Books like Sapphic songs by Elsa Gidlow

A pioneering lesbian romance set in the 1950s, The Price of Salt follows the budding love between two women amid societal stigma and family challenges, offering a hopeful outcome rare for its time.

Stone Butch Blues follows a butch lesbian’s life in 1970s America, blending historical detail with personal experience to explore gender, sexuality, and community within the LGBTQ movement.

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories blends speculative fiction, horror, and sharp cultural commentary, exploring the violence, identity, and politics of womanhood through unsettling, genre‑bending narratives.

A cunning con man teams with an orphaned apprentice to swindle a wealthy heiress, but when the apprentice grows attached, the plot spirals into betrayal, deception and unexpected affection in a grim London slum.

Annie on My Mind follows the deep friendship and emerging love between two teenage girls, set against the backdrop of a private school, as they navigate homophobia and the challenges of coming out.

Jeanette Winterson's debut novel follows a young woman's journey of faith and self-discovery.

Nan King, a young oyster girl, falls in love with glamorous music‑hall performer Kitty Butler, a male impersonator, and together they rise to stardom while exploring their hidden desires.

Cameron Post, a gay teen from a conservative Montana ranch town, is sent to a conversion therapy center after her family demands she change her sexual orientation.

A romantic novel about a talented woman of aristocratic background who defies Victorian expectations and commercial success while pursuing her love for other women.

Joan Nestle’s essays chronicle her life as a working‑class, openly lesbian activist, tracing her involvement in the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ movements from the McCarthy era to the present.

Pat Parker’s *Movement In Black* is a vital collection of poetry that blends fierce activism with intimate reflections on race, gender, and sexuality, celebrated by African American women writers and enriched with new, unpublished work.

In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it? Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoker's Dracula, and Lawrence's Women In Love.

Sappho of Lesbos lived and wrote poetry some twenty-six centuries ago, but hers remains a persistent and effective voice for the expression of a woman's desire for a woman. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho is the first book to examine Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire, focusing on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture. Snyder reads Sappho's songs against a woman-centered framework in which emotional and/or erotic bonds between and among women take center stage. Her close readings demonstrate the ways in which Sappho's lyrics focus on women's emotional lives with one another and on female erotic desire for other females. In Sappho's poetic world, male figures, when they do appear, stand on the periphery. In order to make Sappho accessible to everyone, Snyder presents detailed readings of the one complete existing song and of each of the major fragments of her poetry. She provides a clear English translation and a transliteration into our alphabet; the original Greek text is included in an appendix. Rather than making claims about the specific social contexts out of which the poems may have arisen, Snyder offers a close analysis of the words themselves, with comparative material drawn from other archaic Greek poets where there appear to be appropriate parallels. The book concludes with a chapter addressing Sappho's influence on a number of modern American woman poets, particularly Amy Lowell, H.D., and Olga Broumas. Snyder sees in these three poets qualities similar to Sappho's: a strong sense of self-definition; a display of independence within a poetic tradition; a relishing of the erotic and the sensual; and an emphasis on the mutuality of desire; and a blurring of the gaze that disrupts the hierarchy of subject versus object.