Lesbian Historical Fiction Books: The Best Sapphic Historical Novels

Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 1998

• Published 1998
• Setting Whitstable and London, 1890s
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Sensual, adventurous, dramatic
• Ending Hopeful
• Know first Sexual content, heartbreak, poverty, class cruelty

Nan King is an oyster girl from Whitstable when she falls for Kitty Butler, a male impersonator on the music-hall stage. Nan becomes Kitty’s dresser, then her stage partner, then her lover. And that’s only the beginning.

Nan’s journey takes her through very different corners of Victorian London: the stage, the streets, a wealthy woman’s house and, eventually, socialist politics. What makes the novel such a good starting point is that it gives its lesbian heroine a whole life, not one forbidden relationship. She desires different women, makes real mistakes, works, performs and finds more than one kind of queer world. The period isn’t wallpaper; it shapes every choice she has.

Why read it: The big, bawdy, generous place to begin modern lesbian historical fiction.

Best for: Victorian London, music halls, sexual self-discovery and big character journeys.

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Fingersmith

Sarah Waters · 2002

• Published 2002
• Setting London and a country house, 1860s
• Genre Gothic historical mystery
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Dark, twisty, psychological
• Ending Not promised; go in blind
• Know first Confinement, institutional abuse, manipulation, sexual material

Sue Trinder is a thief raised among London’s petty criminals. Maud Lilly is a lonely heiress in a gloomy country house. Sue is sent into Maud’s household as her maid, as part of a scheme to steal her fortune. Simple.

Except this is a Sarah Waters novel, so very little stays simple. Crime, class, institutional power, deception and sapphic desire are folded into one of the most elaborate plots in modern historical fiction. It’s one of those books where knowing more makes the recommendation worse, so stop reading about it and start reading it.

Why read it: A Victorian crime novel with twists you won’t see coming, and a love story tangled inside the con.

Best for: Gothic mansions, crime, morally complicated women and major twists.

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters · 2006

• Published 2006
• Setting London, 1941–1947
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Several central queer women
• Romance Major, but not romance-shaped
• Mood Melancholic, intimate, complex
• Ending Bittersweet
• Know first War, violence, imprisonment, grief, an illegal abortion, difficult relationships

Most novels move forward. The Night Watch moves backward. It opens in 1947 and travels back through the war to 1941, so instead of asking what will happen to these people, you learn what happened to make them who they are.

That structure changes everything. Relationships that seem mysterious at first slowly acquire histories; losses gain causes. Kay, who drove an ambulance through the Blitz, Helen and Julia are queer women living through war, not a single lesbian romance dropped into wartime. Work, danger, secrecy, sex and friendship all matter.

Why read it: A quietly devastating wartime novel about queer women, told in reverse.

Best for: World War II, complicated women and nonlinear literary fiction.

The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters · 2014

• Published 2014
• Setting Champion Hill, London, 1922
• Genre Literary fiction / domestic suspense
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Slow, tense, increasingly dangerous
• Ending Uncertain
• Know first Domestic violence, a death, crime, guilt, sexual content

The war is over, but Frances Wray and her mother have been left with a big house in south London and very little money. So they take in lodgers: a young married couple, Leonard and Lilian Barber.

Frances and Lilian become close, then considerably closer, and a quiet domestic story turns into something with consequences that can’t stay private. The relationship is central, but this isn’t conventional historical romance: Waters is interested in money, class, respectability, desire and guilt.

Why read it: A slow-burning affair that becomes a gripping crime story.

Best for: 1920s London, slow-building tension, class and domestic suspense.

Affinity

Sarah Waters · 1999

• Published 1999
• Setting Millbank Prison, London, 1874
• Genre Gothic historical fiction
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Claustrophobic, dark, psychological
• Ending Not promised; very dark
• Know first Imprisonment, psychological manipulation, grief, suicidal despair

Margaret Prior, a grieving, unmarried gentlewoman, begins visiting the women’s wing of Millbank Prison as a “Lady Visitor.” There she meets Selina Dawes, a spiritualist medium jailed after a séance went wrong.

Selina claims she can reach the dead, and Margaret becomes increasingly fascinated by her. The prison, the séances, the secrecy and Margaret’s loneliness build an atmosphere that tightens with every chapter. Part historical novel, part psychological story, part ghost story. This is not the Waters to choose when you want comfort.

Why read it: A haunting, claustrophobic Victorian novel about longing and belief.

Best for: Victorian prisons, spiritualism, obsession and gothic suspense.

The Sealed Letter

Emma Donoghue · 2008

• Published 2008
• Setting London, 1864
• Genre Literary fiction / legal drama
• Sapphic focus Significant
• Romance Not a conventional romance
• Mood Scandalous, sharp, tense
• Ending Not promised
• Know first Adultery, coercion, public scandal, emotional manipulation

Marriage. Adultery. Friendship. Scandal. And the law. Emily “Fido” Faithfull, a campaigner for women’s work, runs into her old friend Helen Codrington after years apart and is pulled straight back into Helen’s disastrous marriage.

Based on the real Codrington divorce case, which gripped Victorian London, the novel shows what happens when women’s private relationships become evidence inside institutions run by men. It’s exactly the kind of book that shows why lesbian historical fiction has to be broader than historical romance: come for social history and morally complicated women, not a tidy love story.

Why read it: A real Victorian divorce scandal, retold through the woman who loved one of the wives.

Best for: Victorian law, scandal, marriage and women’s history.

Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth · 2020

• Published 2020
• Setting A Rhode Island girls’ school, 1902, and the present day
• Genre Gothic horror / historical fiction
• Sapphic focus Central, across two timelines
• Romance Important
• Mood Eerie, playful, sprawling
• Ending Not promised
• Know first Deaths, body horror, homophobia, obsession

In 1902 two students at the Brookhants School for Girls are found dead, wrapped up in a strange obsession with a scandalous memoir. More than a century later, a film about the “cursed” school brings three young women back to Brookhants.

Half Edwardian boarding-school gothic, half satire of modern Hollywood, it’s long, knowing and full of sapphic longing in both timelines. Readers who want the historical story should know it shares the stage with the present-day one.

Why read it: A cursed-school gothic with queer women in two centuries.

Best for: Gothic horror, dual timelines and literary playfulness.

Hild

Nicola Griffith · 2013

• Published 2013
• Setting Seventh-century Britain (Northumbria)
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Significant (bisexual heroine)
• Romance Secondary
• Mood Immersive, political, slow
• Ending Series continues
• Know first War, violence, political brutality, death

Long before Victorian drawing rooms there was Hild: the girl who would become St Hilda of Whitby, growing up in the violent court of King Edwin as the king’s seer, a role that keeps her useful and in constant danger.

Griffith imagines a brilliant, watchful young woman in a world of shifting kingdoms, new religion and constant war. Hild’s relationships with women, and with men, are part of her life rather than a single forbidden storyline. It is dense and demanding, and the sequel, Menewood, followed in 2023.

Why read it: Early-medieval Britain seen through a bisexual heroine who was a real historical figure.

Best for: Deep historical immersion, politics and early medieval Britain.

The Mercies

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 2020

• Published 2020
• Setting Vardø, Arctic Norway, 1617 onward
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Cold, tense, oppressive
• Ending Not promised
• Know first Witch trials, misogyny, violence, marital sexual coercion, grief

In 1617 a sudden storm kills almost every man on the tiny Arctic island of Vardø. The women left behind learn to fish and survive on their own, and that independence begins to look suspicious once a commissioner arrives from Scotland to root out witchcraft.

He brings his young wife, Ursa, who has never lived anywhere like this. She and Maren, a local woman grieving her father and brother, become close in a community tightening toward accusation. Inspired by the real Vardø storm and witch trials, it’s both a love story and a portrait of how quickly women’s independence can be recast as a crime.

Why read it: A love story inside a real 17th-century witch hunt.

Best for: Witch trials, Scandinavian history and atmospheric literary fiction.

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson · 1987

• Published 1987
• Setting Napoleonic France, Russia and Venice, from 1805
• Genre Literary fiction / magical realism
• Sapphic focus Significant (Villanelle)
• Romance Important
• Mood Lyrical, strange, feverish
• Ending Bittersweet
• Know first War, violence, a coerced marriage, sexual content

Henri is a young French soldier who wrings the necks of chickens for Napoleon’s table. Villanelle is a web-footed Venetian boatman’s daughter who works the casinos dressed as a young man, and who has lost her heart to a married woman.

Their stories cross on the retreat from Moscow. Short, strange and gorgeous, The Passion treats history as something closer to myth, and Villanelle’s love for another woman is one of its emotional centers. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Why read it: A short, dazzling Napoleonic fable with one of fiction’s great sapphic heroines.

Best for: Lyrical prose, magical realism and short literary novels.

The Well of Loneliness

Radclyffe Hall · 1928

• Published 1928
• Setting England and France, late 1800s to 1920s
• Genre Classic lesbian literature
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central, tragic
• Mood Serious, earnest, sorrowful
• Ending Not happy
• Know first Homophobia, social rejection, despair, war

Stephen Gordon grows up wealthy and increasingly aware that she doesn’t fit the gender and sexual expectations around her. She loves women. She wants meaningful work. She wants a place in the world. And her world offers very little room.

It was put on trial for obscenity in Britain the year it was published and banned there for decades. The Well of Loneliness isn’t here as a model for lesbian fiction today: its ideas about sexuality and gender belong to its period. It’s here because its place in lesbian literary history is enormous, and reading it now means reading both a novel and evidence of the world that made it.

Why read it: The most famous lesbian novel of the early 20th century, and a historical document in itself.

Best for: Lesbian literary history and early-20th-century queer representation.

The Price of Salt (Carol)

Patricia Highsmith · 1952

• Published 1952
• Setting New York and a road trip across America, early 1950s
• Genre Classic lesbian fiction
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Tense, yearning, restrained
• Ending Hopeful (famously)
• Know first Age gap, custody battle, surveillance, homophobia

Therese Belivet is working in a Manhattan department store at Christmas when she meets Carol Aird: older, glamorous, married and a mother, living inside a world where acting on her desire can cost her everything.

What made the novel remarkable wasn’t simply that two women wanted each other. It was that the book refused the punitive ending lesbian fiction of its era was expected to deliver. First published under a pseudonym, and filmed as Carol in 2015, it remains the essential mid-century lesbian love story.

Why read it: The 1950s lesbian love story that dared to end with possibility.

Best for: Mid-century America, age-gap romance and lesbian literary history.

The Friendly Young Ladies

Mary Renault · 1944

• Published 1944
• Setting A Cornish houseboat, 1930s
• Genre Classic queer literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Major
• Romance Important
• Mood Witty, unconventional, bohemian
• Ending Divisive
• Know first Period attitudes to sexuality and gender; an ending many readers argue with

Elsie is a sheltered young woman who runs away to join her older sister Leo, a writer of Westerns who lives on a houseboat with Helen, an illustrator. Their free, unconventional life opens Elsie’s eyes to relationships outside anything she has been taught to recognize.

Written and set in its own present, the novel is best read as a product of its time rather than expecting modern identity language, and its ending divides readers. That’s part of its value: older queer fiction shows not only how women lived, but how writers could, and couldn’t, describe those lives.

Why read it: A witty, bohemian early lesbian novel from the author of The Persian Boy.

Best for: Early lesbian literature and unconventional domestic life.

Orlando

Virginia Woolf · 1928

• Published 1928
• Setting England and Constantinople, 1580s to 1928
• Genre Classic historical fantasy
• Sapphic focus Significant (subtext and dedication)
• Romance Important
• Mood Playful, satirical, lyrical
• Ending Open
• Know first Period language around gender and race

Orlando begins as a young Elizabethan nobleman, lives for more than three centuries and, partway through, wakes up a woman, simply carrying on with life, love and poetry across the ages.

Woolf wrote it as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, and it is one of literature’s most playful explorations of gender, desire and history. Not a lesbian romance in the modern sense, but a foundational sapphic text that uses the whole sweep of English history as its stage.

Why read it: Woolf’s centuries-spanning love letter to a woman.

Best for: Classics, gender-bending fantasy and literary history.

Patience and Sarah

Isabel Miller · 1969

• Published 1969
• Setting Connecticut and New York State, 1816
• Genre Historical romance / classic
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Tender, determined, hopeful
• Ending Happy
• Know first Family disapproval, gender disguise, social hostility

Patience White is a painter with a small inheritance. Sarah Dowling was raised by her father to work like a son. In 1816 Connecticut they fall in love and decide, against every expectation, to leave and make a farm together.

Inspired by the real painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion, it was first self-published in 1969 as A Place for Us and is often called the first modern lesbian novel with a happy ending. It’s short, sweet and quietly radical.

Why read it: The pioneering lesbian historical novel that let its women win.

Best for: Early America, classic romance and happy endings.

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 1982

• Published 1982
• Setting Rural Georgia, early 1900s to 1940s
• Genre Historical literary fiction (epistolary)
• Sapphic focus Significant
• Romance Part of a larger life story
• Mood Painful, ultimately transformative
• Ending Hopeful
• Know first Rape, incest, domestic abuse, racism, trauma

Celie’s life holds extraordinary cruelty. It also holds women: women who support her, women who teach her, and Shug Avery, the blues singer whose relationship with Celie becomes part of Celie’s discovery that her body and her life can belong to her.

Calling it simply a lesbian romance would badly shrink it. Told in Celie’s letters, it’s a novel about abuse, race, family, sisterhood, spirituality and liberation, and the love between Celie and Shug matters precisely because it belongs inside that larger transformation. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Why read it: A Pulitzer-winning classic in which love between women is part of a woman’s liberation.

Best for: Black women’s history, epistolary fiction and survival stories.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton

Sara Collins · 2019

• Published 2019
• Setting Jamaica and London, 1826
• Genre Historical gothic mystery
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major, not conventional
• Mood Dark, angry, gothic
• Ending Not promised
• Know first Slavery, racism, sexual exploitation, addiction, murder, violence

Frannie Langton stands trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of her employers, and the city has already decided what she is. So Frannie tells us what happened, or at least what she remembers.

Born enslaved on a Jamaican plantation and brought to London, Frannie becomes a maid in a wealthy household and falls for its mistress, Madame Benham. Race, colonialism, “science,” class and desire all tangle together. This is gothic confession and murder mystery, not a comforting love story.

Why read it: A Black queer gothic confession set at the Old Bailey.

Best for: Black queer historical fiction, gothic mystery and unreliable narrators.

Dead Dead Girls

Nekesa Afia · 2021

• Published 2021
• Setting Harlem, 1926
• Genre Historical mystery
• Sapphic focus Central (Black lesbian heroine)
• Romance Secondary
• Mood Jazz Age, tense, determined
• Ending Series continues
• Know first Murder, racism, homophobia, kidnapping trauma, violence

Young Black women are being murdered in Harlem, and Louise Lloyd would rather stay out of it. She survived a kidnapping as a teenager and has built something like a normal life: shifts at a café, nights dancing at a speakeasy, and her girlfriend Rosa Maria.

Then another girl is found dead, and Louise is pulled into the investigation. Her race, sexuality and history shape what she can do and who will talk to her. The Louise Lloyd series continues with Harlem Sunset and A Lethal Lady.

Why read it: A Black lesbian heroine in a Harlem Renaissance murder mystery.

Best for: Historical crime, the Jazz Age and continuing series.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Audre Lorde · 1982

• Published 1982
• Setting Harlem, New York and Mexico, 1930s–1950s
• Genre Biomythography (memoir-fiction)
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Several relationships
• Mood Lyrical, searching, political
• Ending Hopeful
• Know first Racism, homophobia, grief, a workplace injury, an abortion

Audre Lorde called it a “biomythography”: part memoir, part myth, part novel. It follows her growing up as the daughter of Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, and coming of age as a Black lesbian in the gay-girl bars and circles of 1950s New York, where she was often the only Black woman in the room.

Not a historical novel in the usual sense, but one of the most important records of Black lesbian life in mid-century America, written by one of its great poets.

Why read it: Audre Lorde’s landmark account of Black lesbian life in 1950s New York.

Best for: Black lesbian history, memoir and poetry lovers.

Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg · 1993

• Published 1993
• Setting Buffalo and New York, 1950s–1970s
• Genre Working-class queer fiction
• Sapphic focus Central (butch life)
• Romance Important
• Mood Politically and emotionally intense
• Ending Hard-won hope
• Know first Police violence, sexual violence, transphobia, homophobia, medical trauma

Jess Goldberg grows up gender-nonconforming in a working-class Jewish family and finds a home in the butch/femme bar culture of 1960s Buffalo. From there the novel moves through factory work, relationships, union organizing, police raids and violence.

It’s deeply connected to butch history and to lives that don’t fit neatly inside today’s labels, and it’s a reminder that queer history happened at work, on picket lines and in bars. Feinberg later made the novel free to read online. Essential, and difficult.

Why read it: The essential novel of working-class butch history.

Best for: Butch history, labor politics and gender.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 1987

• Published 1987
• Setting Whistle Stop, Alabama, 1920s–1930s (and the 1980s)
• Genre Southern historical fiction
• Sapphic focus Implied but unmistakable
• Romance Important
• Mood Warm, funny, bittersweet
• Ending Bittersweet
• Know first Domestic abuse, racism, violence, death

In a nursing home in the 1980s, the elderly Ninny Threadgoode tells a lonely middle-aged visitor, Evelyn Couch, about Whistle Stop: the café once run by the fearless tomboy Idgie Threadgoode and gentle Ruth Jamison.

The novel never uses the word “lesbian,” and the 1991 film softened it further, but readers have long understood Idgie and Ruth as a couple who built a life together in the Depression-era South. Read it knowing the relationship is told through warmth and implication rather than on-page romance.

Why read it: The beloved Southern classic where two women run a café and share a life.

Best for: Southern storytelling, found family and dual timelines.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 2017

• Published 2017
• Setting Hollywood, 1950s–1980s (framed in the present)
• Genre Historical fiction
• Sapphic focus Central (bisexual heroine)
• Romance Central
• Mood Glamorous, dramatic, emotional
• Ending Bittersweet
• Know first Homophobia, domestic violence, death, grief

Aging Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo finally agrees to tell her life story, and she chooses an unknown magazine writer to hear it. Seven husbands, decades of fame, and one great love she could never publicly claim.

The frame is contemporary, but most of the book lives in old Hollywood, where studio control, the tabloids and the closet shape every choice. It’s the most popular book on this list, and a gateway for many readers into sapphic historical fiction.

Why read it: Old-Hollywood glamour hiding a lifelong love between women.

Best for: Celebrity stories, big emotions and book-club fiction.

The Pull of the Stars

Emma Donoghue · 2020

• Published 2020
• Setting A Dublin maternity ward, 1918
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Important
• Mood Intense, claustrophobic, tender
• Ending Heartbreaking
• Know first Pandemic illness, childbirth trauma, infant and maternal death, institutional abuse

Dublin, 1918, during the flu pandemic. Nurse Julia Power runs a tiny quarantine ward for expectant mothers over three exhausting days, with the help of Bridie Sweeney, a young volunteer, and the real-life doctor and rebel Kathleen Lynn.

Almost everything happens in one cramped room, and the relationship that grows between Julia and Bridie is tender, fast and fragile. It’s gripping and humane, and it’s also graphic about childbirth and loss, so read the content notes first.

Why read it: Three days, one flu ward and a love that grows in the middle of it.

Best for: Medical history, single-setting novels and emotional literary fiction.

Tell It to the Bees

Fiona Shaw · 2009

• Published 2009
• Setting A Yorkshire town, 1950s
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Gentle, observant, bittersweet
• Ending Not promised
• Know first Homophobia, domestic abuse, poverty, small-town cruelty

Charlie is a lonely boy who starts visiting the town doctor, Jean Markham, and her beehives. Soon his mother, Lydia, struggling after her husband leaves, and Jean are drawn to each other, in a small town that notices everything.

Told partly through the eyes of a child who doesn’t fully understand what he sees, it’s a quiet, painful portrait of two women in 1950s Britain. The 2018 film moved the story to Scotland and, according to the author, changed the ending.

Why read it: A quiet 1950s love story seen partly through a child’s eyes.

Best for: Small-town Britain, gentle literary fiction and book-club reads.

Under the Udala Trees

Chinelo Okparanta · 2015

• Published 2015
• Setting Nigeria, from the Biafran War (1968) onward
• Genre Historical literary fiction
• Sapphic focus Central (lesbian protagonist)
• Romance Important
• Mood Difficult, reflective, resilient
• Ending Hard-won hope
• Know first War, homophobia, religious condemnation, mob violence, an unhappy marriage

Ijeoma is a child when the Nigerian Civil War takes her father and sends her away from home. There she falls in love with another girl, Amina, in a world shaped by war, Christianity, family expectations and severe condemnation of love between women.

The novel doesn’t treat Nigeria as interchangeable with Western queer history; Ijeoma’s life is shaped by a specific place, faith and time. It follows her into adulthood, marriage and beyond, and it’s a Lambda Literary Award winner.

Why read it: A Nigerian coming-of-age story about loving women in a world that forbids it.

Best for: Nigerian history, religion, family and literary fiction.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Malinda Lo · 2021

• Published 2021
• Setting San Francisco’s Chinatown and North Beach, 1954
• Genre Historical YA
• Sapphic focus Central (lesbian protagonist)
• Romance Major
• Mood Tender, tense, hopeful
• Ending Hopeful
• Know first Racism, homophobia, McCarthy-era persecution, family conflict

Lily Hu is seventeen, Chinese American, and living in 1954 San Francisco. She’s beginning to understand why an ad for a male impersonator named Tommy Andrews affects her quite so strongly, and why she wants to spend all her time with her classmate Kath.

The Telegraph Club opens a door into a lesbian world Lily didn’t know how to reach. Outside it is McCarthy-era America, where her family’s immigration status, anti-communist suspicion and expectations of Chinese American girls all shape what’s safe. Lily doesn’t stop being Chinese American in a lesbian bar, or stop being gay at home. It won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Why read it: A National Book Award-winning lesbian coming-of-age story in 1950s San Francisco.

Best for: 1950s San Francisco, Chinese American history, lesbian bars and first love.

Passing Strange

Ellen Klages · 2017

• Published 2017
• Setting San Francisco, 1940
• Genre Historical fantasy (novella)
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Major
• Mood Atmospheric, romantic, bittersweet
• Ending Bittersweet
• Know first Homophobia, police harassment, period sexism

San Francisco, 1940, with the World’s Fair on Treasure Island. A group of women artists, performers and pulp-magazine illustrators move through the city’s queer nightclub scene, and Haskel, a cover artist, falls for Emily, a singer at Mona’s who performs in a tuxedo.

The magic is small and arrives late, but it gives the story another way to imagine what was possible. It’s a lovely, compact portrait of pre-Stonewall lesbian community, and a good pick if you want something shorter.

Why read it: A short, atmospheric love story set in pre-war queer San Francisco, with a touch of magic.

Best for: Queer San Francisco, art, nightlife and subtle magic.

The Chosen and the Beautiful

Nghi Vo · 2021

• Published 2021
• Setting Long Island and New York, 1922
• Genre Historical fantasy (Gatsby retelling)
• Sapphic focus Central (queer narrator)
• Romance Important
• Mood Glittering, cool, melancholy
• Ending Bittersweet
• Know first Racism, an abortion, a death, alcohol

The Great Gatsby, retold by Jordan Baker. Here Jordan is a Vietnamese adoptee raised in Louisville high society, a queer golfer with a paper-cutting magic she keeps quiet, moving through a Jazz Age where demonic pacts and ghosts are part of the party.

It keeps Fitzgerald’s plot but shows how differently the glittering 1920s look from the edge, as an Asian American woman in a world that wants her exotic and silent. Jordan’s relationships with women, including Daisy, run through the book.

Why read it: The Great Gatsby, magical and queer, from Jordan Baker’s point of view.

Best for: Retellings, the Jazz Age and literary fantasy.

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics

Olivia Waite · 2019

• Published 2019
• Setting England, 1816
• Genre F/F historical romance
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Romantic, clever, hopeful
• Ending HEA
• Know first Grief, a controlling ex-husband’s legacy, sexual content

Lucy Muchelney is an astronomer whose work has always been credited to her late father. Catherine St Day is the widowed Countess of Moth, whose husband left her his scientific connections. When Lucy offers to translate an important French astronomy text, the two women start working together.

The romance begins through intellectual work, which makes it particularly satisfying: they admire each other’s minds. It’s also about how women’s scientific and creative work was dismissed, and what they build when they refuse to accept that. Book one of the Feminine Pursuits trilogy.

Why read it: Two women, one telescope and a genuinely happy ending.

Best for: Women in science, Regency romance and intellectual attraction.

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows

Olivia Waite · 2020

• Published 2020
• Setting Kent, England, 1820s
• Genre F/F historical romance
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Warm, political, sensual
• Ending HEA
• Know first Grief, political persecution, sexual content

Bees. Printing. Politics. Agatha Griffin runs her late husband’s print shop; Penelope Flood is the local beekeeper who comes to rescue a hive from the shop’s walls. Both women are in their forties, with established lives, responsibilities and opinions.

A great pick for readers tired of historical heroines who are all nineteen and meeting desire for the first time. Their romance unfolds alongside seditious pamphlets and a village choir with secrets. Book two of Feminine Pursuits.

Why read it: Middle-aged women, bees and a printing press: second-act love done beautifully.

Best for: Mature heroines, work, politics and slow, warm romance.

The Hellion’s Waltz

Olivia Waite · 2021

• Published 2021
• Setting An English market town, 1820s
• Genre F/F historical romance / caper
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Bold, witty, rebellious
• Ending HEA
• Know first Financial fraud, class exploitation, sexual content

Sophie Roseingrave is a pianist whose family has been ruined by a swindler. Maddie Crewe is a silk weaver running a scheme to take down a crooked businessman. When the two meet, sparks fly, and so do plans.

The third Feminine Pursuits novel adds schemes, labor organizing and class anger to the romance. Choose it if you like your historical F/F with a little more rebellion.

Why read it: A heist-flavored F/F romance with class politics.

Best for: Capers, class politics and adventurous women.

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower

Erica Ridley · 2021

• Published 2021
• Setting London, 1817
• Genre Regency romance
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Playful, sweet, fun
• Ending HEA
• Know first Low; family pressure

Thomasina Wynchester is a mistress of disguise from a delightfully chaotic family. Philippa York is a shy bluestocking whose father wants her married off. When a Wynchester scheme needs Philippa’s help, Tommy goes undercover, and hiding her feelings turns out to be the hardest disguise of all.

This is the openly fun side of sapphic historical fiction: disguises, secrets, family chaos and a satisfying F/F love story, with considerably less existential despair than Affinity. Book two of The Wild Wynchesters.

Why read it: A lighthearted Regency romp with disguises and an HEA.

Best for: Regency romance, humor and low-angst reading.

Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure

Courtney Milan · 2019

• Published 2019
• Setting Victorian England
• Genre F/F historical romance (novella)
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Funny, gleeful, heartwarming
• Ending HEA
• Know first Elder financial abuse (dealt with), a death in the past

Bertrice Martin is in her seventies, very rich and very bored of being polite. Violetta Beauchamps is in her sixties and has spent her life being underestimated. They team up to get revenge on Bertrice’s dreadful nephew, and fall in love along the way.

A short, joyful romance about older women having the time of their lives. Perfect when you want something warm after the heavier books on this page.

Why read it: Two women in their sixties and seventies, a revenge plot and a love story.

Best for: Older heroines, humor and short reads.

Proper English

K. J. Charles · 2019

• Published 2019
• Setting An English country house, 1902
• Genre Historical romance / country-house mystery
• Sapphic focus Central
• Romance Central
• Mood Witty, cozy, romantic
• Ending HEA
• Know first Murder, family cruelty

A country house. Guests with secrets. Murder. Pat Merton, a crack shot and cricketer, arrives for a shooting party and meets Fen Carew, the host’s fiancée, who is everything Pat isn’t supposed to want. Then one of the guests turns up dead.

If your idea of the perfect sapphic historical is a whodunit with a proper romance at its heart, start here.

Why read it: An Edwardian country-house murder with a central F/F romance.

Best for: Cozy mysteries, Edwardian settings and romance.