Sacchi Green

Through the Hourglass has been very much a group effort, so both Patty G. Henderson and I want to share our thoughts here, and publisher Liz McMullen will outline the charity aspect at the heart of our project. What could be more appropriate for an anthology focusing on historical stories of lesbians than helping organizations that benefit senior lesbians right now?

History, to my mind, is the greatest story ever told—or too often left untold.

Women loving women have been a fact of life for as long as love and women have existed. Who's to say some of those sculptors of full-bodied stone or ivory goddesses weren't women? We have always been here, in every era and every area of society, even though our stories have so seldom been told.

Fiction has its own power to deepen and intensify our perceptions and beliefs. Stories that show lesbians in well-researched historical settings, with passions fully recognizable today, rescue our past from invisibility and affirm our place through all time, past, present and future.

The writers here are, of course, the real hearts and souls and inventive minds of Through the Hourglass , and their stories speak for themselves.

We begin in the Old World with Megan McFerren’s “Völvur”, set in the Iceland of the 990s where the old Nordic beliefs have not yet given way to the newly arrived Christian missionaries, and girls called Wand-bearers still run free as messengers between the worlds.

Six hundred years later, in the mid-1500s, Heather Rose Jones’s “Where My Heart Goes” takes us to the Renaissance, where a woman’s royal privilege is offset by being a pawn of political intrigue and succession, but her heart is still her own to give, however long it takes.

By 1692-93 in the New World, we find the brutal misogyny of the Salem Witch Trials pitted against the unbreakable bond between two women in Patty G. Henderson’s “In Full Moon Light”. Then, two centuries later during the War Between the States in “Emma” by Priscilla Rhoades, a young woman passing as a man finds love in an unexpected setting before inevitably taking on the duties of a soldier.

Meanwhile in Europe, also during the 1860s, Susan Smith’s “Saffron and Fennel” depicts an aristocratic widow taking on a man’s role in order to pursue archaeological exploration, and, with the scientifically trained daughter of a botanist at her side (and in her bed), discovering traces of women loving women as long ago as the early Cretan civilization. Just twenty years later, the characters in Cara Patterson’s “Propriety” struggle, with tenderness and wit, against class distinctions and the obligations of an Austrian Archduchess.

Back across the sea and half a century later, in 1910, Doreen Perrine’s “A Year of Silent Promise” paints a complex scene of art and longing and the roughly beautiful coast of New England. Just a few years later, The Great War changes the world forever, and by 1917, an ambulance driver wounded in body and spirit by trench warfare in France encounters a free-spirited artist in England at “The Bridge” by Connie Wilkins. “Captain My Captain” by Lexy Walleans takes us forward four years to the postwar England of 1921 and another seacoast, where recovery and loss and memories of adolescent games of piracy affect the lives of childhood friends.

The between-wars era of prohibition in the USA forms the colorful backdrop in 1928 to “The Rum Runner and the Show Girl” by R.G. Emanuelle, followed by a cluster of stories sparked by the drama of WWII. Jean Copeland’s “Nightingale” portrays the struggling nightclub scene on the home front, while MJ Williamz’s “My Elizabeth” depicts women like Rosie the Riveter building war planes, and Aliisa Percival’s “With a Spark” varies the theme with a celebrity visiting a Canadian bomb-building factory for a patriotic fund-raiser. Just a year later, in 1944, the characters in Allison Fradkin’s “With Ball Due Respect” pitch witty banter and score with each other as team members in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

The post-war decades bring us to times so recent that some of us remember them, and those who don’t know someone who does, but they still belong to the history that formed who we are today. Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker is an icon of lesbian literature, and here we have an excerpt from her book with all the grit and moody tension of Greenwich Village in 1962. Lee Lynch’s stories, too, have inspired us for years and continue to illuminate our world, and her evocative story “Honeydew Moon” is the perfect conclusion to our anthology, with an older, established couple in the 1980s sharing their memories of romance and struggle during the 1950s with young lesbians just beginning their adult lives.

All these wonderful stories, with their passion, adventure, variety, and attention to historical details, have come together because of Patty G. Henderson’s original proposal.