Usually when France Apsley's name comes up in lesbian-relevant history, it's in connection with the future Queen Anne, but this article focuses more on her correspondence with Anne's sister Mary. Or rather, on Mary's corresopndence with her, as we only have one side of the letters.
LHMP
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From one angle, this article is of only passing relevance to the Project--imputing same-sex bonds on fragile evidence. From a different angle, the entire lesson of the play being studied could be "men are trash; they'll betray you and get you killed; stick to your girlfriend for happiness." I doubt that's the lesson that Restoration audiencese took from it, though.
I frequently comment on the somewhat chaotic order in which I encounter material for the Project. The closest I come to any deliberate program is when I seek out (or prioritize) publications on a topic I want to cover in the podcast. So it's often happened that, after blogging a book, I find myself encountering the author's earlier work that went into that book.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 340 – Mary/Charles Hamilton: The Original Female Husband - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/04/18)
Introduction
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 339 - On the Shelf for April 2026 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2026/04/04)
Welcome to On the Shelf for April 2026.
I don't usually post more than one LHMP entry per day, but I wanted to pair this article closely with Fielding's original, so that readers have the "real version" immediately available to compare with Fielding's fiction.
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.
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)
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