Your Favourite Classical Authors Were Probably Gay
By Alana Rae (she/her) and Kubra Iqbal (they/them)
ueerness in our art and media has struck a revolution, Q but what about the iconic closeted authors that came before? As a couple of queers, we understand sapphic subtext. In an age of media where the LGBT+ community are finally starting to get some representation, we find it just too easy to start analysing the heteronormative past. There has been a lot of speculation around the queerness of female authors in the 18th–20th century. Probably because they published books with straight-up gay undertones. If we look at the likes of Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf, we can see some tell-tale signs. Woolf’s Orlando has been described by Art UK as a “masterpiece of modernist queer fiction”, while Alcott herself said “I fall in love with half a dozen pretty girls and I have never felt that for a man”.
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Now your average straight historian would claim female adoration. Our diagnosis? Gay as fuck. However, we will say that with a lack of overt coming out, there’s no way of telling if these authors were actually fullyfledged lesbians. But we have to consider how the oppressive society they came from could’ve kept them in the Victorian wardrobe. The 1800s were brutal. Women needed to marry to own property or have any kind of livelihood. They quite literally needed a man to survive, so coming out wasn’t even an option. That being said, Louisa May Alcott never married. Instead, she managed to build a livelihood off her novels.
