"Ethel's Love-Life" and Other Writings (Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century)
Margaret J.M. Sweat, Christopher Looby
Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat (1823-1908), a native of Portland, Maine, and wife of a United States congressman, published Ethel's Love-Life in 1859. The book is sometimes credited as an early--even the first--"lesbian" American novel, but such a label, Christopher Looby observes in his Introduction, somewhat misrepresents what is distinctive and surprising about the book. Ethel's Love-Life confounds our received binary distinctions between the spiritual and the carnal and, indeed, between the sexual and the nonsexual--the boundaries between such categories being not nearly as well-policed at the time as they later became. It is here reprinted, along with Sweat's Verses (1890) and five of her published essays, on Charlotte Bront�, George Sand, the contemporary novel, and the friendships of women.