Acknowledgments for the title of my post to an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford entitled Beyond the Binary.
This post is a modified version of an online talk which I gave on 10 December, 2020, as part of my series of four online talks on Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage. In it, I discuss different aspects of “beyond the binary” with reference to Cumbria. This includes all sorts of aspects of appearance and behaviour, which are not constrained by conventional gender and sexual binary norms, male and female.
This is the fourth and final talk in my series on Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage and language through the ages Over the past year, I have been researching Cumbria’s LGBTQ heritage, under the auspices of PiNC, Pride in North Cumbria, and with the generous support of the Heritage Lottery fund; I’m very grateful to both of them for their help and support.
In my previous talks, I have introduced ideas about LGBT research, and explored the topics of crime, and of partnerships and relationships. Today, I want to speak about “beyond the binary”. I originally saw “beyond the binary” as the title of an excellent exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It strikes me as an intriguing and productive phrase, so with due acknowledgements, I’m using it today.
But what does “beyond the binary” mean? This is an inclusive phrase, which refers to people or to aspects of appearance and behaviour, which are not constrained by conventional gender and sexual binary norms, male and female. In a sense, this could include being gay or bisexual, because having a same sex relationship used widely to be seen as doing something which was the prerogative of only one sex. Beyond the binary may also include, intersex, transgender and transsexual, asexual, cross dressing, people who experience fluid gender and sexuality. So potentially, it contains all sorts of queer elements.
Today, the acronyms LGBT and LGBTQ signal such diversity and inclusiveness. We also have visual signs, notably the use of the rainbow flag. This flag appears at Pride events up and down the country. Contemporary newspaper reports on events like Cumbria pride usually feature this flag. Newspapers may also use modern, nuanced language. The News & Star, a local paper, in its report on Cumbria Pride last year referred to, quote, “the full range of sexual and gender identities”. (30 Sept, 2019). The word, “range” here, itself, suggests that the world is not necessarily divided into two clearcut camps, but that there may be variety. Today also, we have words with particular meanings, words such as, questioning, transsexual, and transitioning. The Oxford English dictionary gives specific sex change meanings of transition from the 1980s. In the past we might find expressions such as change of sex. Another modern expression is genderfluid, which again enters the language from the 1980s.
We can’t look for all the words which we use today and hope to find them in the past, nor, necessarily, can we always find exact correlates for these words. We may encounter different past concepts about biological sex, cross dressing, gender crossing and sexual preference. These ideas were not themselves fixed and stable, but have changed over time. It can be a challenge for us today to disentangle different threads of gender, identity, biological sex, dressing, and sexuality, if indeed, that is possible. But we can find much richness of material.
To begin, I shall discuss instances of cross dressing, gender crossing, and intersex in Cumbrian newspapers of the past. I shall bring up questions of language and concept as I do so. Then, I shall look more closely at two intriguing figures in Cumbria’s LGBTQ heritage, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Thomas Baty, about whom it is very worth thinking, in terms of beyond the binary.
Various reasons have been mooted as to why people have cross dressed. Women may have been motivated by more than one consideration. One reason for a woman to adopt male clothing might have been to gain access to male occupations. You often find cross dressed women as sailors or navvies or in other heavily dominated male gender roles. A women may have wanted to disguise herself, perhaps because she had run away from home, or even because of crime. Others again may have wanted relationships with other women, and have chosen this means of male disguise as the most socially acceptable. Lesbian and bisexual relationships, while not actually illegal, received no legal recognition, and scant social recognition. Alternatively, a woman might have felt more comfortable dressing as a man as a means of personal expression, perhaps even as a means of gender expression.
Numerous instances of women dressing as men have been reported in old Cumbrian newspapers. Although these generally took place outside the county, people taking the papers, or hearing the gossip, would find out about the possibility of this. I shall consider a few of these cases to illustrate the mix of circumstances and potential motives involved, and also the language in which they are reported.
The Wigton Advertiser, Wigton, Cumberland, reports on 13 April, 1912, in a story entitled, “Dressed as a Man”, that an Adelaide Dallamore, in Chiswick, London, had been charged with, “masquerading in male attire”. The newspaper is picking up on the language of the court here. Not only had she done this, but she had been living with another young woman, and they had been passing has man and wife. According to the court, “the two young women were very fond of each other, and the parents parted them. But the accused thought that the best plan would be for her to dress as a man and live with her friend, so that no young man should come forward and keep them apart.”
Dallamore had appeared first appeared in court wearing male clothing, and with short cut hair; she had been working as a plumber’s mate in a male persona. On her second appearance, she was dressed in what the newspaper called, “woman’s attire”. She had promised to go home and live like as a girl, and was bound over to keep the peace.
So, we have here, male employment, a plumber’s mate. We also have women living together. It is hard here clearly to separate possible lesbianism from transgender issues. We would not expect the word, lesbian, at this early date, and the word, “friend” is used for Dallamore’s companion. It is also too early, really, for transgender to appear in print – we might think of that from the 1970s, and the Oxford English dictionary gives a 1956 reference for transexual, in the sense in which we use it today. Indeed, the Wigton Advertiser sticks to binary descriptions, noting the clear difference between male and female clothing, and presenting the male clothing as a kind of disguise for the female biological sex. Note the word, “masquerading”, one which was common at the time. This itself denotes a false appearance.
It is not clear to me, though, that cross dressing was illegal in England, per se. Another Cumbrian newspaper, the English Lakes Visitor, tells an interesting story on 6 August, 1904, under the headline, “A Women’s Freak”. A person called Catherine Coombes/Charlie Wilson had been discharged for drunkenness by a Westminster magistrate. The magistrate “remarked that he was aware of nothing in law to prevent a female adopting male attire”. Coombes or Wilson had worked in a male occupation, as a painter for years. They had also married and lived with two different women, one for four years, and one for twenty two years. Finally, they had turned to the workhouse after old age and injury. Coombes/Wilson had expressed that they were, “very uncomfortable in female attire, and she took her discharge in the male clothing in which she was admitted.” Note the newspaper title, in which the biological sex of the person is made salient and also the use of the word, “freak”, which here means a personal caprice, a strange whim, an irrational idiosyncracy. An earlier story, also from the English Lakes Visitor and about the same person, from 9 October, 1897, describes Catherine Coombes/Charlie Wilson as, “the masquerader”. Again, clothing and gender presentation are seen to be incompatible with biological sex, and biological sex is seen to express a person’s true identity, whatever their experience may be. We can note also the potential mixture of motives from employment to relationships with women, to personal gender expression.
On 9 March, 1869, the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald prints a story about a so-called female groom and burglar. This is a very interesting case, potentially combining all sorts of motives. A young woman in Kent, calling herself Mary Field at the time of the story, had worn male clothes for five or six years, after running away from her previous situation. Indeed, she had had something of a male career, working in occupations from hop picking to potboy in an inn, to stable boy and under-groom, also waiting at table, in livery. She passed successfully as a male servant, and, as the paper reports, and I quote, “this she did without arousing the slightest suspicion as to her sex, not even [from] the young girl of the neighbourhood to whom she was paying her attentions”.
Mary Field had come to people’s attention because of burglaries in which she had stolen cheques. She was sentenced to seven days’ imprisonment with hard labour. In her box were found male attire and a false beard and curls. The newspaper says that, “She gave no motive whatever for donning male attire.” We see here that possible disguise, or gender expression or attraction to women might be at work.
These instances of female cross dressing occurred at a period of more restricted occupation for women than today, and also at a time preceding established lesbian or bisexual or transgender identity. In printing these stories from around the country, and occasionally from abroad, the editors of the local newspapers would hope most probably for diverting content; readers would be expected to recognise the aberrance of such episodes, and might be entertained. However, readers would also know that such things could and did occur.
Now, let us turn to something closer to home. There are local newspaper reports from 1890, relating a tale of a mysterious visitor or so-called “mysterious customer”, in Carlisle. The Carlisle Patriot, the West Cumberland Times, and the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald, all pick this up. On 7 June, 1890, the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald reports that, and I quote, “On Saturday morning last there arrived at Carlisle Railway Station by one of the trains from the south what appeared to be a tall and somewhat fashionably attired lady, but whose demeanour was of so masculine a character that one of the station officials suspected her to be a man dressed in women’s clothes. Information was given to Mr. Mackay, the Chief Constable, and it was deemed advisable to watch the movements of the mysterious visitor”.
This person went shopping in Carlisle. They bought a pair of gold earrings, and a lady’s hat and jacket. Then they visited the county hotel, before continuing to Edinburgh that day. There, their movements were also traced, and after further adventures, they changed into male attire. The Cumberland Herald prints part of the ensuing Scotsman report.This contains the terms, “queer customer”, and the “masquerader”. It is hard to fathom in terms of personal motives, what exactly is going on here. One thing is clear, though: a man dressed and trying to pass as a woman, alighting at Carlisle railway station, is thought suspicious in itself, and worthy to be reported to the police.
As you can see from all these past instances, clothing had a strong gender identification people, and was even socially policed. One cross dressing woman whom I came across, from 31 January, 1913, Lilian Cowley, of Bayswater, as reported in the Lakes Herald, was challenged as to whether she had been at a ball. This would have provided an acceptable excuse.
It’s worth thinking about some open questions at this point – I’m going to leave them all for you to think about. What sort of freedoms did we have in the past, and what today, in our dress and appearance? What about perceived gender crossing? Are freedoms and constraints the same for everyone, or is there a difference, depending on sex or on another factor? Does wearing make up, or wearing clothes, which are perceived to be gender related, mean that people necessarily wish to change their gender presentation? Or does it mean something else?
We are used to people being able to change their appearance, both today and historically, in certain contexts. These include for work, and in performance and entertainment and unusual social contexts. Some people like to dress up when celebrating Pride events, wearing outfits or decor which they wouldn’t ordinarily wear. What happens, nowadays and in the past, if we dress differently outside of these contexts?
I am going to give a couple of examples, where cross dressing in the past seems to be allowed and safely defined by the social mores of the time. The Maryport Advertiser for the 1st December, 1900 carries a report on Mrs Bandmann-Palmer, a noted actress. She is a “talented lady”, who is to take to the stage in December, in Whitehaven, to play the male role of Hamlet. The report is actually entitled, “The Lady Hamlet”. The reporter, with the press name, Marguerite, emphasises that it is the challenge of portraying “the personality of the moody Dane”, not the emulation of the male sex, which appeals to the actress. I quote, “She is not desirous of masquerading in men’s clothes.” Mrs Bandmann-Palmer’s cross dressing, and her endeavour to walk, talk, and think like a man, has been safely contained within the world of theatre – it is not going to spill out, and endanger her gender presentation in everyday life.
Another example of what I regard as safely contained cross dressing, comes in the form of carnivalesque, where traditionally, things are turned upside down for a short period. In the town of Alston, Cumberland, there were celebrations, as there were across the country, in June, 1902, to mark the end of the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa.
The Cumberland and Westmorland Herald for 2 June, 1902, tells us that peace was celebrated by putting up bunting, by sounding the church bell and the factory buzzer. A local band played, and a torchlit procession took place. To add to the overall effect of gaiety and rejoicing, “A band of young men with faces blackened masqueraded the town in female and other garments.”
This is very different from the sort of altered gender presentation in everyday life, which caused trouble for the people whom we have looked at above. In the case of men presenting themselves as women in the past, there was a risk that their appearance could be linked to homosexuality, whether that was the case or not. Homosexuality was illegal, and this could cause problems with the law. That was the case for men wearing drag in Manchester in 1880, and for the London cross dressers, Ernest ‘Stella’ Boulton and Frederick ‘Fanny’ Park, in 1870.
It is important too, to remember that being intersex can not easily be constrained into binary definitions of male and female. Being intersex means having male and female physical sex characteristics, and variations which go beyond a simple binary definition. I believe that there is discussion about how many people this includes, but you might think, for example, of one person in fifteen hundred. Intersex is a modern, twentieth century word, and in the past, you often find that the word which is used is hermaphrodite. In the past, also, you may find that being intersex has been kept a secret, or that people have had surgery to assign them to one sex or another, without their consent.
There was some awareness of intersex in the past. The Cumberland Pacquet, and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser, for 1 August, 1826, carries in its list of deaths, information from the Blackburn Mail. I will quote exactly what the newspaper says: “On Wednesday, the 19th ult. [July] aged 26, James Clough, of Blackburn. This person was of that class of beings styled Hermaphrodite, and though usually following the avocation of a man, such as a porter, ostler, &c.; he generally appeared in women’s clothes, with the exception of wearing a common man’s hat. – Blackburn Mail.”
We can see here that the newspapers use the language of gender identity, and that names, even occupation, and clothing, have strong binary gender connotations. Genderlessness does not seem to be possible. But the newspapers recognise this person in their own right too.
At the time of the instances of cross dressing and gender presentation which I have mentioned, it was not possible, physically to change the body as part of gender reassignment. It was not possible to get legal recognition for gender reassignment either. This became more accessible over the twentieth century, and especially, in England, at the end of the nineteen nineties, and in the early 2000s. When researching this talk, I came across several contemporary positive news stories about transsexuality and sex changes in Cumbria the recent 2000s.
As we can see, when looking for LGBT people in the past, we may have to look for women in men’s apparel, men in women’s apparel, or situations where people are pursuing courses then thought to be only open to the opposite sex.
For the remainder of my talk, I would like to introduce two historical people from Cumbria who raise all sorts of interesting thoughts about non binary gender and sexuality. The first is Eliza Lynn Linton, the Victorian journalist and novelist, and the second is Thomas Baty, also known as Irene Clyde, a lawyer and gender radical. I have already written about both of these figures, but it is well worth saying something them in a beyond the binary context.
Eliza Lynn Linton is not so very well known as a writer today. However, she was well known in her lifetime and she enjoyed a long writing career in fiction and journalism. You can buy her novels today as modern reprints. She lived 1822 -1898. She was born in Crosthwaite Vicarage, Keswick, Cumberland, where her father was vicar. Her mother sadly died when Eliza was young, so Eliza struggled up herself, reading, and eventually moving away to London to forge a career as a writer.
She is of interest to us today, as part of Cumbria’s LGBT heritage, because of her ambiguity about her gender and sexuality – it is hard to disentangle these strands in her case. While she was outwardly feminine, and even condemned those women who did not conform to her own ideas of femininity, Eliza Lynn Linton did some very conventionally unfeminine things. She developed an independent career and held sturdy views. In particular, she had a liaison with a neighbour who was a married woman, when she herself was still a young woman and living at home in Cumberland.
Her friend and biographer, George Somes Layard, found this incident embarrassing when he came to write his book. Mrs. Lynn Linton, her life, letters and opinions was published in 1901. However, rather than suppressing the information, Somes Layard did record it, saying, “The incident must as far as possible be cleared of its unnatural atmosphere. It is sufficiently bizarre without any eccentric additions.” (MLL, Chp. 4, p. 41)
Eliza Lynn Linton herself delineates such an episode, in her cross dressed autobiographical novel, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland. There the lady is called Adeline Dalrymple, and Eliza Lynn Linton describes at significant length the physical effects which this lady have on the hero, that is on Eliza herself.
Somes Layard quotes from Lynn Linton’s autobiography, believing it to reflect Eliza’s life, and attempts to pass it off as a crush, calling it an “infatuation”. (MLL, Chp. 4, p. 41).
This is interesting enough in itself, but Eliza Lynn Linton also incorporated characters who experience same sex attraction into one of her novels, called The Rebel of the Family, 1880.
I am grateful to the work of Deborah Meem in particular for the following observations. Meem has edited the novel, and written an excellent article on Eliza Lynn Linton. The heroine, Perdita Winstanley, becomes involved in women’s rights circles. She meets two women called Bell Blount and Constance or Connie Tracey. These female characters are living together, and Bell actually calls Connie her “wife”. This is a very significant inclusion for a novel published in 1880. The novel gives a wider portrayal, albeit not exactly flattering, of women who can’t yet be openly called lesbians, but who, in their behaviour and sometimes in their dress, leave no doubt as to their preferences for women. The heroine is pursued by one woman who has a “flourish of masculinity”, and whose mannerisms reveal her as a “handsome hybrid”. Hybrid suggests a mixture of male and female, and we may think of this character in lesbian or even in early transgender terms.
As I mentioned, Lynn Linton wrote her autobiography, but she disguised it as a novel, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, in 1885; and she reversed the sex of some, though not all of the characters, including herself. So, she features as the male protagonist, Christopher Kirkland. I acknowledge Deborah Meem and Kate Holterhoff’s very useful introduction.
The novel was widely reviewed at the time, as a kind of transvestite autobiography, an autobiography in drag, neither properly fictional nor thoroughly autobiographical. Why did its author seek to tell the story of her life through a male persona? True, it does allow her to present her ambition and strong opinions in ways which are more acceptable to the age, because they are uttered by a man. But, sometimes it seems that Eliza Lynn Linton, though not precisely comfortable in a male guise, has been drawn to describing herself in a masculine way. Contemporaries alluded to this too. In his biography of her, her friend, Layard Somes, says:
It is curious to find that even thus early in her life she was looked upon by her father and others rather in the light of a naughty boy than a weak and defenceless little girl, naughty or otherwise. That one felt her in after life, with all her sweet womanliness to have so much of the man in her was probably due to the same alloy in her composition. Indeed, alluding to this, she has more than once said with something of gravity, that when she was born, a boy was due in the family, and it was only the top coating that had miscarried.
Still, with all her masculinity, it was one of the delightful contradictions of her nature that she insisted upon her womanliness.” (p.21)
Meem and Holterhoff raise in their introduction to the novel, the idea of “fluid identity”, and pose the question, “Did Linton live her life on the transgender spectrum rather than or in addition to the lesbian spectrum?” (pp.8-9)
This is clearly a question which cannot admit of a secure answer, but whether for her early presentation in fiction of women who seek same sex relationships or for her own ambivalent gender presentation, Eliza Lynn Linton does deserve to be remembered more widely in connection with Cumbria’s queer heritage.
I know want to turn to a fascinating figure who is part of Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage, and that is Thomas Baty. He lived 1869-1954, was born in Carlisle to a local family. His mother came originally from Penrith and his father was a cabinet maker in Fisher Street, Carlisle. Thomas Baty before continuing to Oxford and Cambridge, and becoming an expert in international law. It was in his legal capacity, that he sailed to Japan in 1916. He had been appointed legal advisor to the foreign office of the Japanese government.
When Baty went on his voyage, his mother and sister – his father had died by this time – went with him, as did items from their house. They settled in Japan, and spent the rest of their lives there. All three are buried in a cemetery in Tokyo.
As well as holding his official post as legal advisor to the Japanese govermnet, Thomas Baty was very active in quite unorthodox ways. I am grateful to Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai, Sonja Tiernan, Mary McAuliffe, Emily Hamer, and Karen Steele for what follows, and there are acknowledgments below, and in my previous posts.
As Ingram and Patai explain in a key article, “Fantasy and Identity: The double Life of a Victorian Sexual Radical”, Thomas Baty had a “double life” as a “sexual radical”. He published radical books under a female pseudonym, Irene Clyde. These books were broadly feminist. They also strongly advocated doing away with gender differences and ignoring biological sex distinctions altogether.
Baty’s radicalism began before he left England for Japan. In 1909, as Irene Clyde, he published a novel, Beatrice the Sixteenth. This is a Utopian story, which allows him to unfold his ideas about the perfect society. The heroine, Mary Hatherley, discovers a mysterious country, Armeria, whose inhabitants have given up gender distinctions. Baty inconsistently presents his characters with female and genderless pronouns. The society’s inhabitants are vegetarian, as was Baty himself. The heroine decides to spend the rest of her life there, rather than return home, and forms a partnership, or conjux, with one of the Armerians. (Hamer). Because of the inconsistent pronouns in the novel, this could even be interpreted as a lesbian relationship. (Hamer) Whatever the relationship is, it is certainly not heterosexual. The novel contains pioneering ideas remarkable for its time, although it did not sell well.
In 1912, Baty established the “Aëthnic Union”. This was a society which was intended to ignore differences of biological sex, and the gender expectations which flowed from them. He claimed that sex distinctions created barriers for people.
In 1934, as Irene Clyde, he published a book of essays, entitled Eve’s Sour Apples. This is a radical, and spiritual discussion of the relations between the sexes. Chapter headings comprise “The essence of sex: domination”; “How it comes.”; “How it must go”; “What is progress?”
However, it is especially for the radical periodical, Urania, that Thomas Baty deserves to be known. I was alerted to the connection between Thomas Baty and Urania by the LGBT+ Within and Beyond exhibition at the museum of Lakeland Life, Kendal.
Urania was published several times a year between 1916 and 1940, and it was sent to perhaps 250 worldwide subscribers. The editors themselves paid for printing and distributing the journal around the world over the years. The team behind Urania included Thomas Baty/Irene Clyde and colleagues, like Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade. Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth were social reformers; they also had a long lesbian relationship, only terminated by death, and the two women were ultimately buried in the same grave. Dorothy Helen Cornish supported alternative education, and Jessey Wade campaigned for animal welfare and vegetarianism. Thomas Baty had become part of a radical, reforming circle.
Urania was a journal for Uranians. Uranian is a term which is not in use in LGBTQ+ communities today, but it was in circulation in the early twentieth century. “Uranian”, was chiefly introduced in English through the writings of Edward Carpenter, a man who campaigned especially for reform around homosexuality. Uranian and the word, Urnings, come originally from late nineteenth German sexology, and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.
Reforming currents of thought at this time were am intriguing mixture of ideas about homosexuality, inversion, and transgender, interfolded in a way in which they are not so much today.
Urania advocated the end of dualities of gender distinctions and of biological sex differences. Its motto was, There are no ‘men’ or ‘women’ in Urania.” The editors believed that, as Eva Gore-Booth put it, sex was an accident. If anything was beyond the binary, then Urania definitely was! Editorials, articles, book reviews, and reprinted articles from newspapers and periodicals around the world all advanced this view. Topics covered included positive references to Sappho, same sex romantic relationships, cross dressing, women who were not confined by gender expectations, who excelled in athletics or science, and men who were not confined by their gender expectations, who excelled in female areas like knitting. (Hamer)
Even the body itself could be considered mutable. The journal noted cases from the natural world of hermaphroditism, such as with oysters and plants. And Urania recorded instances of human intersex, and early sex change and gender reassignment. As Melanie Taylor notes, it printed in 1934, a story of an apparently spontaneous human sex change, that of Margaret Hutchison. And in 1931, it reported the story of Lili Elbe, a Danish painter, who had sex reassignment surgery and had her name legally changed. (Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener) In 1936, Urania printed the case of a Czech athlete, Zdenka Koubkova, who underwent medical gender re-assignment to become male, and called, Zdeněk Koubek. (Tiernan). Urania and its editors supported the entire dismantling of conventional gender and sexual distinctions.
In addition to all these cutting edge activities, Thomas Baty incorporated the reforms which he believed in into his own life. He was a vegetarian, and dressed himself sometimes in an unconventional way.
As Peter Oblas notes, Hugh Keenleyside, a Canadian diplomat in Japan, who knew Thomas Baty, reminisces that:
“Like most people, Dr. Baty had his emotional quirks. He was an active transvestite; even when having guests for he would sometimes appear in a flowing and low-necked gown.” (Keenleyside, p. 331)
So, Thomas Baty, born and brought up in Carlisle, may be regarded as a transgender pioneer, a genderqueer radical, and an important person in Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage.
I hope that you can see that “beyond the binary” is a fascinating topic. It incorporates all sorts of elements from same sex relationships, to cross dressing, to transsexual issues. Although we don’t find the same language in the past as we do today, words such as masquerading and Uranian have their own rich history. Local newspapers did carry stories of queer interest, even if they were not exactly labelled as such; and Cumbrian figures such as Eliza Lynn Linton, and Thomas Baty, give us much food for thought. The past is more various than we might think.
That concludes my final talk in the series. I have very much enjoyed doing these, and I am grateful to all of you for listening, whether you have followed the whole series, or are looking in today. Thank you very much.
Acknowledgements:
Wigton Advertiser, Saturday 13 April, 1912, p.7
English Lakes Visitor, Saturday 6 August, 1904, p.5
English Lakes Visitor, Saturday 9 October, 1897, p.3
Cumberland & Westmorland Herald, Tuesday 9 March, 1869, p.6
Cumberland & Westmorland Herald, Saturday 7 June, 1890, p.8
Lakes Herald, Friday 31 January, 1913, p.2
Maryport Advertiser, Saturday 1 December, 1900, p.6
Cumberland & Westmorland Herald, Saturday 7 June, 1902, p.1
Cumberland Pacquet, and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser,Tuesday 01 August, 1826, p.3
These newspapers, mentioned in the order in which they appear in the text, are available, digitised, on the British Newspaper Archive website, to which Cumbria public libraries have a subscription.
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
Cumbria public libraries and archive centres also hold physical copies, and microfilms. https://cumbria.gov.uk/libraries/localstudies/newspaper.asp
https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/17935512.pride-brings-us-together/
The Oxford English Dictionary. Entries are viewable through the number on a Cumbria public library card.
George Somes Layard. Mrs. Lynn Linton, her life, letters and opinions. London: Methuen, 1901 https://archive.org/details/mrslynnlintonher00layarich/page/n8/mode/2up
There are copies of this biography in the public libraries of,
Barrow-in-Furness: Reference section, LC309EC/LIN Carlisle: Reserve stock and in the Jackson Library: B 9 Keswick: C920 LIN
Whitehaven 52 LIN
Ed. Deborah T. Meem. Eliza Lynn Linton. The Rebel of the Family. Peterborough, Ont. ; Orchard Park, NY : Broadview Press, 2002
The Rebel of the Family. 3 Vols, Chatto & Windus: London, 1880
The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, Richard Bentley, 1885
The first edition of this novel is in Carlisle public library: RS CUMBRIA; Jackson Library: 1 F LIN Eds Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff. The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, Brighton : Victorian Secrets, 2011
Kendal public library: LOCALFIC
Deborah T. Meem. “Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness”, in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 April 1997, Vol.7(4), pp.537-560 Available free by registering with JSTOR.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704160
Irene Clyde. Beatrice the Sixteenth. London, 1909
Irene Clyde. Eve’s Sour Apples. London: Eric Partridge Ltd. at the Scholartis Press, 1934
Emily Hamer. Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth Century Lesbians. London: Bloomsbury, 2016 This discusses Thomas Baty, Irene Clyde, Beatrice the Sixteenth, and “Urania” on pp.67-73
Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai. Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889-1939. Chapel Hill ; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993
Peter Oblas. “Britain’s First Traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and Obsession”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 7, 2 (December, 2005): 109-133 Available online here: http://www.asia-studies.com/2nzjas72.html
Hugh L. Keenleyside. Memoirs of Hugh L. Keenleyside, Vol. 1, Hammer the Golden Day. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1981-1982, pp. 330-331
Alison Oram. ” ‘Sex is an Accident’: Feminism, Science and the Radical Sexual Theory of Urania, 1915 —1940″, pp.219-27, in Eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. Sexology in Culture : labelling bodies and desires. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998
Judith Ann Smith. MA thesis. “Genealogies of desire : “Uranianism”, mysticism and science in Britain, 1889-1940”. University of British Columbia, 2005. Available online here: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0066742
Karen Steele, “A Case Study of Urania (1916-1940)” in Ed. Catherine Clay. Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018
Melanie Taylor. D.Phil thesis. “Changing Subjects: Transgender Consciousness and the 1920s”. University of York, July, 2000. Available online:
https://core.ac.uk/reader/42604822
Eds Sonja Tiernan and Mary McAuliffe. Sapphists and Sexologists; Histories of Sexualities, Vol. 2. Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars, 2009 This discusses “Urania” in chapter 5.
Sonja Tierman. ” ‘No Measures of Emancipation or Equality Will Suffice’: Eva Gore-Booth’s Revolutionary Feminism in the Journal Urania“. In Eds Sarah O’Connor and Christopher C. Shepard. Women, Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century Ireland: Dissenting Voices? Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2008
Sonja Tiernan. ” ‘Engagements Dissolved’: Eva Gore-Booth, Urania, and the Radical Challenge to Marriage”, chapter seven, in Eds Mary McAuliffe and Sonja Tiernan, Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives: Histories of Sexualities Volume I. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 128-44
Sonja Tiernan. Eva Gore-Booth: an image of such politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012 Tiernan discusses the Aëthnic Union established by Thomas Baty; its newsletter, the Phoenix, and its supporters; she also discusses in detail Eva Gore-Booth’s phrase, “sex is an accident” in chapter 11.
LGBT+ Language and Archives 