Reviewed by: The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance by Hannah Roche Emma Heaney THE OUTSIDE THING: MODERNIST LESBIAN ROMANCE, by Hannah Roche. Gender and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 249 pp. $60.00 cloth; $59.95 ebook. Hannah Roche’s The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance analyzes the sapphic triumvirate of Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes to argue that modernist lesbian writing negotiates what is outside (declared, affirmed, shown) and what is inside (felt, subtly communicated, coded) in ways that are central to the period’s literary aesthetics. It was Stein who provided the declaration from which Roche takes her title: “romance [is] ‘the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside’” (qtd. in Roche, p. 15). For Roche, these writers depict romance on the brink of open declaration. Sometimes its openness or opacity depends on the lesbian reader’s ability to find it. Sometimes these novels and stories keep a heterosexual love plot as cover for an evident (if you are able to see it) lesbian desire. All of these writers absorb the conventions and tones of Victorian heterosexual romance, the “outside” forms that define normative love in the modernist period, and populate these forms with the particular tones of love between and among women. Here Roche pulls both the content and method of Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007) forward into the twenty-first century. Roche approaches “lesbian” as a mode of writing, reading, and relating that is both radically open and culturally specific in a way that recalls the lesbian feminist writing of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. What is different here is that Roche is working with a narrow group of white, bourgeois to aristocratic-adjacent, European-located (if in two of three cases American-derived) writers as the objects of study. These writers do not take the pathologizing of sexology or psychoanalysis as their primary mode of understanding lesbianism but rather the forms and tones of nineteenth-century romance. The Outside Thing argues that the critical consensus that romance is middlebrow, mediocre, and (perhaps most damningly from the [End Page 362] modernist perspective) simple operates precisely as a feminization of that the genre. Rather than seek to escape the association with feminized forms, as the previous generation of feminist literary scholars did (here I am thinking of Nancy K. Miller, Susan Gubar, and Sandra Gilbert in particular), Roche wants us to lean into the she said, she said of these stories and novels, not only because they are gossipy and fun but because this romance content is conceptually and aesthetically serious. Roche’s engagement with Stein’s literary output largely focuses on Q.E.D. (1903) and in particular the queer coupling of Adele and Helen, whose ultimately frustrated mutual passion still holds open the possibility of such passions. This literary analysis is followed by a biographical chapter, which focuses on the relationship between Stein and Alice B. Toklas—in particular Toklas’s jealousy, famous in Stein scholarship, over the novel’s basis in Stein’s previous liaisons. This pairing of the literary with the biographical text allows Roche to see how in both fiction and life Stein played with gender roles, allowing Adele to be both man and woman even as Stein herself occupied the roles of husband, wife, and even baby in her relationship. Likewise, focus on the sing-songy love notes passed from Stein to Toklas and the erotic poetry that emerged from their sexual practice demonstrates how the inside of their life together formed the texts on which Stein’s reputation, her outside, was built. This argument recalls Tirza Latimer’s discussion in Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (2005) of the centrality of the couple’s domestic life to Stein’s art. Roche then moves to valorize the much-maligned Hall, making a case for taking the writer seriously, precisely on the topics that have most often attracted derision: the anti-modernism of her simple direct prose, her sentimentality, and her commitment to the trope of the tragic invert. Roche agrees with its author that The Well of Loneliness (1928) is a “propaganda novel...