[(review date May 1996) In the following review, Dugaw stresses the diversity of individuals and stories in Passions between Women, and underlines the changing historical concepts of sexuality in the book.]

It has more than once been said, including recently by English writer Brigid Brophy, that there are two things in life worth talking about--sex and the eighteenth century. During the rambunctious era between 1660 and 1800, popular and polite culture in the British Isles appear just familiar enough for Euro-Americans to recognize ourselves in our forebears. At the same time, we encounter more than enough of the inexplicable and the strange to feel chagrined, baffled and bemused--specially about sex. (After all, that is the world the Puritan founders of what would become the United States were breaking away from.)

What people of the 1600s and 1700s have left us of their words, images and deeds reveals that they carried on with each other in ways that our staid, post-Freudian, post-Victorian selves can hardly dream of. These two books [Passions between Women, by Emma Donoghue, and Companions Without Vows, by Betty Rizzo] about actual and fictional women in Great Britain attest both to the fascination of the eighteenth century, and to our own perplexity in the face of its enigmas.

Relationships between women at this time give us a lot to think about, especially as they shimmer with passion and sex: the swirl of feminine pronouns in the amorous "Verses design'd by Mrs. A. Behn to be sent to a fair Lady, that desir'd she would absent herself to cure her Love"; or the 1764 death reported in the London Chronicle of one "John Chivy," a woman farmer who lived as a man, "Notwithstanding she had been married upwards of 20 years, her sex never discovered till her death."

At the end of the twentieth century we realize, even as we use such words as "intimacy," "significant other," "sexual orientation," "hetero-," "homo-," or "hi-sexuality," "lesbian," "gay," "queer" and so on, that these terms name historically determined concepts. We identify ourselves alone and with one another, sexually, relationally, ethnically, culturally, economically, professionally. But pre-modern people are ill-served by late twentieth-century notions of "self-identification." Modern science-driven models of the self conceptualize people and their passions as norms and deviations--relationships that are "healthy" or "maladjusted," sexualities that are "normal" or "perverse." The closing off of irregularity into increasingly limited "deviant" spheres--noted also by George Chauncey in Gay New York (Basic Books, 1994)--coincided with that codifying of personal identity in the nineteenth century that worked to "naturalize" erotic desire in physiology, personal identity in psychology, and notions of community and "culture" in social science.

It is delicate steering, making our way back into the early modern era. We pilot perilously between the Scylla of anachronism in applying our own categories where they don't fit, and the Charybdis of not recognizing "kindred" friends and lovers we need and want to know--women before us who valued women, in myriad ways.

Passions Between Women is...