Books
Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel
Duke University Press, 1997
Dangerous Intimacies was one of the first books to challenge the idea, common in feminist and queer studies, that sex between women was unimaginable before the late nineteenth century.
"By consistently attending to the often selfish leveraging of race and class in stories of female homosexual passion, Dangerous Intimacies emerges as a valuable cautionary tale and a timely complication in the bedtime story of romantic friendship."
— Bonnie Blackwell, Eighteenth-Century Studies
Dangerous Intimacies was one of the first books to challenge Intimacies challenges the idea, common in feminist and queer studies, that sex between women was unimaginable before the late nineteenth century. Lisa L. Moore argues that literary representations of female sexual agency—and in particular "sapphic" relationships between women—were central to eighteenth-century ideas about modern subjectivity.
Moore shows how the novel’s representation of women’s "romantic friendships"—both platonic and sexual—were encoded within wider social concerns regarding race, nation, and colonialism. The book includes lively readings of Sarah Scott’s utopian Millennium Hall, John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Maria Edgeworth’s recently-reprinted, now-classic domestic comedy Belinda, and Jane Austen’s Emma. It concludes by showing how love between women even makes an appearance in the early feminist theory of Mary Wollstonecraft.