So I had never heard of D. K. Broster before she was invoked in a comments thread over at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer's and now I am waiting for the Gutenberg e-book of The Wounded Name (1922), because "Waterloo happens off-stage while the two main characters share a bed in a cave and exchange anguished confessions" is really all the blurb I need for a Napoleonic novel. [edit: It's on Google Books. I'll be back in a bit.] In the meantime, I went looking for information about Broster herself and ran into this simultaneously intriguing and frustrating article:
A particular feature of Broster's fiction is the way in which she portrays friendships between men. There is much stress laid on misunderstanding and reconciliation, and many intense conversations reflecting on minute points of honour. Long passages of dialogue, and some authorial omniscience, enable us to see the characters' interior worlds. Often one man saves another from false accusations of dishonour, or from execution, and the commitments of friendship often take precedence over other allegiances. There is also much emphasis on physical and emotional suffering, and one friend watching over another while he recovers from illness and fever. Blood, sweat and tears are followed by physical and emotional recovery. Some would say that such scenes have a homoerotic element; I'm wary of reading back later interpretations into 1920s fiction, but it would be difficult to write in this way for a modern audience without creating an impression of more than a passionate friendship. I am inclined to say that whilst we may well read homosexual overtones into The Flight of the Heron, and others of her novels where the emotional focus is firmly on the male characters, this wasn't consciously intended by Broster, and my impression is that it was not picked up by contemporary critics. As for D K Broster herself, she was unmarried and lived with her close friend Gertrude Schlich for more than thirty years; but this wasn't uncommon then, and assumptions from a modern perspective about two women sharing a home would only be speculative.
I understand not wanting to project categorizations of the present onto the behavior of the past. I was nonetheless reminded of how it took me until 2014 to find an anthology of modernist poetry which directly acknowledged H.D.'s bisexuality and polyamory and referred to Bryher without equivocation by their chosen name. It is unnecessary as well as inaccurate to suggest that homoeroticism in fiction of the 1920's must be a product of modern slash goggles as opposed to something that could be found on its own recognizance. (Trust me. I'm reading Forrest Reid.) Qualifying it as unconscious on the part of the author treads perilously close to the she-wrote-it-but angle of Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983). I don't even care that much about the readings of contemporary critics, since I can remember reviews of Carol (2015) which missed the chemistry ("Harold, they're lesbians") between its female leads. Look, I am late to the game of this writer and know nothing about her that is not cursorily available on the internet, I know nothing about Broster and Schlich except that they lived together for more than thirty years and I can read the dedication of The Yellow Poppy (1920), their relationship might have been neither sexual nor romantic because people are capable of bonding with neither of those factors in play, but could we still not default to "in the absence of evidence, she mustn't have been queer"? Scootch a generation forward and living with another woman and writing m/m looks like Mary Renault.
Last and less bristlingly: man, hurt/comfort really is older than dirt. I should like to read her supernatural stories, too.
osprey_archer's and now I am waiting for the Gutenberg e-book of The Wounded Name (1922), because "Waterloo happens off-stage while the two main characters share a bed in a cave and exchange anguished confessions" is really all the blurb I need for a Napoleonic novel. [edit: It's on Google Books. I'll be back in a bit.] In the meantime, I went looking for information about Broster herself and ran into this simultaneously intriguing and frustrating article:A particular feature of Broster's fiction is the way in which she portrays friendships between men. There is much stress laid on misunderstanding and reconciliation, and many intense conversations reflecting on minute points of honour. Long passages of dialogue, and some authorial omniscience, enable us to see the characters' interior worlds. Often one man saves another from false accusations of dishonour, or from execution, and the commitments of friendship often take precedence over other allegiances. There is also much emphasis on physical and emotional suffering, and one friend watching over another while he recovers from illness and fever. Blood, sweat and tears are followed by physical and emotional recovery. Some would say that such scenes have a homoerotic element; I'm wary of reading back later interpretations into 1920s fiction, but it would be difficult to write in this way for a modern audience without creating an impression of more than a passionate friendship. I am inclined to say that whilst we may well read homosexual overtones into The Flight of the Heron, and others of her novels where the emotional focus is firmly on the male characters, this wasn't consciously intended by Broster, and my impression is that it was not picked up by contemporary critics. As for D K Broster herself, she was unmarried and lived with her close friend Gertrude Schlich for more than thirty years; but this wasn't uncommon then, and assumptions from a modern perspective about two women sharing a home would only be speculative.
I understand not wanting to project categorizations of the present onto the behavior of the past. I was nonetheless reminded of how it took me until 2014 to find an anthology of modernist poetry which directly acknowledged H.D.'s bisexuality and polyamory and referred to Bryher without equivocation by their chosen name. It is unnecessary as well as inaccurate to suggest that homoeroticism in fiction of the 1920's must be a product of modern slash goggles as opposed to something that could be found on its own recognizance. (Trust me. I'm reading Forrest Reid.) Qualifying it as unconscious on the part of the author treads perilously close to the she-wrote-it-but angle of Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983). I don't even care that much about the readings of contemporary critics, since I can remember reviews of Carol (2015) which missed the chemistry ("Harold, they're lesbians") between its female leads. Look, I am late to the game of this writer and know nothing about her that is not cursorily available on the internet, I know nothing about Broster and Schlich except that they lived together for more than thirty years and I can read the dedication of The Yellow Poppy (1920), their relationship might have been neither sexual nor romantic because people are capable of bonding with neither of those factors in play, but could we still not default to "in the absence of evidence, she mustn't have been queer"? Scootch a generation forward and living with another woman and writing m/m looks like Mary Renault.
Last and less bristlingly: man, hurt/comfort really is older than dirt. I should like to read her supernatural stories, too.
