Ethel's Love-Life: A Novel.
Earliest American Sapphic Novel
Sweat, Margaret J. M. Ethel’s Love-Life. A Novel. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859.
8vo.; five page publishers ads in the rear; brown cloth, stamped in blind and gilt. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Sweat’s second book and only novel, told as a series of letters and generally recognized as the first lesbian novel in American fiction.
Born in Maine, one of five children of the Honorable John Mussey and his wife, Mehitable Smith Rana, Margaret Jane Mussey (1823-1908) graduated from the Roxbury Latin school and entered the ranks of Boston’s literati. Well-traveled over Europe and fluent in French, German, Russian, and Italian, she was one of the earliest female book reviewers in New England. She married lawyer Lorenzo de Medici Sweat in 1849, began appearing in the North American Review in 1856 and published Highways of Travel; or a Summer in Europe and Ethel’s Love Life three years later. In Ethel…, she details intense friendships with several women, stopping short of describing any sexual acts.
Praised in its time for its “pure, tender and elevated sentiment,” it is notable rather as an elaborate female erotic fantasy in which Ethel describes to her fiancé her relationships with rejected suitors, as well as with two women bound to her by “strange and irrevocable ties.” This device enables the reader to experience a variety of exotic relationships while remaining within the context of a traditional engagement. With its tension between “correct” rhetoric and Ethel’s obvious enjoyment of and interest in her erotic life, the novel points up the contradictions in women’s lives. (, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, by Virginia Blain et al, p. 1050).
Wright, American Fiction, II, #2413: “Written in a series of letters which treat of lesbianism.”
Other works followed before her death at the age of 85, all published as Margaret J.M. Sweat: Highways of Travel; Or, A Summer in Europe (1859); Antonia (1870); A Fortnight in St. Petersburg (1899); Verses (1890, as “M.J.M.S”); and Hither and Yon by Land and Sea (1901). As Blain et al point out, many of the poems in Verses “express erotic desire for women through a male persona.”
(#5994)
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