn’t feel that way. I just wanted to be clear that the post is a ramble, not a position paper. I do that a lot–just open my mouth and see what flies out :) Sometimes I make myself wince, sometimes I think, damn, that almost makes sense…I do appreciate your engagement and willingness to offer a different perspective.