Romantic Friendship Research Articles

Introducing 'Brother-Love': If 'No-Homo' Were Invented in the Victorian Era

Working off of information surrounding nineteenth century intimate male friendships provided by E. Anthony Rotundo’s 1989 article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Norther United States, 1800-1900,” as well as ideas of female intimacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Julian Carter’s 2005 article “On Mother-Love: History, Queer Theory, and Nonlesbian Identity,” the concept of “brother-love” encompasses important components of intimate male friendships during the Victorian period. Hidden physical and emotional intimacy were vital to these intimate friendships, in ways differing from Carter’s “mother-love” as explored in this project. Anna Clark’s concept of “Twilight Moments” (2005) will help explain “brotherlove” as it is compared to Carter’s “mother-love.” “Brother-love” is a response to contemporary terms and concepts queer scholars use when focusing on historical moments, and it provides an alternative frame of reference for intimate and romantic male friendships while extracting contemporary influence of same-sex relations.

General Affections: Griffin Alexander Stedman and Romantic Friendships During the Civil War

General Affections: Griffin Alexander Stedman and Romantic Friendships During the Civil War

Queering singlehood: Examining the intersection of sexuality and relationship status from a queer lens

AbstractThis paper uses a queer theoretical lens to redefine family boundaries and structures by exploring LGBTQIA+ and single adults' relationships through the interconnectedness of their marginalized histories. Queer theory both centers LGBTQIA+ lives and deconstructs normativities. The overlapping history of singlehood and LGBTQIA+ will be explored using examples including romantic friendships, same‐sex couples and legal marriage, family of choice, and relationship anarchy. These examples explore how LGBTQIA+ people have often been considered single or choose new interpretations of singlehood (e.g., solo polyamory). The paper also explores how single people have often been considered outside the heterosexual norm. Thus, how these lived experiences deconstruct heteronormativity and can deconstruct mononormativity, amatonormativity, and homonormativity is examined. Understanding and acknowledging family lives beyond these normativities will build toward a more inclusive family and relationship science.

Charity Bryant and the Queer Affordances of the Early American Acrostic

Abstract: This article investigates early American women's acrostic poetry, especially as it was written and exchanged in same-sex friendships and romantic relationships. It begins with a discussion of male poets' deployment of the print acrostic in the service of courtship, considering how such poems expose women to the public eye. Women's manuscript acrostics, on the other hand, refuse the isolation of the female subject in the heterosexual pair, instead creating community in their composition and circulation practices. By way of example, the article turns to acrostic poetry written and received by Charity Bryant, a young teacher from New England whose affections for other women prompted the exchange of manuscript acrostics that fit same-sex love into the larger framework of gendered respectability and morality. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the adaptation of women's manuscript practices to relationships that included but went well beyond the rhetoric of romantic friendship. In this exchange, the article argues, acrostics normalize same-sex relationships, making them legible and preserving them for posterity.

Dezorientacje: Antologia polskiej literatury queer [Disorientations: An anthology of Polish queer literature

<i>Dezorientacje: Antologia polskiej literatury queer</i> [Disorientations: An anthology of Polish queer literature

The Sexuality of Civil War Historiography: How Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War

The Sexuality of Civil War HistoriographyHow Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War Andrew Donnelly (bio) The central scene in James K. Hosmer’s 1865 novel The Thinking Bayonet takes place in a Confederate prison camp. Two men, a Union solder and a Confederate soldier, say farewell: “Hands for a moment on one another’s shoulders; bearded faces, damp with the rain now falling, coming together under the dark in a kiss.” At a college in Massachusetts, the pair had been intimates who, as a classmate wrote, “have a love for one another, almost surpassing the love of women.” They broke up over the issue of slavery, when the Southerner returned to his family’s slave plantation in Louisiana and the Northerner became involved in Massachusetts abolitionism. The Southerner enlisted in the Confederate army, declaring, “I hate the North . . . and yet the only man I ever loved was a Northerner.” Coincidentally overhearing this declaration, the Northerner resolved to fight his onetime friend, “I say it while I love him.”1 The prison kiss is their last. The novel ends with the Southerner, his Confederacy, and their romantic friendship all dead, deaths necessary both for national reunion and the Northerner’s eventual heterosexual marriage. Hosmer, a Harvard graduate who served as an infantryman in the Union campaign for the southern Mississippi River, framed the crisis in his novel within the broad “we are not enemies but friends” framework of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”2 Hosmer’s novel did so by narrating the war [End Page 295] as the destruction of romantic and homoerotic bonds between white men. The novel’s antebellum nostalgia celebrates their intimacy as of the past, strained already equally by their advancement beyond college and by their places in the sectional conflict. Even then, the novel suggests that a paired adulthood was impossible, requiring the intervention of the Civil War to end it. The war transforms their intimacy to a thing possible only in the past, ruptured by death and replaced by marriage. Antebellum white men had celebrated romantic friendship as a stable model of republican society and the ties that bind male citizens; postbellum novelists like Hosmer imagined these friendships within a developmental framework that moved from youthful intimacies to disunion to adult heterosexuality.3 His and several other novels written during and after the war continued an antebellum trend of using intimate male friendships to think about the problems of national unity.4 In these novels, the Civil War became an event within a trajectory of male development, necessary for the maturation from youthful homo-eroticism to adult heterosexuality. As such, the novels offered an interpretation of the war: the more intense the intimacies between the two young men, the more the war appears as the tragic loss of a past that cannot return. The closer the men advance toward the impossibility of a same-sex paired adulthood, the more the war appears as fatalistically preordained for antebellum society. Hosmer’s interpretation of the war is not simply about the outcome on the battlefield but is narrated as a tragedy for the relationships between men. The war ended the homoerotic relationship, and reunion offered a new stage of heterosexual maturity. Hosmer interpreted the war not only as a novelist but also [End Page 296] as a Civil War historian. Forty-two years after The Thinking Bayonet, he wrote a history of the conflict for Albert Bushnell Hart’s American Nation series in volume 20, The Appeal to Arms, 1861–1863, and volume 21, Outcome of the Civil War, 1863–1865.5 Unlike his 1865 novel, Hosmer’s history contains no cross-sectional kisses; nonetheless, his history plays out at grand scale the relationship between his male heroes. Like the novel, Hosmer’s history made the war primarily about the intensity of feeling between white men: Northerners led to war by aggressive abolitionist voices and Southerners, with misperceptions of their power, launching a misguided effort to defend the already doomed system of slavery. This essay covers the roughly four decades for which Hosmer’s novel and two-volume history...

Negotiating Intimacy in British Romantic Friendship Albums

This article explores the integral role that the practice of friendship album-keeping played in British intellectual networks at the turn of the nineteenth century. The friendship album's draw among contemporaries, and deterrent to researchers, is that the album's intimacy is achieved through the practice's refusal to consider its legibility beyond its immediate circle. Instead, each album's significance resides in the affective residue of lived experiences that is expressed differently in each album. Friendship albums engage primarily with contemporary topics and literature and thus are a part of Romantic-era album culture, including manuscript miscellany albums and gift books; but contributors convey friendship through personalized acts of archiving, including tracing and copying, as well as literary and artistic imitations, adaptation, and invention that use early modern literary and social networking traditions for inspiration. In all cases, the friendship album's casual approach to archiving insists that outsiders remain uncertain of social dynamics, contributor intentions, and conversations that lay beyond the album pages. Contributions discussed include the original writing of Amelia Opie, Hannah More, and the young Felicia Browne Hemans, as well as amateur contributors, many of whose entries and even albums remain unsigned and unattributed.

DIGITALIZATION OF PRACTICES IN THE PERSONAL AND FAMILY SPHERE OF LIFE OF YOUNG RUSSIANS

This chapter examines the deterministic level of development of information and network technologies, the transformation of the practices of interpersonal and family experience of modern Russian youth. The characteristics and consequences of this transformation are analyzed using the concepts of networks and the information society. There is an increase in the number of young Internet users using this space for romantic friendships, communication in general. Conclusions are made indicating a connection between the prevalence of network practices and the age of young people; the feasibility of E. Toff's future forecast about the spread of diversity with the continuation of the nuclear family, new practices: deferred parenting, consciously distant alliances, etc. Positive and negative consequences are given, incl. unpreparedness and inability of young people and the older generation at the moment to resist the ongoing changes, which determine the emergence of both the future and the present shock, are affirmed.

“A Very Crushable, Kissable Girl”: Queer Love and the Invention of the Abnormal Girl Among College Women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

AbstractYoung women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural anxieties about their relationships. But, as notions of normative girlhood began to form, this intense scrutiny of their relationships had a significant impact on their everyday lives. The young women who were navigating this scientific and cultural shift developed a range of innovative strategies from subversively concealing their relationships to boldly pursuing their queer desires.

From Girls' Novels to Love Novels: Female Friendship in Yuikawa Kei's Sayonara, Insecurity and Sweetheart Nearby = 少女小説から恋愛小説へ: 唯川恵の小説における女同士の友情

Despite its marginal status in literary history, the genre of girls' novels has played a significant role in the development of Japanese popular literature. In this article, I demonstrate the thematic continuity between Cobalt girls' novels and popular literature for adults by examining representations of female homosociality in two novels by Yuikawa Kei: her girls' novel Sayonara, Insecurity (Sayonara, konpurekkusu, 1987) and her love novel Sweetheart Nearby (Katagoshi no koibito, 1999). I argue that both novels employ a model of female homosociality based on the exclusion of men and rejection of heterosexual love. In Sweetheart Nearby, Yuikawa expands this model to include a cluster of plot elements I call "lesbian panic defused," which signals the protagonists' heterosexual identity and serves as a foundation to the homosocial plot. I argue that the homoerotic tension between the female protagonists in Sweetheart Nearby links this novel to the tradition of passionate friendship in girls' novels and also queers the genre of love novels. Thus, Sweetheart Nearby expands the boundaries of the love novel genre (ren'ai shōsetsu) to include homosocial bonds.

Sources of Mattering for Women and Men: Gender Differences and Similarities in Feelings of Social Significance

Social mattering refers to an individual’s perceived sense of significance in the world and is a key aspect of overall mental health. Using data from a representative survey of adult Americans, we test the extent to which societal-level status, community engagement, group memberships, and interpersonal attachments affect men’s and women’s sense of mattering. We find that women gain social significance to the extent that they feel attached to others interpersonally, in terms of romantic relationships, parenthood, friendships, and closeness to family. Men’s sense of mattering is significantly influenced by broader social factors, like their strength of attachment to the Republican Party, their social media use, and their ability to donate money to the community. These differences suggests that gender norms lead men to also seek significance from the broader community and through group memberships while women rely mainly on their close social ties to feel like they matter.

The Chosen and the Beautiful

The Chosen and the Beautiful

Remembering Sappho: transatlantic ‘Lesbian Nations’ in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT This paper examines differing articulations of proto-lesbian identity in the long nineteenth century, in which educated, middle-class white women emulated the figure of Sappho in their writing and formulated Sappho-inspired communities through creative salons, societies, clubs, and social/literary networks. It maps the progression from the romantic friendships of the eighteenth century to the Boston marriages of the nineteenth century, to the beginning of the twentieth century, when love between women went from noble and virtuous to deviant and morbid sexual ‘inversion’. The question is not only treated chronologically but geographically, the position of American-based women writers juxtaposed with the opportunities afforded by specifically 'Paris-Lesbos'. The following study maps these Transatlantic communities as early forms of ‘Lesbian Nations’ through their use of the 'Lesbian' poet. It engages in a form of Sapphic ‘remembering,’ questions how and who we remember, and contributes to current understandings of a 'lesbian' historical past.

"cling with both hands": Erotic Pedagogy in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Gates Ajar

"cling with both hands":Erotic Pedagogy in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Gates Ajar Brianna Thompson (bio) In Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' postbellum novel The Gates Ajar (1868), when the fictional Mary Cabot loses her beloved brother Roy in the Civil War, she goes numb and begins to doubt her faith.1 Improbably accompanied by a daughter named Faith, her pious aunt arrives to care for her. The first time Mary cries in front of her aunt, Winifred "gather[s]" her (adult) niece onto her lap and consoles her: "'There,' she said in a low, lulling voice, 'now tell Auntie all about it.'"2 This early scene marks the beginning of loving religious instruction in which the women touch and comfort each other. Such instruction foreshadows how Winifred continues for Mary a desire taboo that Mary had already established with Roy. As Mary pivots from a sister desiring her brother to same-sex desire for Winifred, she and her aunt establish a radical new intimacy that exceeds traditional categories of love. Phelps frames both grief and religious empowerment as transformative processes in the mid-nineteenth century by offering us a story about tragedy that becomes livable due to the erotic potentiality of faith and grief. Readers of the wildly popular Gates Ajar found that religious teaching and mourning surprisingly enabled desire taboos. In this novel, American religious instruction [End Page 443] as it bleeds into surviving grief allows for a transformative experience that I call erotic pedagogy.3 While the term may sound as if it describes what were often normative homosocial relationships between Victorian American women, theorized by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg as "romantic friendship," erotic pedagogy offers a new analytic for understanding how these relationships could be infused with the Second Great Awakening's embodied religious enthusiasm in ways that enabled erotic expression.4 Erotic pedagogy describes how these women draw on erotic potentiality to fashion a new intimacy, transforming Mary's passionate grief for her brother into desire for her aunt. What I am reading as desire taboos play a crucial role in how Phelps understands bereavement. She comforted her readers by framing grief as something so raw and alienating that it made one feel painfully separate. Interestingly, Phelps expresses this aching alienation by making Mary's grief the logical outcome of losing someone with whom she already shared a unique relationship. To make a scenario in which Mary is experiencing the most extreme loss, she must love her brother so differently when he is alive that she is already distinctive. In other words, Mary's incestuous love for her brother anticipates her sense that her grief is singular. Phelps conceived of The Gates Ajar from 1863 through 1865, during and immediately after the Civil War, to console women whose patriarchal Protestantism offered few tools for dealing with world-shattering loss. With a death toll of over 750,000 American soldiers and an unknown number of civilian casualties, the only group that the war generated in surfeit were mourners.5 Grief became an abiding reality for Northerners and Southerners, as the war reduced almost every family in the reconstituted United States.6 After the war, Phelps recalls that "our country was dark with sorrowing women … Towards the nameless mounts of Arlington, of Gettysburg, … the yearning of desolated [End Page 444] homes went out in those waves of anguish which seem to choke the very air."7 She describes the Civil War's effects as an obstructing darkness because the war left surviving Americans, especially lower- and middle-class women, with particularly numerous losses.8 Women experienced the personal, gendered effects of the war's staggering damage due to two cultural norms. First, the work of mourning was often women's work, and second, "prevailing [religious] beliefs had nothing to say to an afflicted woman that could help her much. Creeds and commentaries and sermons were made by men."9 Phelps designed The Gates Ajar to address those gendered experiences of postwar bereavement. This essay intervenes in theories of nineteenth-century relationships, offering a new analytic for understanding how the Second Great Awakening's embodied religious enthusiasm could infuse female friendships in ways that enabled erotic expression. I suggest that, because...

Branching Out: Toward A History of Jewish Radical Feminisms

Branching Out:Toward A History of Jewish Radical Feminisms Lana Dee Povitz (bio) Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices From the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. viii + 453 pp. Figures, notes, and index. Hardcover $75.00. Jewish feminisms, like Jewish studies, like Jewish people, run a full gamut of experience: religious and secular, Yiddish and Hebrew, Zionist and pro-Palestinian, heteronormative and queer. In Jewish Radical Feminism, Joyce Antler unites "the two branches of Jewish-inflected feminism": members of "the early women's liberation movement [of the late 1960s and early 1970s] and the later, more self-consciously identified 'Jewish feminist' movement that arose in the 1970s and 1980s to address Jewish religious and secular life" (p. 3). The book is structured accordingly, with four chapters dedicated to the first branch and four more to the second branch. Each chapter focuses on one influential group or occasionally a subculture within a particular city. Antler's subjects are predominantly Ashkenazi women based in the northeastern United States.1 Using an open-ended understanding of radical, Antler explores universalist feminist groups such as the radical Redstockings and the socialist Bread and Roses alongside manifestly Jewish collectives, such as the spiritually oriented B'Not Esh (Hebrew for 'daughters of fire') and the lesbian Di Vilde Chayes (Yiddish for 'the wild beasts').2 Antler's project has been a long time in the making. A range of historians have noted the significant presence of Jews in the women's liberation movement, both in terms of their demographic numbers and their intellectual contributions.3 To accomplish her task, Antler employs prosopography or collective biography, a narrative strategy that could not be more appropriate to radical feminism's collective spirit. As Antler shows, no feminist ever worked alone. Whether analyzing the conditions of their lives in consciousness-raising circles, producing new research about their own bodies, organizing public speakouts against rape, coordinating childcare collectives, or reinterpreting Torah, Jewish feminists came to their ideas and plans through electrified conversation. Through Antler's oral history interviews with at least forty-six women, passionate friendships emerge as the matrix for Second Wave feminism's revolutionary [End Page 294] ideas (p. 31).4 "Much of the energy that had heretofore gone into sexual relationships and especially couples was now being directed towards women friends and the women's community in general," observed Ann Hunter Popkin, a member of the Boston-based Bread and Roses.5 Speaking about her friends in the Chicago women's liberation movement, Amy Kesselman recalled, "Our appreciation of each other was like fertilizer, liberating energy long stifled by the sexism of the male leadership of the new left" (p. 42). That disagreements and splits just as often drained their energies only further highlights the centrality of relationships to feminist world-making. Together, the profiles of different collectives–the backgrounds of their members, the forces that drew them together, what they accomplished, and (to a much lesser extent) why they dissolved—offer a panoramic experience that is akin to flipping through stacks of photo albums with an inordinately well-informed guide. Antler is also the sort of guide who prefers to focus on points of unity. In granting only limited space to matters of contention among feminists, Jewish Radical Feminism manages to cover a lot of ground and make itself palatable to the spectrum of readers interested in Jewish American history. The narrative launches confidently out of the late 1960s, sails smoothly through the 1970s, and glides to a stop in the mid-1980s, just as many Jewish feminists were beginning to grapple with crucial questions concerning whiteness, Zionism, and sexuality. It is unfortunate that Antler limits her admittedly long book in this way. Feminism was no less alive in 1990 than it was in 1980. In fact, as recent work by Lisa Levenstein has shown, by the 1990s, American feminism had been fortified by recent decades of international coalition building and the growing influence of lesbians, women of color, and activists from the global South.6 Jewish feminists remained vitally engaged with all of this new activity. Jewish Radical Feminism is not an argument-driven book. Instead, its rationale lies...

An Investigation of Coping Strategies Used by College Students With Intellectual Disability

Abstract Attending college can lead to many benefits including better outcomes in adult life for college graduates. This concept is applicable to all students, including students with intellectual disability who are attending institutions of higher education programs to refine social, academic, employment, and independent living skills. Similar to their typical peers, students with intellectual disability enrolled in postsecondary education programs endure levels of stress that result in the application of coping strategies necessary to navigate various social domains of college life, including romantic relationships, friendships, roommate relationships, and social media interactions. The present study utilizes survey and interview data to examine which coping strategies are used by college students with mild intellectual disability. When faced with stressful situations, almost one-third of study participants chose Planful Problem Solving as their first choice coping strategy in the Romantic domain, and almost half of respondents used it to deal with stressful situations related to Friendships. More than a third of college students with intellectual disability chose Confrontive Coping as their preferred strategy in the Roommate and Social Media domains. Findings are consistent with previous research, which suggests that young adults with intellectual disability use Problem-Focused strategies most frequently when dealing with stressful situations. Implications for research and practice are also presented and discussed.

Very Queer Friends

ABSTRACT:&#x0D; Elena Ferrante has long acknowledged the influence of Alba de Céspedes’ 1949 novel Dalla parte di lei on her writing, particularly in terms of conceiving female characters. In Ferrante’s newest novel, La vita bugiarda degli adulti, the prominent theme of queer friendship between young women echoes and reconfigures elements from Dalla parte di lei. This article delves into the capacious queer relationality depicted in both novels, tracing the presence of transmasculinity and feminist re-writing as key elements in both. Situating the two novels’ representations of women’s intimacy in their socio-literary contexts, I analyze the ways in which they utilize models like the «fiamma», romantic friendship, sisterhood, and female husbands. Neither author identifies as lesbian or queer; thus my close reading of the frankly sexual and deeply romantic scenes between female characters seeks not to assign the writers or their books to a category, but rather to elaborate the queer dimensions of relationality that they explore. Ultimately, I propose that a significant part of what makes these queer, lesbian, and transmasculine representations possible is a shared feminist project of reading, writing, and rewriting from one’s own perspective: dalla parte di lei. In this sense, what Ferrante’s narrator-protagonist Giovanna owes to de Céspedes’ narrator-protagonist Alessandra is not only the possibility of a queer life and a feminist voice, but the potential for narrating queer feminist experience as relational.

Romantic female friendships as resistance: subversive web series in the United States and India

ABSTRACTThe current representative wave of romantic female friendships (Girls, Broad City, Insecure) in the United States owes a great deal to the web series. The online platform bypasses conventions of the romantic comedy, which prioritize heterosexual romance over female relationships. This article seeks to bring two geographies (United States and India) into conversation with one another via a textual analysis of two such web series: Brown Girls (US) and Ladies Room (India). These stories of female friendship explore the unique concerns of urban female identity, sexuality, and solidarity. A central question we address in this textual dialogue is how these representations subvert and critically engage their respective political climates of neoconservatism. Brown Girls and Ladies Room move away from prioritizing heteronormative relationships reflects the transcultural disillusionment with the ideology of containment that defines the genre of romantic comedy. The acceptance of the romantic female friendship narrative within the mainstream thus fosters new critiques of old illusions of monogamous coupling, feminine duty, and heteronormative subjectivities.

The Girl in the Whirlpool: Girls' Culture (Shōjo Bunka) in Tanizaki's Manji = 谷崎潤一郎の『卍』における少女文化

The novel Manji (Quicksand, 1931) by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, about a destructive love affair between two women, has been analyzed extensively for its use of Kansai dialect and its complex narrative style. This article argues for a new interpretation of Manji as a parody of 1920s girls' culture (shōjo bunka), in particular the S relationship (S kankei) or romantic friendship between two girls. Tanizaki uses signifiers of girls' culture in Manji to spin a tale of comedy and perversion. The novel reconfigures the S relationship to cater to the male gaze, containing and controlling the potentially disruptive shōjo character. Although the novel embeds the female characters in girls' culture, rather than a chaste friendship between two girls, Manji features a perverse sexual relationship between two adult women, ending in an attempted love suicide. By examining the references to girls' culture in the novel, as well as the theme of love suicide and censored content related to abortion and birth control, this essay shows how Tanizaki comedically, deliberately revised girls' culture tropes for male readers. Tanizaki uses mockery to contain and control the aspects of the S relationship threatening to the patriarchal order, using the recognizable markers of girls' culture to create a sexualized, voyeuristic tale of the shōjo as perverse and dangerous.

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons

Reviewed by: The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons Claudia Nelson (bio) The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children by Eleanor Fitzsimons. Abrams, 2019. Edith Nesbit may well have led the most engrossing life of any children's writer. There's something to fascinate everyone here. Nesbit's domestic conduct overturns the stereotypes of Victorian middle-class propriety; after marrying her first husband, Hubert Bland, two months before the birth of their first child, she passed off as hers two of his children by her friend and companion Alice Hoatson, who became an indispensable part of the Bland-Nesbit household even as Nesbit herself indulged in a lengthy series of romantic friendships—or perhaps romances—with male protégés. Nesbit's intellectual deportment is equally eye-catching, given her passionate commitment to ideologies ranging from socialism (the nonviolent brand espoused by the Fabians, of whom Nesbit was a founding member) to [End Page 179] the belief that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's plays. And, of course, she published poems, plays, nonfiction, horror stories, New Woman fiction, and—particularly beloved and influential—children's literature. Small wonder, then, that since her death in 1924, Nesbit has attracted multiple biographers. The first of these, Doris Langley Moore, had the advantage of direct contact with Nesbit intimates including Hoatson and Nesbit's adopted daughter, Rosamund. First published in 1933, Moore's E. Nesbit: A Biography was revised and reissued in 1968 after the deaths of its subject's immediate family members made possible greater candor; this account of Nesbit's life thus has a particularly good claim to authenticity and necessarily functions as an important source for any subsequent biographer. Moore's most significant successor in this role, Julia Briggs, published A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit in 1987. Briggs, a distinguished academic whose subjects also included Virginia Woolf, produced both in and beyond her Nesbit biography what remain some of the most brilliant and insightful readings of the author's children's fiction available; her work is indispensable to any scholar interested in Nesbit's writing for the young. Other biographies, ranging from Noel Streatfeild's quirky Magic and the Magician: E. Nesbit and Her Children's Books (1958) to Elisabeth Galvin's The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit (2018), thus have serious competition in vying for the attention of the Nesbit devotee. Nesbit's most recent biographer, Eleanor Fitzsimons, is a journalist specializing in historical and women's issues; she is also the author of Wilde's Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew (2015). The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit reflects its author's strong interest in historical detail, which appears to overshadow her interest in literary content. What is most admirable about this new biography is Fitzsimons's extensive research. Not only has she tracked down some hard-to-find throwaway publications from Nesbit's years as a hack writer, she also takes the trouble to provide the reader with thumbnail sketches of an immense cast of supporting characters. To take an example at random, we are informed that "[Nesbit's niece] Dorothea and Richard's youngest daughter, Pamela, a poet, died in mysterious circumstances when she apparently fell from a cliff on March 27, 1935. She was twenty years old. Diana, their eldest daughter, also died young. Richard married for a second time in November 1935, but his wife Edith Harriet Weston, an American, died less than four months later. He left for America in 1940 but returned to Capri in 1947 and died there on December 22" (223). This passage, which appears in a footnote, is an aside in the book, but it nonetheless suggests both what is pleasurable and what is tedious in this biography. Fitzsimons's willingness to educate herself and her readers helps bring Nesbit's world to life, but simultaneously there is a remarkable dearth of interpretation. Rarely do we hear why tangential material (in this case, events occurring a decade or two after Nesbit...