Lesbian Ghosts

Abstract

While reading these theoretically and textually rich essays, I tried to concentrate wholly on the distant past, on the new and wonderful women to whom I was introduced. I hoped to find suggestions for how we might identify and describe boundary-blurring relationships, whether between women or between the past and the present. Yet my thoughts kept returning to one of my favorite Victorian writers, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856–1935). She would have loved to contribute to this volume. For her, crossing time periods was an easy act of the imagination, and no one had a keener sense of the importance of archives, memories, and subjective experience. The past was never dead, or as she declared in the preface to her volume of horror stories, “a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between [the Past] and the Present.”¹ Surely the past is still haunting us, if the editors can compile such an interesting and provocative set of essays on same-sex erotics—something that Lee, who lived with and loved women throughout her life—would have understood. While I could easily make connections between my own work and these essays, could I do so as well for someone writing over a hundred years ago? It is a question I return to at the end of my essay, after reflecting on what I have learned.