Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature Book

Questions for Emma Donoghue on Inseparable Q: What inspired you to write Inseparable? Did you feel there was something important missing from the existing scholarly work? A: Back in the mid-90s I was approached by a university press to write a history of lesbian literature. Although I was attracted to the idea of a book that would have a really long historical and geographical range, I didn’t want it to trawl dutifully and descriptively through the entire body of texts both by and about women-who-loved-women. That deal fell through, so what I ended up writing was much more for my own pleasure: a sort of travel guide that would identify and analyze the handful of underlying plot motifs about desire between women. As I worked on Inseparable for a decade and a half, more and more academic studies were published on specific periods and genres--sometimes on just a couple of texts. While I drew on much of this excellent scholarship, it also confirmed my hunch that both academic specialists and 'common readers' could do with a guide to this literary tradition in all its length, breadth and flavor. Q: You describe Inseparable as a sort of map and each chapter a new "terrain." What discoveries led you to choose the path you did for the book? A: Some of the tracks were clear from the start: I always knew there would be at least one chapter on cross-dressing, because it's been perhaps the dominant way for writers over the centuries to tell stories about how same-sex desire might 'accidentally' occur. Others were more of a surprise to me; I knew that lesbian detective fiction as a distinct genre was born in the 1990s, but I found much earlier detection stories (in large numbers from the 1920s on) that hinged on the discovery of desire between women, so that became a chapter of its own. Q: Most of the writers you cite are men. Did this influence your reading of the texts in any way? A: I don’t think it affected how I read the texts, but perhaps it shaped my decision, early on, to concentrate on the texts themselves rather than their autobiographical elements. I found it peculiarly liberating to approach each novel, play, or narrative poem without much caring who wrote it--to look at both trash and high literature in terms of story, and discover all sorts of connections between different texts that borrowed and reworked the same stories. Q: Although you write that conclusions about real life shouldn't necessarily be drawn from these tales, are there any strong connections that you’ve found between the plot motifs you discuss and the cultures they come from? A: Oh yes, indeed. I could generalize and say that a text published in 1890 will almost always give us a good insight into 1890's prevailing fantasies about love between women (e.g. morbid, neurotic, oversexed, addictive, suicidal). The tone of a text from 1600 (think of Shakespeare's playful cross-dressing heroines and the women who fall for them) will be entirely different. Neither will tell us much about real everyday life, but they certainly make up a cultural history. Q: How do you feel that gender roles have evolved in today's literature? A: Oh dear, that's too big a question for a quick answer! I will say that one thing that delights me nowadays is that the lesbians are writing well about whatever they like (including, very often, books that happen to have no lesbians in them) and a wide variety of authors (including straight men) are writing well about lesbians. Let confusion reign! (Photo © Chris Roulston) Read More