Marie may not have been interested in her husband, but she was most certainly into the ladies, and at one time was caught drooling over English writer Mary Robinson’s tits. The incident was later reported in Mary’s memoirs: “She appeared to survey, with peculiar attention, a miniature of the Prince of Wales, which Mrs. Robinson wore on her bosom …”

I debated whether to write this review of A Short History of Queer Women once I finished it. It’s a book I have very mixed feelings about and I’m still not entirely sure that I have my thoughts straight on it, but I’ll give it a go.i had the pleasure of meeting Kirsty in person for a pride event Max Minerva’s hosted last month— and i can confirm she is just as lively, funny, and flirty as she is in the book. I really enjoyed reading this book as I found it was a great introduction to queer history and it was told in an accessible and entertaining way. I think hearing Kirsty talk about her intentions with the book really helped to shape my reading experience before I went into the book, not thinking it would cover the vast history of queer women’s lives, but rather would be a small selection of certain stories which Kirsty has been researching since her MA. Without having much space, she aimed to tell intersectional stories to show queer women have always been around. As part of the 2023 Farsley Literature Festival, hear author Kirsty Loehr in conversation about her hilarious and informative book, A Short History of Queer Women. But I’ve momentarily digressed here. We were discussing the author’s decision to call all of the people who feature in this book women. These are not what you might call ambiguous examples. There are individuals who dressed as men, who lived and married as men, and who were punished for it. (There is an example of someone who wore a leather dildo (outside of sex), for crying out loud. What exactly strikes you as cis woman about that?) Loehr even decides that Radclyffe Hall, despite noting that “Radclyffe identified as male and almost always wore men’s attire”, is going to be included in this book as a woman. Even if you’re going to stop short of using trans terminology to describe them, you can at least admit that they’re not cis women as we understand those terms in a modern world (and therefore, should either not be part of this book, or the remit of this book should be expanded). Some use of modern terminology is inescapable in a book like this, but it’s interesting to see what the author chooses on a more selective basis.

However, the biggest issue with this book is that there are ZERO REFERENCES! Not one piece of information has a source cited nor is there an actual reference list at the end (only a further reading list, which is not the same thing) and I'm sorry but that is absolutely appalling or something proclaiming to be a history book.

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It’s confusing to try to superimpose gender theory, as it’s taught today, on a society that didn’t operate as such. Also, I can’t be arsed. Just so you know, even though you never asked, I’m Team Sarah, but I think that might have something to do with the fact that Rachel Weisz played her in the movie.

But it was the nineteen-year-old widow Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy who was Marie’s personal favourite. Marie was so charmed by Marie Thérèse Louise that she regularly showered her with gifts and made her the superintendent of the royal household, which sounds more like a punishment than anything else.Given Loehr’s propensity for labelling AFAB non-women as women, you might be wondering about the reverse: does she recognise the existence of trans women in the past? The answer would be no, at least not up until the Stonewall riots, when she brings up Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Perhaps this is unsurprising. i keep seeing that this book is getting a lot of hate for the humorous tone, millennial jokes, lots of swearing, and endless comments about having sex. i invite everyone to lighten up!!!

The second issue I have is the bigger one, namely the decision detailed at the start of the book which I shall lay out here in the author’s own words: Let me wrap up here then (not least because this is starting to feel less like a book review and more like an essay) and leave you with this, the list of names mentioned in the book and one final point. If the job of a nonfiction book is to make you think, this has certainly done that. Loehr attempts to infuse a comedic tone throughout the book and it's quite frankly extremely bizarre. I can see what she was aiming for but it was very poorly executed to the point that it just made certain parts confusing. Honestly not one attempt at comedy was remotely funny - but I guess humour is subjective. A Short History of Queer Women is definitely going to end up on my list of most disappointing reads of 2023 and I'm so sad about that. Marie and Louis were hardly love’s young dream, and initially got together to form a political alliance between France and Marie’s home country, Austria. The pair were utterly ill-suited. Louis was painfully shy, indecisive and cold. On the other hand, Marie was lavish, outgoing and extremely shallow. They were so uninterested in one another that it took them a whopping seven years to consummate their marriage.

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This is where I think this book falls short. I don’t think you can purport to write a “short history of queer women” and neglect an analysis of gender within that. No, we don’t know how these people might have identified, whether they thought of themselves as women or not, whether they even had the words to express not-womanhood—we are likely never to know, unless they wrote about it (although I maintain we might make educated guesses, such as those individuals who elected to live as men). But even in writing such a book, we are subconsciously imposing our modern ideas of gender onto it, whether we mean to or not. To act like we might remove the concept of it entirely defeats the point. Can lesbianism itself, for example, not have a dimension of gender, as much as it does sexuality? It’s that ‘perfect gift book’, easy to read, small, neat and engaging, filled with fascinating narratives about some eye-popping women and their staunchly passionate love lives. Like all good history books it leaves you with an appetite to learn more ( Billie Holliday’s beautifully tart letters to ex-lover Tallulah Bankhead anyone? I need to know more), and offers the casual reader a reassurance of the constant affirming glorious presence of women loving women throughout known herstory.