Books like 'The Well of Loneliness'

"Luke" Hamilton has always been sure that she'd never marry. She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man. After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new, respectable life...

From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family.In 1977 Uruguay, a military government crushed political dissent with ruthless force...

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation...

WINNER - 2014 Golden Crown Literary Society - Historical FictionWhen in 1943, twenty-five-year-old Lily Rivera is widowed, she finally feels able to step out of the shadows of an unhappy marriage. Her love of flying leads her to join the Womens Airforce Service Pilots, determined to regain her passion and spread her wings, not suspecting that she would experience more than just flying...

Lesbian Fiction: Historical Fiction - Sequel to Backwards to Oregon - Commuter Novel - 19 hours reading - "Luke" Hamilton has been living as a husband and father for the past seventeen years. No one but her wife, Nora, knows she is not the man she appears to be. They have raised their daughters to become honest and hard-working young women...

A spicy age gap romance where one night of passion could lead to a lifetime of love...

“At once the easiest truth to know, and the hardest to realise”Thea Morell, Georgian heiress and eligible lady, is not normal. At least, that’s what she has come to believe. She loves nothing more than spending hours at the study of natural history, collecting fossils, insects, dead fish, bones and even the odd spider...

"The story unfolds like a flower; the impact of it on each person is profound. It’s a spectacular offering of love gained, lost, and struggled with over a lifetime—a poignant tale with a marvelous reveal at the end."—Anna Furtado, Lambda Literary ReviewThree women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they lived...

Nestled in a towering fir forest on British Columbia’s famous Vancouver Island, Three Rivers Campground is calling you to come relax, explore, and maybe even fall in love...Trish Rivers lives a good life.A happy life...

Can a house save the lives of the people who live in it? Can an inscription written in a book over sixty years ago change the fates of people not even born when it was written? Beryl Gray is solid and dependable – her partner, Claire, thinks so, her family thinks so, her colleagues think so. She has a long-term relationship and a job she likes as a university librarian...

Sometimes to be yourself, you have to become someone else.Thomasina Miller knew from a young age she wasn't like other girls. She didn't want to be a rancher's wife, so she makes the harrowing decision to leave all she's known, risking everything for the chance to choose her own fate in life...

A wartime secret. A journey to uncover the truth.Claire has always had a special bond with her aunt Margaret, but she’s astonished when Margaret suddenly begins talking about a friend called Agnes, who Margaret met working as a WAAF in World War 2 – a past Claire had no idea about. Margaret and Agnes were best friends until Agnes started acting strangely, becoming secretive and distant...

A shooting party at the Earl of Witton’s remote country house is a high treat for champion shot Patricia Merton—until unexpected guests turn the social atmosphere dangerously sour. That’s not Pat’s biggest problem. She’s visiting her old friend, the Earl’s heir Jimmy Yoxall—but she wants to spend a lot more time with Jimmy’s fiancée...

It's tempting to describe the actinon in The Crown of Valencia, but then we'd reveal spoilers from The Spanish Pearl.Just know that once again, Kate Vincent finds herself in a mess, both romantically and time travel-wise. Romance, betrayal, intrigue, disobedient children,and religious fanaticism pack this tense conclusion to the epic adventure begun in The Spanish Pearl...

Kate Winthrop, the only child of a wealthy shipping magnate, has the course of her life charted for her by her parents. She’s expected to marry well and produce a successor to the Winthrop empire. But Kate has a very different path in mind. Her true passion lies with photography—and with women...

The son of the god must take her rightful place on Egypt's throne.Hatshepsut longs for power, but she is constrained by her commitment to maat – the sacred order of righteousness, the way things must be. Her mother claims Hatshepsut is destined for Egypt's throne – not as the king's chief wife, but as the king herself, despite her female body...

THE PRICE OF SALT also published as CAROL. THE PRICE OF SALT (1952) is a romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The author – known as a suspense writer following the publication of her previous book, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN – became notorious due to the story's latent lesbian content and happy ending, the latter having been unprecedented in homosexual fiction...

"Lavishly crammed with the songs, smells, and costumes of late Victorian England" ( The Daily Telegraph ), this delicious, steamy debut novel chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster girl in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable and whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler...

When Agatha Griffin finds a colony of bees in her warehouse, it’s the not-so-perfect ending to a not-so-perfect week. Busy trying to keep her printing business afloat amidst rising taxes and the suppression of radical printers like her son, the last thing the widow wants is to be the victim of a thousand bees...

Inspired by real women, this powerful novel tells the story of two unconventional American sisters who volunteer at the front during World War IAugust 1914. While Europe enters a brutal conflict unlike any waged before, the Duncan household in Baltimore, Maryland, is the setting for a different struggle...

Solving mysteries is her business. Finding love is her dream. Will combining the two get her killed?Victorian Era England. Stetson revels in being unconventional. So when society shies away from her independent nature, the bold woman creates an imaginary boss and opens her own detective agency...

Themes: Romance, lesbian.In 1899 two women from very different backgrounds are about to embark on a journey together - one that will take them from the Old World to the New, from the 19th century into the 20th, and from the comfort and familiarity of England to the rigours of Western Canada, where challenges await at every turn...

Lydia Wraxhall is on her best behavior every day of the year—except one: the annual Bickerton Christmas Poultry Show. On that day she brushes her birds, sharpens her tongue, and engages in the closest thing the village knows to war.Harriet Boyne is a soldier’s widow reeling from the worst years of her life...

At the height of the Cold War, Lucybelle Bledsoe is offered a job seemingly too good to pass up. However, there are risks. Her scientific knowledge and editorial skills are unparalleled, but her personal life might not withstand government scrutiny...

A tale of grief and lust, frustration and hilarity, death and family.Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love...

Arguably Patricia Highsmith's finest, The Price of Salt is story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce...

No pirate on the high seas is more bloodthirsty than the notorious Branded Ann, a woman with eyes like ice and a face marred by a mysterious cross-shaped scar. When she raids a merchant vessel bound for Jamaica, her only objective is to obtain the map that will lead her to a legendary treasure. But she hadn't bargained on taking Violet, the merchant's young widow, on board her ship as a prisoner...

When Hollywood-bound actress Violet London meets speakeasy singer Moxie Valette, her trip takes an unexpected turn toward love. New York City, 1931: When wry Broadway actress Violet London and her hard-drinking cohorts venture into a speakeasy the night before she is to board a train for Hollywood, she is floored by sassy blond singer Moxie Valette...

Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit the Baron Saveze’s fortunes—and even less his bodyguard. The formidable Barbara, of unknown parentage and tied to the barony for secretive reasons, is a feared duelist, capable of defending her charges with efficient, deadly force...

From one of the leading lights of contemporary Latin American literature—a lush, lyrical, deeply moving story of a young woman whose passion for the early sounds of tango becomes a force of profound and unexpected change...

Lady Sarah Lark has never had much interest in any of the suitors that surround her. She’s decided that, instead of choosing a husband, she’ll save her pin money and travel like she’s always wanted to. However, her plans are interrupted when her family invites her cousin’s widow, Winifred Wakefield, to stay with them...

These remarkable diaries are a piece of lost lesbian history. Anne Lister defied the role of womanhood seen in the novels of Jane Austen: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller, and lesbian. She kept extensive diaries, written partly in code, of her life and loves. The diaries have been edited by Helena Whitbread, who spent years decoding and transcribing them...

Inspired by Nigeria’s folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love...

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home...

A collector's edition of the best-selling all-girl action adventure...

The Gulf of Mexico, 1702: When pirates of the square-rigger Original Sin steal ashore to abduct a doctor to tend to their wounded, they end up settling for the doctor's attractive fiancée--Celia Pierce, the town seamstress...

When Kate Vincent and her partner travel to Spain, Kate is accidentally transported back in time...way back in time...to 1085. What does a woman like Kate do in a world of no antibiotics, no feminism, no Diet Coke? She denies it as long as possible, then sets her mind to getting home. Tricky with her now useless twenty-first century skills. Things don't go well...

It’s not a crime to steal a heart... Sophie Roseingrave hates nothing more than a swindler. After her family lost their piano shop to a con man in London, they’re trying to start fresh in a new town. Her father is convinced Carrisford is an upright and honest place, but Sophie is not so sure...

Nathaniel Fleming, veteran of Waterloo, falls in love with his Major's spinster sister, Harriet. But Nathaniel is not what he seems, and before the wedding, the truth will out... Eleanor Charlotte Fleming, forgotten daughter of a minor baronet, stakes her life on a deception and makes her name—if not her fortune—on the battlefield...

Budding romance between a sweet-talking gardener and a bluestocking headmistress blooms to full flower in this steamy lesbian historical romance.On the cusp of the 20th century, France is where libertines indulge poetic desires. Dorothea has fled the structure of dreary old England for the Côte d'Azur...

For fans of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell and The Futures by Anna Pitonia, a soul-piercing debut that explores the ways that past and present intertwine, queerness, and coming of age in uncertain times.In WILLA & HESPER, two young women fall in love. When they fall apart, they unwittingly take the same path to heal from their breakup, seeking answers in the lands of their ancestors...

China, 1700s. The Consorts is a novella, written as a prequel to The Fragrant Concubine. Set a few years earlier, it tells the story of Lady Qing, who has spent the past seven years languishing inside the high red walls of the Forbidden City. Classed as an Honoured Lady, a lowly-ranked concubine, Qing is neglected by the Emperor, passed over for more ambitious women...

Set in the nineteenth century, Isabel Miller's classic lesbian novel traces the relationship between Patience White, a painter, and Sarah Dowling, a farmer, whose romantic bond does not sit well with the puritanical New England farming community in which they live. Ultimately, they are forced to make life-changing decisions that depend on their courage and their commitment to one another...

Set in the nineteenth century, Isabel Miller's classic lesbian novel traces the relationship between Patience White, an educated painter, and Sarah Dowling, a farmer, whose romantic bond does not sit well with the puritanical New England farming community in which they live...

Considered one of the most subtle and beautifully written lesbian novels of the century, this 1949 classic returns to print in a Cleis Press edition. Dorothy Strachey’s classic Olivia captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle...

When AP political reporter Lorena Hickok—Hick—is assigned to cover Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign, the two women become deeply involved. Their relationship begins with mutual romantic passion, matures through stormy periods of enforced separation and competing interests, and warms into an enduring, encompassing friendship documented by 3300 letters...

A powerful, engrossing story of a biracial heiress who escapes to Paris when the Haitian Revolution burns across her island home. But as she works her way into the inner circle of Robespierre and his mistress, she learns that not even oceans can stop the flames of revolution...

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes is a satirical novel written in the style of an almanac. It portrays the lives of lesbian women in Paris in the early 20th century, particularly focusing on the character Dame Evangeline Musset. The book uses humor and wit to explore the relationships, sexual and social, among women in the expatriate and artistic community of Paris...

A tour-de-force debut following three generations of a Muslim-Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change in Obama-era San Francisco and Texas with a blockbuster ending you have to read to believe...

In the aftermath of The Great War, everything is changing.But not for Marian Fielding.Marian’s life is quiet and predictable in the solitude of the English countryside, where she plans to remain. But Marian’s world is turned upside down when she meets brash, confident Katherine Fuller...