Items

• Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present
  Academic Lillian Faderman (1940-) uses literary and documentary sources to present a history of romantic love between women, one of the first comprehensive studies of its kind. Following initial research on poet Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Faderman expanded her scope to consider a period of five hundred years and the lives of many women (including those featured in the ‘Scotch Verdict’ case explored in another Faderman work seized during the raids). The book describes how societal attitudes to love between women moved from tolerance (albeit not to women who dressed as men), to prejudice and eventually, to liberatory lesbian feminism. The book, dedicated to Faderman’s partner Phyllis Irwin, is shown here in the UK edition, although it is likely to have been the US William Morrow edition that was seized from Gay’s the Word.
• You are the rain : a novel
  When a hurricane strikes an all-girl canoe trip in the Florida Everglades, athletic Crash and introvert June become separated from the group and must depend on each other to survive. The novel is described as being “Of lesbian interest” in the 1975-76 catalogue of women’s bookstore First Things First, although the relationship is implied rather than overt. The novel is endorsed on the back cover by lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, with several references to the poetry of Emily Dickinson throughout. The title is taken from a May Swenson poem – “I will be earth you be the flower / You have found my root you are the rain”. Swenson and R.R. Knudson (1932-2008) were lovers in the mid-1960s. They collaborated on the collection ‘American Sports Poems’ (1988), and Knudson was Swenson’s literary executor on her death in 1989.