Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 356 - On the Shelf for November 2026

Saturday, November 7, 2026 - 07:00

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 356 - On the Shelf for November 2026 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2026/11/07)

Welcome to On the Shelf for November 2026.

With apologies to my non-US listeners who may have only a tangential interest, was that an election or what! Ever since 2016 (when Trump’s win stomped all over my book release for Mother of Souls) I’ve approached elections with an underlying sense of dread. I wasn’t daring to hope for much this time around, so it was all the sweeter. I mean, here in California we’ve gotten used to a Democratic sweep, even if they don’t always live up to the highest ideals (*cough* Newsom *cough*), so we have some sympathy for our international neighbors who watch the whole thing with a sense of helplessness. Still a long road to walk things back from the brink, but it feels like at least we’ve turned the bus around.

Turning back to lesbian history topics, I’ve been making some significant progress on the book version of the Project, especially in terms of structural organization. As I briefly mentioned last month, I’ve concluded that the book really needs to be split into multiple separate projects to kept the length manageable. My current vision is for the basic book to cover the historic material. A separate, shorter book will cover the “tropes and character types” that I’ve been presenting as “Our F/Favorite Tropes.” Then there will be a series of short pamphlets providing integrated information for specific settings, like the one on How to be a Lesbian in the English Regency that I’ve talked about previously. I’ve been thinking about starting to do regular updates and maybe teasers about this for my Patreon subscribers. I’ll let you know if I do, because I’d be restricting it to paid Patrons.

Keep thinking about the submissions period for the fiction series and spread the word to your writer friends. January will be the last opportunity to submit short stories to the podcast’s fiction episodes. The Call for Submissions is linked in the show notes and provides important information.

I’m feeling like a slacker on lining up interviews for the show. I have correspondence going with half a dozen authors, but keep falling down about scheduling things. (This is why I don’t announce interviewees until I actually have the recording done.) It isn’t from lack of excitement about the people involved, it’s just one of the ways my brain can fail me.

Publications on the Blog

On the blog I discussed the second book on intersexuality that I read for last month’s podcast: Anne Linton’s Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Now I’ve returned to my folder of journal articles and have started on ones relating to classical Greece and Rome, starting with yet another analysis of what (if anything) Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans can tell us about actual women loving women. This was Errietta Bissa’s “Man, Woman or Myth? Gender-bending in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans.”

Book Shopping!

And I’ve bought two new relevant books. Anne Carson being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature reminded me that I didn’t yet own If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, which presents and translates all the fragments of Sappho’s work known to exist at the time of publication. (Every once in a while, a new fragment is discovered, typically in Egyptian tombs.) I love the layout, with each fragment, no matter how short, being given its own page.

I also had one of those times when reading the notes and bibliography in an article sent me immediately to pick up the work being referenced. In this case, it was the collection Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, which has a couple of articles specifically addressing Foucault’s flaws with regard to his treatment of women.

AI and My Philosophy

Before I move on to the new historical fiction titles, I want to reiterate my policy that I will not knowingly promote books written using large language models. As I’ve said previously, I’m not going to be perfect, but I use a set of criteria to guide my decisions. One of those criteria is that a book gets heavier scrutiny if it uses what appears to be an AI-generated cover. This month fully half the books that I did end up including appear to have AI-generated covers. This makes me sad. But not as sad as the next item.

Another one of my criteria is that a book gets extra scrutiny if the author is generating AI-translated editions. For both of these criteria, my reasoning is that if an author is willing to cut out human creativity for their covers and translations, there’s a much higher chance that they’ve also cut corners on the original text. This month, while I was running my usual book searches at Amazon, I was startled to find a number of multi-language translations of titles from Bold Strokes Books. On discussing this with people in the know, this is something that Bold Strokes has begun offering their authors as an option. This puts me in a dilemma. If I choose not to include titles based on a habit of AI translation for self-published authors, why should I overlook the practice simply because the books are put out by a small press?

I hate that what began as a project of sharing joy about sapphic historical fiction has turned into a constant ethical conundrum. To say nothing about the extra work I’m putting in to try to curate what I support. I’m not willing to throw in the towel and list every title I find, with no filtering. And I’m not willing to give up and stop sharing new release information—given how solidly it anchors these “on the shelf” episodes. These are both choices that I’m making. I know that authors appreciate the extra boost they might get from being included. I hope that readers appreciate the curation. But I’m tired.

I also want to lay some personal cards on the table. The French translation of my novel Daughter of Mystery—which used a human translator, thank you very much—has cover art that I’m pretty certain is AI generated. I had nothing to do with that choice and when we were struggling through the contract negotiations, it hadn’t occurred to me that it was something I should specify. I won’t make that mistake again, but it means that I can’t promote the book in spaces that don’t allow AI covers. I have also used translation software to assist my historic research, when an English translation of a historic text isn’t already available. I wouldn’t use it for a literary text. I wouldn’t use it to translate from English into another language. And I wouldn’t use it without detailed review and revision of the results. But I do plan to publish a translation and commentary on an 18th century French legal text that I produced in 2021 with the assistance of Deep-L, a program that predates the current AI fad. So I’m not claiming any moral purity here. Negotiating this topic is a constant struggle and a matter of continually deciding where to set boundaries and what consequences to accept. So I will continue to share what my boundaries are, as I make those decisions.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

OK, everyone take a deep breath. Smell some roses or pet a cat. And let’s take a look at some new lesbian and sapphic historical fiction. As usual, I’ve condensed some of the cover copy for reasons of length.

September books start with the intriguing A Witch Willful and Cunning by Esme Marchbank.

Saltcote, Norfolk, 1783. Keziah Gedge is the only help the village has. Then a licensed apothecary buys the empty shop and puts her own name over the door. Keziah stops blood with her hands. She turns babies that are coming wrong, sits with the dying, and takes what the parish can pay her: eggs, eels, a goose at Michaelmas, a shilling when there is one. The village calls her a cunning-woman. She has never claimed to be anything more than a woman who knows her work.

Leonora Quarles weighs, writes down, and charges what it costs. They are rivals for the same parish and they are very good at two different things. Keziah can do what Leonora has only read of. Leonora can do what Keziah has no book for. What starts in the back room of a shop with the door bolted does not stay there, and by the end of the summer they are in the herb loft, in a hut on the marsh in a squall, and in the bed above the shop with the stays unlaced a hole at a time.

Then a child dies, and a physician from Wells who wants the parish’s paid work explains the law to a young curate. Under the statute, nobody is punished for witchcraft. A woman is punished for pretending to it. Leonora is called to the sessions as the expert witness. For the prosecution. She will not lie, and she will not say the word they need her to say.

Lately I’ve been a bit picky about settings that move into the ‘60s or later. I guess my gut instinct is that a book isn’t historical if it’s set within my own lifetime. But my interest was caught by Confessions of a Former Femme Fatale (The Sapphic '60s #2) by Eve Noble.

1961: Thelma Blake was the first Black woman to play a villain on network television, and she was magnificent. Thirty million Americans watched Nightshade purr in purple sequins every Wednesday night—until Thelma used her platform to speak up about civil rights at a Kennedy fundraiser. Hollywood blacklisted her, destroyed her career, and branded her crazy. So Thelma Blake drove her car off Mulholland Drive and disappeared.

Two years later, in 1963, she’s reinvented herself as Elle Brown, a mousy waitress keeping her head down in a New Orleans bar. No fame. No voice. No risk. Then she meets Dominique LeJeune. Dom walks in wearing a sharp suit and an easy smile, and everything changes. She’s a street-boxer using all the money she makes to keep her grandfather’s struggling bar afloat, a civil rights activist, and a single mother who took in a boy from his abusive father—a father who couldn’t accept that his child was a boy.

Dom doesn’t know about Hollywood or Nightshade. She just sees a woman who needs protecting, and that’s enough to make Elle fall completely. For the first time since Mulholland Drive, Elle starts to believe in the family they’re building together. But the bar sits at the heart of New Orleans’ civil rights movement, organizing the Canal Street sit-ins that will explode into two years of violence and resistance. The movement needs voices—fearless ones, unforgettable ones. And in a city that runs on stories, someone will recognize Nightshade’s purr.

Her invisibility is running out. Elle will have to choose: lend her voice to the movement and risk losing everything she’s built, or stay silent and keep the safety of her anonymity.

The October books start with an adventure set in a historically-inspired India of uncertain date: The Fire Beneath Her Crown by Preeti Setiya. The cover appears to be AI-generated.

A queen who signed the warrant. A rebel who never stopped loving her. A kingdom that will force them both to answer for the past. Seven years ago, Ishani Rathore chose the royal seal over Zoya, the woman she loved, and shattered the life they had imagined together.

Now rebellion has come to Ruhangarh. Zoya returns as a commander, sword in hand, and finds Ishani trapped in the machinery of a corrupt court. The two women must fight side by side, but victory cannot erase Ishani's betrayal, and longing is not the same as forgiveness. As their old love reignites amid political upheaval, both women must decide whether honesty, courage, and the daily work of rebuilding can give them the future the palace stole.

Sweet Amber and Gold by Karen Hunter Watson from NOWTIME Media has a gorgeous cover which, alas, appears to be AI. Although it isn’t indicated in the description, the cover shows the main characters as Black.

Set in the turbulent years of the 1870s, we follow Christina and Katherine, two determined sisters who leave Missouri behind in search of a new beginning in San Francisco—a city alive with promise, uncertainty, and reinvention.

Along the way, they encounter new friendships, unexpected challenges, and people whose courage and unconventional lives challenge the expectations of their time.

Art is central to The Orchard Blooms Again by Pamela Lynn Goodman, which makes it ironic that it, too, appears to have an AI cover.

Julia Evans is a gifted Maine painter whose life revolves around her art. After years of disappointing relationships and a growing sense that something is missing, she has nearly given up on finding a love that feels real. Then she meets Evelyn Horne.

Evelyn is unlike anyone Julia has ever known. She is intelligent, artistic, compassionate, and the unexpected owner of a magnificent coastal estate filled with priceless paintings, antiques, and secrets hidden for generations. Drawn together by their shared love of art, the two women form an unlikely friendship that slowly develops into something deeper.

When Evelyn invites Julia to live at the estate and gives her a studio where she can create, Julia discovers a forgotten room filled with unfinished paintings. As she begins to transform the abandoned canvases into her own works of art, something strange happens. The paintings seem to have a life of their own.

The mystery leads them into secret rooms, forgotten letters, old diaries, hidden paintings, and a heartbreaking story about two women who lived and loved more than a century earlier. A love that was condemned. A love that was violently torn apart. A love that someone believed would find its way back.

They Taught the Witness to Cry by Colton Matthews is a rather different mystery. The cover art does appear to be AI.

Seattle, 1949. Theater director Cecily Rusk knows how to help frightened people speak. When she takes a job preparing residents for a civic housing inquiry, she insists on one rule: never put words in a witness's mouth.

Then witnesses with different stories begin using the same polished phrases. Pages claiming to be extracts from private coaching sessions reach the press. Suddenly the people who know what happened sound as though they rehearsed it—and a neighborhood's fragile chance to purchase one of its buildings is running out of time. Someone has found a way to defeat the truth without disproving it: make it look manufactured.

To uncover who altered the instructions, Cecily follows a trail of copied pages, disputed repair records, and carefully chosen omissions. Her most valuable ally may be Ida Holbrook, the meticulous stenographic reporter who once loved her—and whose trust Cecily lost years ago.

In November we get an addition to the constantly-growing Jane Austen spin-offs with this possibly gothic-tinged story: A Truth Unacknowledged by Ellen Crowe.

Charlotte Lucas has always prided herself on making sensible choices. Marrying Mr Collins was one of them. Giving up Elizabeth Bennet was another. Or so she thought.

Twenty-two years later, Charlotte has settled into the comfortable life of a clergyman's wife. Her husband is as tiresome as ever, but her home is her own, and her devoted maid, Joanna, makes married life rather more bearable than she had expected. Then Elizabeth Darcy returns. Once Charlotte's dearest friend and the woman who broke her heart, Elizabeth has never quite forgiven her for choosing Mr Collins. But old resentments soon give way to familiar affections, and before long, the two women are making up for lost time.

There is just one problem. Joanna has secrets of her own, and she has no intention of losing Charlotte to the woman who abandoned her twenty-two years ago. As stolen moments give way to dangerous suspicions, Charlotte must decide how far she is willing to go for a love she once sacrificed.

I confess I was a little surprised when I saw that Bloom Town: Genesis (Bloom Town #1) by Ally North was published by Dell. It doesn’t feel like the sort of lesbian book typically picked up by a Big 5 publisher, but there you go.

June 1852. When Abby Proctor is kidnapped from a train in the middle of the desert halfway to her new life in California, she makes a promise to herself—she will escape. Abby is leaving Iowa and all its oppressions behind for a reason, and she refuses to be someone’s prisoner again. Especially when that someone is the infamous female outlaw Joey “JT London” Taylor—Abby’s brash, brooding, and inconveniently beautiful captor.

As Abby plots her escape, she stumbles upon a larger conspiracy behind her kidnapping—a complicated revelation considering her growing feelings for Joey, who might not be the ruthless criminal everyone believes her to be. Suddenly Abby doesn’t want to go back to the confines of her religious father or her suffocating husband.

Then Abby realizes it’s all connected—her kidnapping, the secrets she left behind in Iowa, even her plans in California—and she must decide between returning to a life of obedience and unhappiness or trusting an enigmatic outlaw bound for the gallows.

Ok, I have to confess the previous description sent me down a research rabbit hole because the 1852 date sounded completely implausible for someone to be on a train halfway from Iowa to California. The Union Pacific stretch of the transcontinental railroad, which was built westward from the border of Iowa and Nebraska didn’t even begin construction until the Civil War ended in 1865. So maybe we have to consider this an alternate history? The hazards of being a historian!

What We Say About Adelaide Bell by Grace Mazza falls solidly in the gothic horror genre.

They say Adelaide Bell screamed when she found her father's body. They say she was covered in blood. They say she killed him. But Elise Hamilton knows the truth.

In the small idyllic New England town of Blackwater, in 1885, the Bell family has always been untouchable. Their mansion sits above the ocean as if it belongs there, and everyone in Blackwater knows not to ask questions about what happens behind closed doors. That is until girls begin to go missing.

When a servant girl suddenly disappears, Elise does the unthinkable and starts searching for answers. But what she finds is worse. A photograph of forgotten girls, parish records that lead nowhere, and all of Blackwater that acts afraid at the mere mention of the Bell family.

Then, her childhood friend, Adelaide, warns her, "You're not safe here anymore." Adelaide knows what her father is capable of. Elise believes there is something deeply sinister going on within the Bell house. And as the two women grow closer, they quickly begin to realize that the secrets of the Bell family extend beyond those four walls.

The next two titles look like a duology rather than two independent stories. Collectively, they are labelled the Blackwood Chronicles, by Raven Ashwood, starting with The Mistress of Blackwood Hall. Both books appear to have AI covers.

Cornwall, 1898. Evelyn Vance is twenty-four, a private nurse with a past she has told no one and a family that needs every penny of a wage five times the usual rate. Lady Althea Blackwood is fifty-five, proud, wasting and cruel to her nurses on purpose, because she believes that everyone who stays with her dies.

The housekeeper gives Evie three rules. Keep the fires lit after dark, whatever the season. Never go past the Red Door. Never touch her ladyship without her leave. So Evie asks for her patient's wrist, every four hours, and in a house where frost grows on the inside of the windows, the room turns warm.

What follows is a duel. A cold, brilliant woman who has not wanted anyone's touch in nearly twenty-four years tries to make her own pulse lie. A stubborn young nurse refuses to be frightened off, by her patient or by the house.

But the boarded door at the end of the east wing weeps red, the cold in the walls grows hungrier, someone in the household is writing to London, where Althea's cousin and heir is building a case that she is mad.

The story continues in The Scandal of Blackwood Hall.

May 1899. Althea, fifty-six, has left her house on the Cornish cliffs to fight her cousin's petition in lunacy in the High Court. If she is found of unsound mind, a committee will manage her estate, and her cousin intends to sit on it. His counsel will tell the jury that she believes herself wanted by a woman thirty-one years younger. She does. The woman is Evie Vance, twenty-five, the nurse who stayed.

The family house in Mayfair is no refuge. The housekeeper locks the doors at ten and keeps every key, the servants carry tales, and the illustrated papers have already printed Althea's face. On the witness list is the doctor who ruined Evie three years ago, ready to swear that she was hysterical and that no other nurse ever complained of him. Evie means to find the woman who can prove him a liar, whatever their barrister says.

The Neighborhood Dames by Laura Stanfill from Ooligan Press is a dual-timeline story.

Violet Radford, an introverted songwriter, is no stranger to grief. She’s lost her mother, her best friend Minnow, and now her father. Growing up in the early 1900s and into the late ’20s Prohibition era—when giggle water, speakeasies, and the fight for women’s rights are the talk of the town—Violet is sober, disconnected, and adrift. It’s only a matter of time before she loses herself in the solitude of her New Jersey estate.

Everything changes when Sally, Minnow’s trouser-wearing teenage daughter, comes knocking, hoping to uncover the truth behind the explosion that killed Violet’s father. With the door to friendship open, Sally and Violet search for the truth. Drawn into a deeper mystery, they stumble upon a discovery that threads a transformative counterpoint through the rhythm of their lives—a secret society of women called The Neighborhood Dames working just beneath the surface, hacking away at the patriarchy.

Sky Roads Home (Edge of the World #2) by Margaret Fridley is part of a loose series set in Australia. The book appears to have an AI cover.

In 1936, Dr Catherine Bell arrives in Queensland’s Channel Country with twelve weeks to prove that her fieldwork, and the career she has fought to build, deserves to continue.

Maggie Callahan has spent years keeping a remote cattle station running. She knows every track, waterhole, and shift in the weather, and she has little patience for outsiders who treat her home as material to be collected.

But Cathy is observant enough to listen, and Maggie sees more in the visiting scientist than careful notes and stubborn questions. Through dawn bird counts, failing water supplies, station records, and letters that must cross half a world, professional respect becomes a quieter, more dangerous attachment.

Cathy’s research could secure her future, but publishing it may expose details Maggie never intended to surrender. Maggie can offer Cathy a place to return to, but not a life without departures. To build something lasting, they must decide what belongs to science, what belongs to the land, and what they are willing to entrust to each other.

The Sewing Club by Stephanie O'Connor is set in that unsettling time after World War II when many women lived a life of “quiet desperation.”

In post-war London, Patricia lives a life stitched together with routine, respectability, and a husband who loves her. But beneath the surface, she is unraveling. By day, she works in a quiet bookshop. By night, she slips into a hidden world known only as the Sewing Club, where women gather under the guise of thread and fabric to explore desires that society forbids.

When a new woman enters the club, Patricia feels something shift. What begins as intrigue quickly deepens into something far more dangerous. But when a violent raid threatens to expose everything, suspicion falls, loyalties fracture, and the fragile safety of their secret world begins to collapse.

As Patricia is pulled between duty and desire, truth and survival, she must decide what she is willing to risk, and who she is willing to become. Because some secrets don’t stay buried. And some loves refuse to be hidden.

I’m picky about which vampire stories I consider sufficiently historical, but I confess I’m willing to be influenced by an author contacting me directly to let me know about their book, like Let the Dead Lie (Dizzy Dixon #2) by Cameron Darrow.

In an alternate 1948, as the world’s foremost expert on all things paranormal, Desdemona ‘Dizzy’ Dixon views those who claim to be able to speak to the dead as little more than charlatans who lie for a living. Others, however, believe every word.

So when an old friend winds up dead after asking the wrong question at a seance, Dizzy finds herself investigating more than simple fraud. From not wanting to get involved to being unwilling to leave until the job is done, Dizzy will have to fight her way through a battlefield far different than anything she faced in Germany. But given the stakes and the people involved, she might just wish she was back there, instead.

What Am I Reading?

And what have I been reading? I’ve recently been getting caught up with my reading notes for the year in my Dreamwidth blog, which has been an interesting revelation—especially in terms of how many books I’ve decided not to finish. There were two of those last month—both books that caught my eye when assembling lists for the podcast, but that just didn’t grab me enough.

Matrix by Lauren Groff is a very literary-feeling fictionalization of the life of Marie de France (about whom extremely little factual information is known, beyond her writings). In this version, she's a bastard relative of England's King Henry II, has a (decidedly unrequited) romantic obsession with Eleanor of Aquitaine, and gets shuffled off to be prioress of an obscure and poor convent, which she not only puts on its feet but turns into a feminist power center. There is some light, background lesbianism. But in the end it didn't grab me enough to renew when the library loan came due.

The Duke by Anna Cowan feels a bit like it was constructed out of tropes, Frankenstein-fashion. The premise is intriguing: in an alternate Regency era when England allows for female inheritance of titles, a bad-girl duke with lesbian leanings gets tangled up with a courtesan fleeing the French revolution. Unfortunately I could tell in the first few chapters that it wasn't going to do it for me, stylistically. I'm not sure I could even put my finger on why. I just quietly moved on.

Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher was easier to love. I mean, it’s Kingfisher, after all. It’s a complexly-plotted romantic adventure that crosses over with other books in the World of the White Rat continuum. Occasionally it flirted with feeling like a "random dungeon adventure" in the plot, but never in a way that threw me out of the story.

The recent release of the third book in Helene Wecker’s Golem and the Jinni series sent me off to pick up book number two, The Hidden Palace. (I also had a chance to get the first book autographed at the recent World Fantasy Convention.) It’s a complex and satisfying blend of solid historical and fantasy. The book builds on some of the unresolved issues and characters from the first book, with a global scope and a lens that shifts regularly from international politics to very personal concerns. I love the writing and the characters, even when I want to shake them.

I often feel torn between wanting to read more lesbian titles and wanting to keep up with all my friends’ fantasy novels. Almost all my fiction reading this year has been audiobooks. I have at least one ebook and a couple print books in progress at the moment, but logistically it’s harder to fit them in. I hope your reading progress is more successful!