This book functionally invented the term “female husband” for an assigned-female person who marries (formally or otherwise) a woman while presenting as male. It’s possible (though speculative) that the book also encouraged pop culture fascination with the phenomenon, though I suspect that the fascination would have existed even if the label had never been created.
LHMP
Blog entry
This finishes up the deep dive into the General History of the Pyrates, the narrative it presents about Bonny and Read, the contemporary sources for elements of that narrative, and the basis for disbelieving the factual nature of the vast majority of the narrative. It isn't that I enjoy debunking potential sapphic encounters in history--after all, the Project is focused on historical fiction, and the General History is a whopper of a historical fiction--but I'm strongly invested in keeping track of the boundaries between history and wishful thinking.
Even more than Mary Read's "origin story," the backstory given for Anne Bonny's birth is complicated, farcical, and implausible. Similarly to Read, she is given an excuse for later cross-dressing in having been disguised as a boy at an early age. (This motif shows up in other cross-dressing biographies and is a way of absolving the woman of deliberate gender transgression. But the details of Anne's pirate career include massive contradictions, especially around her gender presentation and the timelines of her supposed pregnancy(s).
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 338 - Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Other Pirates - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/03/21)
If Mary Read's narrative looks like it was cobbled together from various pop culture sources, Anne Bonny's starts off like the plot of a farce. I mean...what's up with the stolen spoons and the "musical beds" hijinks?
Anyone who is reading this blog in simple chronological order (if any such persons exist) must be getting whiplash from the alternation of the two multi-part series: this one tackling the General History of the Pyrates and the on on the Best Related Work Hugo category. I hadn't planned to have them coming out simultaneously; it just happened that way. But in a way, that reflects the nature of my body of work: eclectic and somewhat random. On the other hand, both series are drawn from one of my favorite preoccupations.
One of the things I found fascinating about the narratives about Bonny and Read in the General History is the way it plays to specific audience expectations and reactions. Now I'm wondering if anyone has specifically studied it in the context of narrative conventions around "historical fictions" of the 18th century. That is, texts that are overtly fictional (as opposed to overtly claiming to be "true") but presented in the form of a reported narrative or even a first-person account.
Continuing our series about Anne Bonny and Mary Read, this installment sorts out conflicting reports of Rackham's crew and discusses the existing popular literature about women cross-dressing in combat or at sea that would have been available as a model for the fictionalization of Bonny and Read's lives.
Yesterday I recorded an extensive interview about the "afterlife" of Bonny and Read that will be included in the upcoming pocast that accompanies this series.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 337 - On the Shelf for March 2026 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/03/07)
Welcome to On the Shelf for March 2026.
By pure coincidence, I'm going to be posting two different series interleaved on the blog for the next month or so. They're quite different in nature! The Lesbian Historic Motif Project will be looking into the mythology around early 18th century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read (starting with this post), while an entire separate blog series will be starting shortly presenting The Theory of Related-ivity: A History and Analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo Category.
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