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Lovers in a Dangerous Time
or "One reason my Pride and Prejudice femslash fizzled out". This is for The 3rd Annual Femslash Mini Meta Fest in response to the prompt "What's your approach to writing femslash in times and places that are notoriously unfriendly for f/f relationships, especially historical settings?"
The very first femslash fic I ever wrote (and also my first fanfic at all) is about Mary Bennet and Anne de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice. One of my motivations was annoyance at the fact that pretty much all the femslash fic I've read set in historical fandoms is full of bittersweet angst, or experimentation before marriage. There's nothing wrong with these sorts of stories, but I yearned for "and then they lived together happily forever and ever".
Of course once I started trying to write such a happy ending I realised why they're so rare.
So, my relatively small focus is the world of Jane Austen: upper class women in England in the late 18th/early 19th century. There are many obstacles to a f/f happily ever after set in this world (and many others): Women were expected to marry, and unless independently wealthy would probably have to unless they wanted to spend their life relying on the charity of others. While two "spinsters" living as housemates was just barely acceptable they could never admit to the true nature of their relationship. There was no support network or easy way for queer women to meet each other or even a general conception of queerness existing. And of course there was internalised homophobia: few women would be comfortable admitting same sex desires to themselves, let alone each other.
Individual women did get past these obstacles. The Ladies of Llangollen were two female friends who refused to marry who they were supposed to and lived together off their relatives grudging support until the Queen persuaded the King to grant them a pension (they were seen as an adorable example of female friendship). Such households became more common in the late 19th/early 20th century with the rise of feminism. There's also Anne Lister, an independently wealthy diarist who went around happily seducing other women. Another option is a loveless or polyamorous marriage with an understanding or clueless husband.
For my particular couple, I don't have to worry too much about all of these issues: Anne de Bourgh is independently wealthy, and while her mother is determined to see her married to a Good Man in general I think most people would assume she'd stay single due to her age and sickliness. Mary is not wealthy, but her family is (by the end of the book, at least), and I think would be happy enough to support her if she didn't want to get married. It wasn't even too hard to construct a situation where they met and started living together. What tripped me up was the internalised homophobia: Mary is canonically incredibly sexually conservative, and I just could not figure out how to have her get to a point where she was ok with being in an f/f relationship without being unforgivably hypocritical.
I do sometimes think about writing f/f for different, more tractable women from that era, but have yet to have an idea occur to me that doesn't hit one obstacle or another. The closest I can come up with is a cheerful Isabela/Katherine/Henry threesome for Northanger Abbey.
It can certainly be done, see for example Sarah Waters brilliant original novel "Fingersmith". But for now I find it easier to write for settings where I don't always have to wrestle with such intense homophobia in the characters or the world. It helps that two of my main fandoms are Dragon Age and Avatar: the last Airbender/Legend of Korra, both of which have fantasy settings based loosely on real historical periods, but minus a lot of the repressive social attitudes.
nb: I've only talked about writing since that was the question asked. In general I find it easier to draw scenarios that if I wrote them would have me tangled up in questions of how it could all possibly work, but for some reason all the historical femslash I've drawn has been based on my own or other people's stories, I'm not sure why.
The very first femslash fic I ever wrote (and also my first fanfic at all) is about Mary Bennet and Anne de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice. One of my motivations was annoyance at the fact that pretty much all the femslash fic I've read set in historical fandoms is full of bittersweet angst, or experimentation before marriage. There's nothing wrong with these sorts of stories, but I yearned for "and then they lived together happily forever and ever".
Of course once I started trying to write such a happy ending I realised why they're so rare.
So, my relatively small focus is the world of Jane Austen: upper class women in England in the late 18th/early 19th century. There are many obstacles to a f/f happily ever after set in this world (and many others): Women were expected to marry, and unless independently wealthy would probably have to unless they wanted to spend their life relying on the charity of others. While two "spinsters" living as housemates was just barely acceptable they could never admit to the true nature of their relationship. There was no support network or easy way for queer women to meet each other or even a general conception of queerness existing. And of course there was internalised homophobia: few women would be comfortable admitting same sex desires to themselves, let alone each other.
Individual women did get past these obstacles. The Ladies of Llangollen were two female friends who refused to marry who they were supposed to and lived together off their relatives grudging support until the Queen persuaded the King to grant them a pension (they were seen as an adorable example of female friendship). Such households became more common in the late 19th/early 20th century with the rise of feminism. There's also Anne Lister, an independently wealthy diarist who went around happily seducing other women. Another option is a loveless or polyamorous marriage with an understanding or clueless husband.
For my particular couple, I don't have to worry too much about all of these issues: Anne de Bourgh is independently wealthy, and while her mother is determined to see her married to a Good Man in general I think most people would assume she'd stay single due to her age and sickliness. Mary is not wealthy, but her family is (by the end of the book, at least), and I think would be happy enough to support her if she didn't want to get married. It wasn't even too hard to construct a situation where they met and started living together. What tripped me up was the internalised homophobia: Mary is canonically incredibly sexually conservative, and I just could not figure out how to have her get to a point where she was ok with being in an f/f relationship without being unforgivably hypocritical.
I do sometimes think about writing f/f for different, more tractable women from that era, but have yet to have an idea occur to me that doesn't hit one obstacle or another. The closest I can come up with is a cheerful Isabela/Katherine/Henry threesome for Northanger Abbey.
It can certainly be done, see for example Sarah Waters brilliant original novel "Fingersmith". But for now I find it easier to write for settings where I don't always have to wrestle with such intense homophobia in the characters or the world. It helps that two of my main fandoms are Dragon Age and Avatar: the last Airbender/Legend of Korra, both of which have fantasy settings based loosely on real historical periods, but minus a lot of the repressive social attitudes.
nb: I've only talked about writing since that was the question asked. In general I find it easier to draw scenarios that if I wrote them would have me tangled up in questions of how it could all possibly work, but for some reason all the historical femslash I've drawn has been based on my own or other people's stories, I'm not sure why.