Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 335 - On the Shelf for February 2026 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2026/02/09)
Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2026.
I delayed this episode a little to allow time for the story contracts to come back. So I can announce the 2026 fiction line-up. Just like last year, there were a number of shorter stories in the final selection process, which allowed me to buy an extra. I should note that writing short doesn’t place a story higher in my evaluation, but it does give me an excuse to move the cut-off to include more. In alphabetical order by title, we’ll be publishing:
- “Between One Word and the Next” by L.J. Lee. We published L.J. previously in 2024 and like that story, this is set in 15th century Korea.
- “Love for Love’s Sake” by Shannon Lippert is a different take on the story of Julie d’Aubigny.
- “Salt for the Unmarried” by Khayelihle Benghu traces a colonial encounter in 19th century Ghana.
- The Sultan’s Vetala by Priya Sridhar is a supernatural tale involving multiple types of love in 13th century India.
- The Tale of Gudrun Sigurdsdóttir by repeat author Daniel Stride grants one of my long-standing wishes for a solidly historic tale from the Viking era.
A number of interesting observations on this year’s submissions. We had the largest number ever, and this time they came in fairly steadily across the month, relieving the anxiety I feel when everyone waits for the last minute to submit. Usually most stories fall near the top of the word-count limit, but this year the largest group was in the 3000-4000 word range, and a fair number were under 1000 words in the flash fiction range. The majority of settings were spread evenly across the 16-19th centuries, rather than clustering strongly in the 19th. Settings were drawn from 20 different named regions, which I think is the most geographically diverse we’ve ever seen. I’m glad people are listening to my wish for more diversity, so that I can easily build that into the final selections.
News of the Field
I was able to distract myself from worrying about submissions in January with a two-week trip to the east coast, visiting friends and family and also taking the opportunity to visit the exhibition of the art of Emma Stebbins that Karli Wurzelbacher came on the show to talk about last fall. If you happen to be on Long Island in the near future, I encourage you to stop by the Heckscher Museum to check it out. The museum is small—just three rooms—but they have a wealth of information about Stebbins and the community of queer women artists that she and her wife Charlotte Cushman hung out with. And, yes, the exhibition used the word “wife” to my delight.
I also had a chance to visit the exhibition on medieval sexuality at the Cloisters museum, but alas it had functionally nothing on lesbians.
Publications on the Blog
My travels distracted me from posting my prepared blogs, so I only just finished the group I had all set to go in January and only managed 7 articles this month. Starting off with Barry Reay’s historiography review “Writing the Modern Histories of Homosexual England” then moving into some articles interrogating gender and its perceptions, including Marissa Crannell’s Utterly Confused Categories: Gender Non-Conformity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Western Europe, Nico Mara-McKay’s “Becoming Gendered: Two Medieval Approaches to Intersex Gender Assignment,” and Jonas Roelens’ “A Woman Like Any Other: Female Sodomy, Hermaphroditism, and Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Bruges.” The month finished up with a group of articles on pornography: Kiki Loveday’s “Sister Acts: Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction,” Ruth Larson’s “Sex and Civility in a 17th-Century Dialogue: L’Escole des filles,” and Christopher Rivers’ “Safe Sex: The Prophylactic Walls of the Cloister in the French Libertine Convent Novel of the Eighteenth Century.”
Time to dive into my spreadsheet and decide which theme to tackle next.
Book Shopping!
I’ve picked up three new research books since last month. I’d already mentioned ordering Sara Lodge’s The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, which looks at both historical female detectives and how they were fictionalized. Given the popularity of this motif among sapphic Victorian novels, I highly recommend checking this book out for the historic background.
I picked up the exhibition catalog for the Emma Stebbins exhibit, which not only includes all the information from the exhibit itself, but many more details about the life of this American sculptor.
And as part of my growing research library on Viking-era culture, I got Rebecca Boyd’s Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns. I recognize a lot of the contents from the extensive exhibits I saw back in 2017 at the Dublin Archaeology Museum. By the time I get around to writing my Viking-era novel, I’ll probably have to write a dozen to justify all the research books I’ve accumulated, just like my collection on historic magic and alchemy.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
The end goal, of research is, of course, books. So let’s talk about new and recent book releases. There are a lot of books in this month’s episode, so I’m going to condense the cover copy in most cases. There were a number of December releases that I only recently discovered.
Hawthorn & Bitter by Shannon K. Kelly from Archway Publishing looks like it has a bit of a Cinderella vibe. Clara Allingham, trapped in servitude to her cruel aunt and uncle, in their country house on the North York Moors crosses paths with the capricious Alicia Broderick, pressured to choose a husband by the night of her 25th birthday ball. How far can they push their boundaries and defy expectations to reach for the magic they have discovered with each other?
In Cut on the Bias by Susanna Bonaretti from Busybird Publishing, Rebecca Victoria Davies -- Australian, bastard, and unrepentant murderess -- has spent three decades delivering justice in Edwardian London where the law refuses to tread. The Metropolitan Police's covert Special Branch, has charged her with hunting the men abducting and murdering young aristocrats. When a criminal gang seizes Lady Katherine, niece of their intended victim, Rebecca and her mentor Major Williams are dragged into a conspiracy that reaches into the highest levels of Special Branch. Old ghosts claw their way back into Rebecca's life: a forbidden love that ended in blood, the men she killed in Australia, and the revenge she took when justice failed her. Old ghosts, and now the unexpected possibility of love.
Before the Swallow Dares by Hannah Perrin-Haynes turns a life into an artistic journey. On the cusp of death, world-renowned artist, Etta Snowe, asks her granddaughter to curate a posthumous exhibition revealing the hidden secrets of her pivotal Second World War years, spent in London and on the magical Isles of Scilly. Each chapter opens onto a new room of the exhibition, where four invited visitors gradually discover who the others are and why they have been brought together. Through Etta’s art, letters and diaries, a story unfolds of an unlikely love, the irresistible pull of ambition, and the painful necessity of lying to oneself to survive.
When I see an author release 6 books in the space of two months, it triggers my suspicions, but in the case of Clara Bellweather’s two series, it seems to be a case of two sets of short, connected stories released as individual titles. Her Voices of the Hive trilogy center around bees. In The Stillness Between Us, a grieving widow in 1873 Bath, finds that her new lodger is a botanical illustrator with secrets of her own. As they share a piano, a garden, and quiet moments charged with unspoken longing, their careful propriety gives way to stolen glances, trembling touches, and a love that blooms in the stillness between words. In The Language of Bees, a reclusive beekeeper's daughter guards her mother's secret: a forgotten language of women's folk songs that keep the hives thriving-and the heart alive. When a disgraced linguist arrives, exiled from Oxford for loving another woman, she sees not just folklore, but a lifeline. Eliza Croft came to document lost voices. She never expected to find her own. Then in The Keeper of Tides a Cornish lighthouse keeper disgraced by the Royal Navy encounters a marine biologist exiled for daring to think like a man. Forced into uneasy alliance, they discover that some truths aren't found in data-but in the quiet language of tides, touch, and shared vigil as they work to preserve the fragile tidal lands they love.
Bellweather’s second trilogy, The Silent Companions, comprising The Language of Leaves, The Marginal Truth, and The Stitched Confession are slow-burn romances set in late Victorian England. From a greenhouse in Kent to a seamstress's atelier in East London, to a hidden library beneath the British Museum, three pairs of women forge lives of meaning, passion, and partnership-using their crafts to preserve truth, protect each other, and build legacies that outlast silence.
Continuing on with other January releases we start with Fire Sword and Sea by Vanessa Riley from William Morrow. You may recognize the historical character of Jacquotte Delahaye from the short stories by Catherine Lundoff published as part of our fiction series. Here, Jacquotte Delahaye is the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy tavern owner on the island of Tortuga in 1675. Instead of marriage, Jacquotte dreams of going to sea. In Haiti she becomes Jacques, a dockworker, and joins forces with others who use disguise to make their way in a hostile world. But the pursuit of riches eventually palls and Jacquotte begins instead to plot a war of liberation.
Like Jacquotte Delahaye, certain historic figures lived such vivid and improbable lives that they draw the attention of authors again and again. Another such is 17th century swordswoman and opera singer Julie d’Aubigny, as attested by one of the stories bought for our fiction series this year. And this month we have two—count them, two—books that fictionalize her life.
Sword and Silk: The Legend of Julie d'Aubigny by Maeve Campbell tells a story of reinvention and rebellion as she escapes convent walls, duels noblemen at dawn, and conquers the stage of the Académie Royale de Musique with a voice as bold as her blade, searching for a place in a world that cannot decide whether to worship or destroy her.
La Maupin: The Scandalous Story of Julie d'Aubigny by C.C. Parke takes us through the course of Julie’s life, from the court of the Sun King, to the opera stage, to a scandalous raid on a convent, always refusing to choose between love and freedom.
Returning to the sea, we have The Black Lark's Oath by Tess Wilder. When a pirate raid tears Isolde Fairchild from the safety of the only world she has ever known, she expects fear, captivity, and eventual return. Instead, she finds the Black Lark and its formidable captain Rowan Blacktide who represents everything Isolde has never been allowed to be—decisive, dangerous, and utterly free.
Embers on the Moor by Giada Moretti takes us to Thornwood Hall, a decaying Gothic estate stranded on the windswept Yorkshire moors. Scholarly, rational Beatrice Ashford, newly arrived from London, has inherited more than crumbling walls and cold halls. Mysterious fires begin erupting and Rowena Blackwood, whose mother died in a fire fifteen years earlier, becomes the target of suspicion and superstition. Together, they uncover signs of deliberate arson, a conspiracy rooted in greed, and a legacy of violence against women who dared to live outside society’s control. What neither woman expects is the slow, undeniable pull between them.
Unfinished Story by Jade Winters from Wicked Winters Books gives us a cross-time story in which historian Mia Winters and fiercely skeptical podcaster Gabby Pearson clash over discovering the truth about Eliza Beckett, a trailblazing Victorian woman who designed and ran her own hotel and whose life hints at a love that was never allowed to fully exist. But some love stories don’t end, and strange occurrences ripple through the hotel, pushing fragments of the past into the present. Gabby came to expose an infamous medium, but now she questions what truths she’s willing to accept.
The Midnight Daughters by Aeressa again crosses the time streams when Imara Thornwood, a Black lesbian scholar of Victorian England inherits Ashwood Estate and finds a house alive with memory-and women who were erased for loving other women, for knowing too much, for refusing to be small. Amid spirits whispering from mirrors and corridors the cursed Seraphine Ashwood-a woman neither living nor dead, bound to the house by betrayal, blood magic, and unfinished longing.
The late 19th century women’s suffrage movement in Boston is the setting for The Hidden Petition (Beacon Hill Mysteries #1) by Maeve McQueen from Digital Ginger Publishing. When young secretary Annie Phelps discovers the theft of a hard-won petition on the eve of its presentation to the legislature, the shock sends her into a dangerous brain fever. As she lies delirious in a quiet Beacon Hill boarding house, her devoted friends—sharp-minded Miss Eleanor Hargrove and gentle Miss Clara Whitcomb—take up a vigilant nursing watch that soon turns into a shadowy investigation to protect the fragile cause they hold dear.
The inheritance of decaying gothic manors named Thornwood seems to be the fashion this month as we encounter another in The House of Hidden Hearts by Matus Zelenay. Rare book specialist Elena Voss plans to catalogue the contents of her legacy, then lock the doors and leave. Then she finds the journals of a young woman named Constance who lived a century ago—and loved another woman in secret. The estate’s landscape architect, Iris Blackwood, should be nothing more than a professional distraction but as the past begins to surface and the house begins to wake she becomes Elena’s anchor to reality.
E.V. Bancroft offers us some short stories from her Women in War series from Butterworth Books: a collection titled The Unshuttered Window in the form of intimate journal entries by the protagonist of the novel, On the Edge of Uncertainty, and a stand-alone holiday short, A Very Hamble Christmas, set while sheltering from a December air raid.
Star & Thea at Court by A V Kakkad follows a quintet of very different women and girls at an English boarding school in 1959 in an era of change and resistance.
The Hidden Flower in the Palace: A Queer Court Tragedy by Shin Hwayoon provides an important content warning in the subtitle. Set in a fictional Korean-inspired court, this is a story of forbidden bloom, memory’s rebellion, and a legacy that can no longer be erased.
At last we arrive at the February releases, beginning with She-Wolf: A Sapphic Beowulf Retelling by E.K. O'Connor from AQH Publications. In this retelling of the Old English epic, Beowulf has spent years proving that strength is not solely a man's domain. She fights not just for victory, but for the right to wield her own destiny, defend her love and stand toe to toe against monsters that lurk in the dark.
In The Fifth Day of Her Heart by Richard Cicay, Sigrid, a capable farmer in a quiet Viking-Age village, widowed by war and known for her kindness keeps losing herself. Every five days, her memory resets. Faces become strangers. Conversations vanish. Only her hands remember how to tend the land—and her heart remembers feelings it cannot name. But with each new cycle, she notices patterns others overlook… and finds herself repeatedly pulled toward Astrid, a warm-eyed shepherd woman who feels impossibly familiar. What Sigrid doesn’t know is that Astrid has already loved her dozens of times.
The Found Family Victory (Salvation's Edge #1) by Lady K follows Rosa Delgado, a Pinkerton detective in 1880s America, to find the disappeared: sex workers, drifters, immigrants, the invisible ones that the local marshal refuses to investigate. Partnering with other marginalized people, she finds courage to face a supernatural enemy that thrives on their separation. But her employers have entirely different goals and consider her new-found allies to be acceptable casualties.
Belonging to the Air by Avery Irons from Screen Door Press is the coming-of-age story of "Bird" Bennett, a young, Black girl with a hunger to learn what lies beyond the house she shares with her mother and grandmother. In Bennettsville, Illinois, a freedman's town established by Bird's great-grandfather, she must reckon with turbulence at home and with what it means to fall in love with a childhood friend. As an adult, Bird spreads her wings and plants roots in Harlem, but a clash with the neighboring white town of Tuckersville pulls her back home.
Joe the Pirate by Hubert from Iron Circus Comics is a graphic novel following real-life personality Marion Barbara Carstairs—"Joe" to her friends—always in pursuit of speed and adventure, from ambulance driving in World War I, to speedboat racing, to her eventual rule over her own Caribbean island where she entertained and sometimes pursued affairs with women like Gwen Farrar, Dolly Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, and Tallulah Bankhead.
And…now we’re back to crumbling haunted manors in A Slow and Secret Poison by Carmella Lowkis from Atria Books, but in the 1920s this time rather than the Victorian era. When Vee Morgan accepts the job of gardener at Harfold Manor, she’s hoping it’s a fresh start. Vee is fascinated by her enigmatic new employer, Lady Arabella Lascy, a woman obsessed with the curse she believes has killed her family one by one and is coming for her next. Her only hope for escape is a local folktale: the elusive dancing hare that gave her ancestor its blessing and the house its name. But even as Vee falls deeper under the thrall of Harfold and Lady Arabella, her own dark past finally catches up to her.
What Am I Reading?
And what have I been reading? I’ve fallen back into my usual pattern of not reading much when traveling. (New Zealand was an anomaly.) So the only new book I finished was Nekesa Afia’s Harlem Renaissance murder mystery Dead Dead Girls. It’s exceedingly well written and thoroughly sapphic but has a rather high body count, for those who need that as a content warning, alongside the period-appropriate racism.
I also finished a re-read of one of my own books, to refresh myself on details for the current work in process. I confess it’s a bit daunting—how did I ever manage to hold all these details in my head at the same time? Can I do that again? But I did, so I expect that I will be able to. I guess we’ll all find out.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- The 2026 fiction line-up:
- “Between One Word and the Next” by L.J. Lee
- “Love for Love’s Sake” by Shannon Lippert
- “Salt for the Unmarried” by Khayelihle Benghu
- The Sultan’s Vetala by Priya Sridhar
- The Tale of Gudrun Sigurdsdóttir by Daniel Stride
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Reay, Barry. 2009. “Writing the Modern Histories of Homosexual England” in The Historical Journal, 52, 1. pp.213-233
- Crannell, Marissa. 2015. Utterly Confused Categories: Gender Non-Conformity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Western Europe. Dissertation.
- Mara-McKay, Nico. 2018. “Becoming Gendered: Two Medieval Approaches to Intersex Gender Assignment” in Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies vol. 7, no. 1.
- Roelens, Jonas. 2017. “A Woman Like Any Other: Female Sodomy, Hermaphroditism, and Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Bruges” in Journal of Women’s History, vol. 29 no. 4, Winter 2017. pp.11-34
- Loveday, Kiki. “Sister Acts: Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction” in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 60, no. 2, 2019, pp. 201–26.
- Larson, Ruth. 1997. “Sex and Civility in a 17th-Century Dialogue: L’Escole des filles” in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, no. 47: 497-514.
- Rivers, Christopher. 1995. “Safe Sex: The Prophylactic Walls of the Cloister in the French Libertine Convent Novel of the Eighteenth Century” in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 5, No. 3: 381-402
- Book Shopping
- Wurzelbacher, Karli. 2025. Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History. Huntington: The Heckscher Museum of Art. ISBN 979-8-9925162-1-0
- Lodge, Sara. 2024. The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-28660-1
- Boyd, Rebecca. 2024. Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-03-259109-4
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- What I’ve been consuming
- Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
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