Autobiography/Biography

The Only Wonderful Things by Melissa J. Homestead

The first account of the central relationship of Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Often dismissed as Cather’s secretary, Lewis was a successful magazine editor and advertising copywriter who edited Cather’s fiction behind the scenes. Melissa J. Homestead reconstructs their life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels in the Southwest that shaped The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, and their summers in an all-woman community on Grand Manan Island, and shows how Cold War anxiety about homosexuality led biographers to erase Lewis, offering a fresh view of lesbian life in the early twentieth century.

Constance Maynard’s Passions by Pauline A. Phipps

Constance Maynard (1849-1935), founder and first principal of Westfield College at the University of London, championed women’s university education. A devout evangelical whose theology demanded resisting carnal feeling, she nonetheless formed a series of passionate relationships with college women, imagining love as both God’s gift and a test of faith. Drawing on Maynard’s diaries and autobiography, Pauline A. Phipps shows how the language of faith let her build an independent career and a distinct same-sex sexual self-consciousness at a time when middle-class women were expected to stay at home and defer to men.

In a Closet Hidden by Leah Blatt Glasser

The first literary biography of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), the New England short story writer and novelist long dismissed as a local colorist. Leah Blatt Glasser shows that Freeman was among the first American writers to explore women’s relationships outside marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women’s lives, the complexity of women’s sexuality, and the inner lives of rebellious women, tracing in her fiction conflicts between creativity and convention, spinsterhood and marriage, and lesbianism and heterosexuality.

Travels in a Gay Nation by Philip Gambone

For two years Philip Gambone traveled across the United States talking with LGBTQ people about their lives. Alongside interviews with David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin are lesser-known voices: a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and drag king, a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who are lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay fraternity and a pair of Vermont garden designers, all of whom have built passionate lives despite prejudice and indifference.

The Summer of Her Baldness by Catherine Lord

When artist and writer Catherine Lord was diagnosed with breast cancer, she turned her treatment into an involuntary performance piece, adopting the online persona of ‘Her Baldness,’ an irascible, witty, polemical voice writing candidly about shame and fear to her listserv. Drawing on those e-mails and her own photographs, Lord describes support groups, her ambivalence about Western medicine, the strain on her relationship with her partner, and being mistaken for a ‘sir,’ and talks back to a society that stigmatizes bald women and middle-aged lesbians with a life-threatening disease.

Marie Equi by Michael Helquist

Born in 1872 to Italian-Irish parents, Marie Equi worked as a child in a Massachusetts textile mill before fleeing to an Oregon homestead with her first long-term woman companion. She put herself through medical school and became one of the first women physicians in the Pacific Northwest, using her status to fight for woman suffrage, labor rights and reproductive freedom. She fought police, shared a jail cell with Margaret Sanger, marched with the unemployed, and opposed U.S. entry into the First World War, earning a sedition conviction and three years in San Quentin. The first well-known lesbian in Oregon, she saw her same-sex relationships figure in two U.S. Supreme Court cases.

Vernon Lee by Peter Gunn

The first biography of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935), essayist, novelist and critic, one of the most brilliant women of her time. Drawing on her private papers at Colby College, Peter Gunn portrays a formidable, outspoken intellectual, from her early Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy onward, and her relationships with John Singer Sargent, Henry James, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Maurice Baring and Bernard Berenson.

Seeking Sanctuary by John Marnell

Life stories of fourteen lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender migrants, refugees and asylum seekers living in Johannesburg. The narrators describe their journeys to South Africa and toward self-acceptance, their struggles to reconcile faith with sexuality and gender identity in the face of persecution, and the spaces of hope and belonging they have built, revealing the interplay of homophobia and xenophobia in South Africa.

Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo

‘Bernardine Evaristo is one of those writers who should be read by everyone, everywhere’ Elif Shafak The powerful, urgent manifesto on never giving up from Booker prize-winning trailblazer, Bernardine Evaristo. In 2019, Bernardine Evaristo became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize since its inception fifty years earlier – a revolutionary landmark for Britain. Her journey was a long one, but she made it, and she made history. Manifesto is her intimate and fearless account of how she did it. From a childhood steeped in racism from neighbours, priests and even some white members of her own family, to discovering the arts through her local youth theatre; from stuffing her belongings into bin bags, always on the move between temporary homes, to exploring many romantic partners both toxic and loving, male and female, and eventually finding her soulmate; from setting up Britain’s first theatre company for Black women in the eighties to growing into the trailblazing writer, theatre-maker, teacher, mentor and activist we see today – Bernardine charts her rebellion against the mainstream and her life-long commitment to community and creativity. And, through the prism of her extraordinary experiences, she offers vital insights into the nature of race, class, feminism, sexuality and ageing in modern Britain. Bernardine Evaristo’s life story is a manifesto for courage, integrity, optimism, resourcefulness and tenacity. It’s a manifesto for anyone who has ever stood on the margins, and anyone who wants to make their mark on history. It’s a manifesto for being unstoppable. ‘Bernardine Evaristo is one of Britain’s best writers, an iconic and unique voice, filled with warmth, subtlety and humanity. Exceptional’ Nikesh Shukla ‘Bernardine Evaristo is the most daring, imaginative and innovative of writers’ Inua Ellams

My Solo Exchange Diary Vol. 2 by Nagata Kabi

The sequel series to the award-winning My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness! Living on her own is harder than Nagata Kabi expected. Building relationships is difficult too, but with a new friendship to cultivate and a new perspective on her family, she s doing her best to open up and become a warm, compassionate person! […]readers who devoured Lesbian Experience with Loneliness need to pick up this volume, if for no other reason than to know that happiness is a never-ending battle for many, but there are always reasons to keep putting up the good fight. Anime News Network