Episode Details

On the Shelf for June 2025 The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 316 with Heather Rose Jones

Your monthly roundup of history, news, and the field of sapphic historical fiction.

In this episode we talk about:

• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Bronski, Michael. 2012. A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History). Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0807044650
  • Rouse, Wendy L. 2022. Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 9781479813940
  • Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
  • Boag, Peter. 2011. “The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West” in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 3: 322-339
  • Brown, Judith, C. 1986. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-504225-5
• Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
  • An American in Paris by Margaret Vandenburg
  • Whispers of Love Beneath the Hidden Manor by Aiyo Sa
  • The Ladies by Caitlin Crowe
  • The Eye of the Water: Between Creek and Roots by Stephanie Hager-Lyons
  • A Soft Place to Land by Kelsey Kranz
  • Lady's Knight by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner
  • Six Wild Crowns by Holly Race
  • Daughter of Doom by Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem
  • A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell
  • Murder by Proxy (Meredith and Alex Thatch Mystery #3) by Rachel Ford
  • Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
• Other Titles of Interest
  • Damsels and Dinosaurs by Wren Jones
  • By Her Sword: A Sapphic Fantasy Romance Anthology (Sunset Wave Sapphic Anthologies #2) edited by Erin Branch
• What I’ve been consuming
  • Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
• This month we interview Joanna Lowell and talk about:
  • Working with historical language and issues around characters who don’t fall neatly in the gender binary
  • How her previous books connect together
  • Actor Charlotte Charke as an inspiration for the character of Georgie
  • Theater as a place for queer themes
  • Avoiding being locked into incorrect historical tropes
  • How the novels of Alexis Hall and Sarah Waters work differently with gender
  • The difficulty of getting away from modern identity categories
  • Books Joanna has recently enjoyed: