Valentine’s Day, move over. Love’s a big place. Plenty of room for Galentines and Palentines too.
It’s easy to think of history as progressing ever forward, out of ignorance toward enlightenment. We snicker at the Victorians’ horror of exposed female anatomy (just try to swim in one of those Victorian wool tents called a “bathing costume”), glad for today’s ho-hum tolerance of tank tops, miniskirts, and bikinis. In the last few decades, same-sex relationships that once provoked arrests, imprisonment, and worse have become commonplace throughout much of the developed world.
But while laws and social conventions governing intimate relationships have grown more accepting, views of “proper” love have not always been repressive. In many ways, same-sex attachments were more openly enjoyed in past eras than in our own. Close friends once publicly expressed mutual affection through physical gestures like hand-holding, kisses, and cuddling, gestures that today can be freighted with sexual implications. (Note the emphasis on mutual; coercion of the powerless by the powerful is, unfortunately, timeless.)
In my historical mysteries, Julia Kydd is an emphatically modern woman of the 1920s. She mistrusts marriage as a bad bargain for women, believing they forfeit too much independence and freedom to gain whatever “security” a husband can or will provide. As Relative Fortunes opens, Julia enjoys an open relationship with her lover, each relishing the other’s company without restrictions.
But in the course of that novel and its sequel, Passing Fancies, Julia’s central relationship is with a new and important female friend. While these two women characters—Glennis Rankin and Eva Pruitt—are wildly different, each comes to mean a great deal to Julia. Those friendships teach her important truths about herself. They help her grow. If Valentine’s Day is about celebrating those we love, romantically and otherwise, then Julia would fondly raise her glass to Glennis and Eva.
