Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present - Hardcover

Faderman, Lillian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068803733X ISBN 13: 9780688037338

Publisher: William Morrow & Company, 1981

Synopsis

This classic cultural history draws on a rich variety of sources - from the writings of Casanova and Henry James to Ladies Home Journal and Adrienne Rich, along with trial records, love letters, pornography and more to explore 500 years of friendship and love between women. Lillian Faderman sheds new light on shifting theories of female sexuality and the changing status of women over the centuries. Surpassing the Love of Men demonstrates how nascent feminist values have always played a role in women's passions for one another and in men's reactions to them, from revulsion to ridicule to admiration.

About this title

Review:

First published in 1981, this feminist classic began modestly as an academic essay on Emily Dickinson's love poems and letters to her future sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert. In her original introduction, Faderman recalled her surprise at finding these records of an erotic attachment between women that showed no evidence of guilt, anxiety, or the need for secrecy. Yet 60 or 70 years after they were written, the original letters had been bowdlerized by a niece of Dickinson's, who clearly found them too shocking for publication. Why, Faderman wondered, was passionate love between women, once almost universally applauded in the Western world, now almost universally condemned? She learned that the love between Dickinson and Gilbert had many precedents, and that it was only in the late 19th century that medical literature and antifeminism combined to rank women who loved women "somewhere," as she puts it bluntly, "between necrophiliacs and those who had sex with chickens." For this new edition, Faderman explains that she has resisted the urge to update her text, hoping that her exploration of romantic friendship, from French libertine literature through the dawn of feminism through the lesbian panic of the 1920s will still serve as "solace and ammunition" for those hoping to find "a usable past." --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Lillian Faderman is a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, author of several books, and the winner of the 1992 Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian/Gay Anthology. She lives in Fresno, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Publication date: 1981
• ISBN 10: 068803733X
• ISBN 13: 9780688037338
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496