Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica — Victoria A. Brownworth

With the onset of the 20th Century, psychoanalysis lifted the curtain on alternative sexuality. Bringing sex out of the closet added a different dimension to erotic writing and eroticism itself. The advent of the roaring 20's changed the sexual landscape of lesbian er*tica. Gone were the tender and affectionate eroticism of the Victorian era with its naughty schoolgirls, convent antics and ladies-in-waiting. These 20th Century tales brought verisimilitude and fantasy together in real time.While Radclyffe Hall was being prosecuted for obscenity for her depiction of sapphics and inverts in the classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, her friend Natalie Barney was riding naked through the streets of Paris on horseback with her lover, the poet Renee Vivienne, Anais Nin was penning lurid and lustful tales of very bad girls while yearning for Henry Miller's sensual wife, June, and Gertrude Stein was crafting a lesbian love poem for Alice B. Toklas in Lifting Belly. The Golden Age opens the door to women's independence: Women choose to live as independently as men, including sexuality. It is an era rife with excitement and mystery and conflict, the volatility reflected between these covers and between the covers of the women writing here about their sensual desires for other women.