SOURCE: Castle, Terry. “Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction.” In Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, edited by Joseph Bristow, pp. 128-47. London: Routledge, 1992.

In the following essay, Castle discusses Warner's Summer Will Show as a lesbian novel.

What is a lesbian fiction? According to what we might call the ‘Queen Victoria Principle’ of cultural analysis, no such entity, of course, should even exist. In 1885, after the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act outlawing homosexual acts in Great Britain, it was pointed out to Queen Victoria that the amendment only dealt with ‘acts of gross indecency’ between men; women, alas, were not covered. The queen responded—as if to a non sequitur—‘No woman would ever do that.’ Desire between men was conceivable, indeed could be pictured vividly enough to require policing. Desire between women was not.¹ The love of woman...