Dangerous Intimacies

Refuting commonly held beliefs within womens and lesbian history, feminist theory, and histories of the novel, Dangerous Intimacies challenges the idea that sex between women was unimaginable in British culture before the late nineteenth century. Lisa L. Moore argues that literary representations of female sexual agencyand in particular "sapphic" relationships between womenwere central to eighteenth-century debates over English national identity. Moore shows how the novels representation of womens "romantic friendships"both platonic and sexualwere encoded within wider social concerns regarding race, nation, and colonialist ventures. Moore demonstrates that intimacy between women was vividly imagined in the British eighteenth century as not only chaste and virtuous, but also insistently and inevitably sexual. She looks at instances of sapphism in such novels as Millenium Hall, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Belinda, and Emma and analyzes how the new literary form of the novel made the bourgeois heroines successful negotiation of female friendship central to the establishment of her virtue. Moore also examines representations of sapphism through the sweeping economic and political changes of the period and claims that middle-class readers identifications with the heroines virtue helped the novels bourgeois audience justify the violent bases of their new prosperity, including slavery, colonialism, and bloody national rivalry. In revealing the struggle over sapphism at the heart of these novels of female friendshipand at the heart of Englands national identityMoore shows how feminine sexual agency emerged as an important cultural force in post-Enlightenment England