Inseparable is a brilliant, scholarly exploration of how desire between women has been portrayed in the past three centuries in English literature. Emma Donoghue identifies six motifs that have been used to tell these tales of attraction between women — attractions that are not always lesbian, but often ignored and misinterpreted.
Donoghue’s motifs are arranged in chapters: Travesties, Inseparables, Rivals, Monsters, Detection, and Out, and explore how these plots have changed from generation to generation, reflecting their times and culture. Writers from Ovid, Chaucer and Shakespeare, to Bronte and Dickens, from Zola, Collette, and Radclyffe Hall to Patricia Highsmith, Jewelle Gomez, and Ali Smith are included. Herself a talented novelist and much-admired literary critic, Donoghue dissects this seemingly deep and dusty cannon in an engrossing and amusing text.
There are a number of illustrations included and a selected bibliography that is arranged by the date of composition “so as to provide a timeline of desire between women in literature.”
Inseparableaddresses an overlooked literary tradition and is a necessary addition to every collection on English Literature, and is a well deserved winner of the 2011 Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction.
Reviewed by, Morgan Gwenwald
SUNY New Paltz