Casey Maeve

Natalie Clifford Barney: A Modern Sappho?

This paper focuses on Sapphic writer, poet and Salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney (born 1876), an Anglo-American lesbian who moved to Paris at the fin de siècle where she remained until her death in 1972. As the original ‘Lesbian,’ the ancient Greek poet Sappho uniquely provided an already-queer mythos for Modernist writers to draw upon as an aesthetic source of inspiration. Barney was actively re-writing the previously heterocentric canon of Sappho’s translations in a particularly challenging context: following the scandal of Oscar Wilde’s criminal sentencing for ‘gross indecency,’ as well as the increasing medicalisation of homosexuality by Sexologists. Barney’s Sapphic relationships and poetic verses were defiantly overt and fervent, from a context in which female homosexuality didn’t even exist in political terms. Though Barney would later identify herself as a ‘lesbian,’ the use of the term Sapphic is pertinent here as it sheds light on those who fall outside our understandings of sexual norms, from historical perspectives where contemporary language may seem anachronisticThis paper will explore how, through the utilisation of Sappho’s classical aesthetic, Barney solidified her lesbian identity in particularly heteronormative contexts. 

This paper draws together interdisciplinary methods, utilising contemporary queer theories to inform my theoretical approach. By employing a queer reading of Barney’s poetry, it becomes possible to expose more complex non-normative literary contributions in the Modernist literary canon. I argue that Barney referenced Sappho to covertly signal to the queer community, drawing on a historical lesbian continuum as Adrienne Rich (1980) described, and to establish her radically feminist translation and adaptation projects. I argue that re-writing these ancient fragments enabled Barney to maintain Sappho’s classical associations to uphold status within the French academy, simultaneously formulating her own Sapphic identity and literary network in the process.

Casey Maeve is a self-funded second-year PhD student in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. This PhD project is refocusing Sapphic poetry and poets from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, identifying and drawing connections between the ‘Sapphic literary networks.’ As of February 2023, Casey has been a part-time lecturer at the University of Worcester, working within the Institute of Humanities and Arts. Casey draws upon Queer theoretical perspectives and methodologies, building on the notion of gender and sexuality as subjective social constructs that can change over time.

Marlena Tronicke

Reclaiming Desire: Fin-de-Siècle Sexology and Historical Revision in Tom Crewe's The New Life

Fin-de-siècle debates on (homo)sexuality were shaped by social institutions that codified, fixated, and policed ‘deviant’ sexual identities in the realms of both medicine and the law. In their groundbreaking study Sexual Inversion (1897), Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds sought to counter repressive sexological accounts of what was then termed ‘inversion’ by a more neutral approach. To do so, they employed a register of scientific objectivity to obscure the oftentimes erotic nature of their subject matter. Tom Crewe’s The New Life (2023) reimagines these historical figures and their textual legacies by centring the emotional and sensual experiences that earlier discourses concealed. Whereas, historically, Ellis and Symonds’ book was published two years after the Oscar Wilde trials, in Crewe’s version their work gets entangled in the immediate fallout from the trials. Through altering this succession of events, Crewe’s novel imagines a version of history that might have been, had not increasingly licensed homophobia disrupted efforts to normalise same-sex desires. Drawing on both fin-de-siècle sexological discourse and contemporary queer theory, this paper explores the ways in which The New Life offers a fictional intervention, not only restoring bodily texture to marginalised figures whose sexualities were previously silenced but also inviting contemporary reconsiderations of how fragile debates about desire and sexuality have always been.

Marlena Tronicke is professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Cologne. Her research and teaching focus on early modern and contemporary British drama, the long nineteenth century and its reimagination, as well as on gender, queer and postcolonial studies. She is the author of two monographs, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 2018) and Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Domestic Elsewheres (Palgrave, 2025). She has also co-edited several volumes and special issues, including Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains (special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020), Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters (special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 2020), and Black Neo-Victoriana (Brill, 2021).

Marcus Lawrence

Queer Transmission and Aural Architecture: Performative Encoding and Sexual Dissidence in the Verbal Portraits of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee.

The late nineteenth century has been viewed in recent criticism as a historical precursor to the understanding of queer theory. Dustin Friedman describes the Aesthetic movement in Britain as ‘one of queer theory’s unacknowledged ancestors.’ (Before Queer Theory). The queer aesthetes’ preoccupation with identity manifested in a search for a viable selfhood and created an aesthetic space in which an autonomous self could develop through resistance: a queer resistance towards a surveillant, panoptic nineteenth century that sought to expose the visible body as exemplifying morality and the observable as indicating moral vitality. The cult of athleticism that emerged at the fin-de-siècle resulted in a heterosexual, virile male body as epitomising moral virtue. Moreover, in representational portraiture, an inviolable visible self emerged due to a dualist discourse of body and mind, forcing a transient, morally suspect physical body to become fixed. As visibility became synonymous with societal control over non-normative desires, queer aesthetes cultivated an aesthetic space where queer identities, which could not be articulated explicitly, could be expressed through the material reality of art objects.

This essay contends that the works of Walter Pater (‘The School of Giorgione’), Oscar Wilde (‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’), and Vernon Lee (‘Oke of Okehurst’) navigate resistance through a queer material transmission. All three texts share a unique use of portraiture and materiality and manage the representation of physical objects as a means of encoding both desire and personality. Through the genre of verbal portraiture, the three respective writers ‘enmind’ matter, whether it be portraits, nature, words, or the abstracted object, to create a point of return, a site where the queer self can be recognised and allowed to go through a process of ‘perpetual weaving and unweaving.’ (Pater, ‘Conclusion’, The Renaissance).

Marcus Lawrence (BA University of Nottingham, MA Durham University) is a first-year PhD English student at the University of Nottingham, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the doctoral training partner, Midlands4Cities. Lawrence’s research examines the significance of apology and the apologetic in late-Victorian literature, focusing on interactions with literary style, queerness, and selfhood and exploring how Victorian writers developed distinctive styles that both express and shield regret. His research reframes the discourse around John Henry Newman, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James as productive attempts to cultivate a vocabulary of apology that affirms the possibilities of a queer self. Lawrence’s undergraduate work on W.B. Yeats’ political abstraction has been published in Innervate (vol.14, 2021-22), and he has presented his work on Newman – ‘Found in the ‘Port’: John Henry Newman and the Narrative Autonomising of a Queer Self’ - at the University of St Andrews.