[(review date 1998) In the following excerpt, Holmes views Passions between Women as a compelling argument for the survival skills of lesbian culture in British society.]

Over the last fifteen or so years, scholars have shown that the representation of gender and erotic desire in early modern England was far less rooted in heterosexual norms than conservative tradition would have us believe. A few holdouts remain, however, and it is the task of the two books under review here to undermine these last heteronormative preserves. In The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne, George Klawitter investigates the numerous gender and sexual ambiguities in the work of one of Englit's most treasured heterosexuals. While the writings of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare have for a long time been seen, even by homophobic critics, to contain numerous expressions of same-sex desire, the literary corpus of John Donne, a man whom Klawitter coyly labels "that most macho of poets" (166), has been mostly immune to homoerotic imputations. In her book Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801, Emma Donoghue similarly dispels "the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian culture was rarely registered in language" (3). Offering provocative interventions into received ways of understanding the past, Klawitter and Donoghue encourage us to reconsider the unexamined assumptions by which we interpret texts and history.

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Perhaps in part because she herself is the author of a lesbian self-discovery novel (Stir-fry [1994]), in Passions Between Women Emma Donoghue also demonstrates a deep sensitivity to often disregarded signs of same-sex desire. The terminus a quo for Donoghue's study is Margaret Cavendish's closet drama The Convent of Pleasure (1668) and her terminus ad quem is Maria Edgeworth's novel Belinda (1801). These two...