Part IV – Modernist Refashionings
A Woman Appeared to Me (Renée Vivien)
Early 20th century French autobiographical novel about the author’s relationsihp with Natalie Clifford Barney.
LHMP entry
Lesbian sex, per se, has rarely been against the law, but in literature the forbidden nature of lesbian relationships encourages entanglement with murder (in both roles), blackmail, and other staples of crime fiction. This chapter, though, focuses more on the act of detection and the ways in which the identification of lesbians and lesbian behavior parallels the solving of mysteries or crimes. As the specific literary examples in this chapter fall after my project cut-off of 1900, I'll just summarize motifs.
