Judith Earle grows up watching the house next door, waiting for the children who come and go there each summer: Roddy, golden and unreachable; Julian, brilliant and cruel to himself before he is cruel to anyone else; steady, devoted Martin; lovely, lost Mariella. She loves them all long before she understands what loving means.
At Cambridge, everything changes. Jennifer Baird walks into her life and fills it entirely — the bathing in the river, the nights talking until dawn, a happiness so complete that nothing before it seems to have counted. Then Jennifer is drawn away by someone else, and Judith is left to carry what she felt back into a world that has no use for it.
What follows is Judith’s slow, aching negotiation with desire itself: with Roddy, who wants her only for a night; with Julian, who wants her more than she can return; with the girl she has lost and cannot stop loving. Rosamond Lehmann, twenty-six when the novel appeared in 1927, writes all of it — the longing for Jennifer, the longing for Roddy, the whole unruly want of a young woman becoming herself — with the same fearless, unclassifying tenderness.
Dusty Answer is a novel about what it costs to feel everything at once, and what is left when the feeling has passed.

In 1930, a woman calling herself Mary Casal published the story of her life: her childhood in rural Massachusetts, the men who abused her, the women she loved, and the private marriage ceremony she shared with the woman she called Juno. It was the first known lesbian autobiography published in the United States. Then the book disappeared, and the woman behind the pseudonym vanished with it.

Her name was Ruth Fuller Field, and her identity remained unknown for seventy years. This edition returns her extraordinary memoir to print, accompanied by three companion essays on the social world she navigated, the trauma she refused to let define her, and the pseudonym that protected her voice and erased her legacy.

Only fragments of Sappho survive: broken lines salvaged from two and a half thousand years of silence. In 1903, poet Renée Vivien filled the gaps not with scholarship but with devotion: a daring French translation of the ancient fragments paired with her own poems written in answer to them. This edition, translated into English for the first time by Louise Martin, brings Vivien’s singular act of reclamation, one woman speaking across millennia to another, to English-language readers for the first time.

Adele Spitzeder is not the kind of woman literary history usually rescues. She was a mediocre actress, a swindler, and, in a century that had no word for it, a woman who arranged her entire life around other women and never once explained why.

In 1869 she borrowed a hundred gulden from a carpenter and promised him ten per cent a month. He told people. Within three years Munich had given her a fortune: laundresses, farmhands, servants, small farmers, village priests, whole parish councils, some of them selling their land to bring her the proceeds. Pulpits called her the angel of the poor. A newspaper christened her Saint Crispina. She endowed church towers, opened a public kitchen where dinner and as much beer as you wanted cost three kreuzer, kept a house on the Schoenfeldstrasse with a room beside her own for whichever woman was her companion that year, and paid yesterday’s interest out of today’s deposits, because there was never anything else to pay it with. In November 1872 the police came. Roughly thirty thousand people lost everything they had. Some of them killed themselves. Spitzeder got three years.

Geschichte meines Lebens, published in 1878, is her account of what happened to her, and almost never of what she did to anybody else. She recasts the whole affair as a chain of misunderstandings, incompetent lawyers and press vendettas, and she is a brisk, aggrieved and frequently very funny narrator of her own innocence. Then, describing the breakdown that nearly finished her in prison, she writes a single sentence about the woman she had given fifty thousand gulden, and takes it all back: Rosa had shown her the greatest attachment and self-sacrifice in the days of her good fortune, or had feigned it. She never returns to the subject. In three hundred and forty-one pages it is the only place where she stops arguing.

This is Lavender Octavo’s first swindler. Jo McIntosh’s translation is a readable one rather than a diplomatic one, and it keeps what a tidier edition would quietly lose: the digressions, the sums that do not add up, the courtroom sentences that run for pages without closing a quotation mark, and the casual antisemitism of her time and place, unsoftened and unexcused. The volume includes an introduction, a translator’s note, and an essay on Rosa Ehinger and the women who held her place before and after.

Queer history is not made only of poets and revolutionaries. It is also made of people like Spitzeder, who ruined thirty thousand strangers, shared a bedroom with her companion for years in front of a Bavarian court that kept asking about it, and went to her grave without ever once saying what it was.