Abstract
Award-winning author and scholar, Emma Donoghue, states that her lesbian historical fictions explore the tension between documented history and its interpretation(s), ‘the difference between two forms of truth: the letter and the spirit of the past’.1 Donoghue takes rumours of suggested homosexual ‘impropriety’ within sensationalist tabloids and neglected sources, and from these she crafts tales of lesbian passion. Her fourth novel, Life Mask (2004), continues Donoghue’s excavation of lesbian history through fiction: it is a revisionary representation of the public ‘outing’ (to use a modern term) of the Honourable Mrs Anne Seymour Conway Damer, relative of Horace Walpole and a distinguished artist and writer of her day. As the Author’s Note to the novel indicates, Life Mask was inspired by a sneering comment in Hester Thrale Piozzi’s diary dated 9 December 1795 that reads:
Tis now grown common to suspect Impossibilities … whenever two Ladies live too much together … that horrible Vice … has a Greek name now & is call’d Sapphism [,] the Queen of France was all along accused … & ‘tis a Joke in London now to say such a one visits Mrs Damer and there was droll but bitter Epigram made.2
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© 2012 Claire O’Callaghan
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O’Callaghan, C. (2012). Re-claiming Anne Damer/re-covering Sapphic history: Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask . In: Cooper, K., Short, E. (eds) The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283382_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283382_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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