Out in the Mountains

OITM Review: Chloe Plus Olivia

Chloe Plus Olivia, an anthology of
Lesbian Literature from the
Seventeenth Century to the Present-
Edited by Lillian F aderman

Viking, 1994.

Moira

I would be remiss not to comment on
Lillian Faderman’s newest anthology of
lesbian literature without first
mentioning the origin of her title, Chloe
Plus Olivia, taken from Virginia Woolf’ s
A Room of One’s Own. In one of
Virginia’s lectures, of which her book is
composed of two, she proposes a ‘what
if?’. While reading Mary Carmichael’s
first novel, Life’s Adventure, Virginia
discovers the challenging sentence
“Chloe liked Olivia.” Perhaps more than
the simple structure of subject and
predicate is the enormity that for the first
time in literature a woman simply liked
another woman.pFriends. With all the
potential intimacies that one statement
could contain, she saw the brilliance.
What if, she proposes, women had been
given the representation that our
fictional male characters have had? What
fullness would the female character have
if she were allowed? In this simple
sentence, she saw all the intricacies that
Mary Carmichael was suggesting. It is in
light of this grand moment that this title
was taken.

The anthology itself unveils a great
variety of writers, some familiar and
some obscure, from the seventeenth
century to present day. I took the book

 

with me to bed for most of the summer
and fall and still have not read all of it.
The collection is over 800 pages of
fiction, poetry, journals, letters, and even
a play. Combined, they paint a rich
canvas of words and sing of love lost,
love gained, love shared. Love between
women.

In the preface, Faderman clearly states,
“Lesbian Literature has been in constant
metamorphosis, reflecting the social
attitudes of the eras in which it was
written, the timidity or power of
women’s voices at a given time, who felt
free to write, and who and what would be
published.” She reinforces this belief in a
series of introductions which coordinate
with her chapter titles: I. “Kindred
Spirits: The Literature of Romantic
Friendship”; II. “A Man Trapped in a
Woman’s Body: The Literature of Sexual
Inversion”; III. “Carnivorous Flowers:
The Literature of Exotic and Evil
Lesbians”; IV. “In The Closet: The
Literature of Lesbian Encoding”; V.
“Amazons: The Literature of
Lesbian-Feminism.”

The chapters are also in chronological
order, marking each piece of writing in
both a literary and historical context.
Through the decades of search,
Faderman defines lesbian literature.

In the first chapter, I was delighted to
read several letters written by Emily
Dickinson to a woman with whom she
obviously had a romantic friendship.

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Most biographies of Miss Dickinson
have tried to find an understanding of
her reclusive nature by linking her to
men with whom she was supposed to
have had a failed romance, shedding
little light on the images and meaning in
her allusive poetry. Seeing Dickinson
within Ms. Faderman’s illuminations
brings clarity to her poetry. Faderman
shows the common language in
Dickinson’s beautiful and much quoted,
“Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” with a letter
written to her dear friend, Sue Gilbert.
These insights and letters complete the
puzzle of Miss Dickinson. Among other
familiar writers in this chapter are
Christina Rossetti and Sarah Orne Jewett
known for her Boston marriage with
Annie Fields.

The following chapter highlights the next
generation of lesbian writers such as
Radclyffe Hall. Her novel, The Well of
Loneliness, was and continues to be a
herald of the female introvert. The novel
chronicles Hall’s life and much
publicized love affair with Una
Troubridge, although in a somewhat
fictional manner. Even though the novel
was banned in England when it was
published, it has subsequently become
the most read lesbian novel of all time.
Included in Ms. Faderman’s collection
are selections from letters that Hall
wrote to Euguenia Souline, a nurse
whom Hall hired while Una was ill. The
letters reveal the passionate affair
between the two women as well as a
glimpse inside the author.

Also included in this section is Vita