Martha Vicinus

"Intimate Friends" offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of "The Well of Loneliness," Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings.

Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of ...