The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989.

Abstract

Teaching courses in lesbian culture over the past five years, I've become frustratedly aware of how proliferating but disparate and difficult to pin down most of the critical material is. Tracking down the elusive pieces of literary criticism is tantamount to lesbian detecting: articles appear and disappear, and information on their whereabouts depends on having friends in the know. There are signs, however, that the field is cohering into a discrete discipline; 1990 produced two anthologies, the imported Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, and homegrown British Lesbian and Gay Writing, edited by Mark Lilly. Two recent bibliographic references, Out On the Shelves, produced by British librarians in the wake of Section 28, and New Zealander Miriam Saphira's New Lesbian Literature 1980-88, suggest there is also a fictional canon to collect. Galvanized in part by the repressive legislation of the 1980s (soon to be followed by more of the same, no doubt), British and North American lesbian and gay activism has provoked a self-reflective growth in cultural theory. The new decade will see its maturity and expansion already two English universities have held conferences: 'The Future for Lesbian and Gay Studies' (Essex), and 'Questions of Homosexuality' (London). However, it is appropriate that the first book-length genre study