Does anybody have any questions, comments, etc? *AMA*

[the_comfortable_courtesan]

While I feel that a lot of loose ends got tied up in the final few episodes, I daresay readers may still have a few questions about how certain things turned out? Or indeed about things that happened in existing text.

With a proviso that in some cases there may be [spoilers] involved with respect to snippets in process or projected.

Comments

[rymenhild]

This. And do Em and Lalage maintain a partnership?

[the_comfortable_courtesan]

They do: although Em continues to have occasional wild enthusiasms towards other women, she always returns to Lalage. The relationship is entirely accepted by her family and their immediate circle.

[kore]

OMG. //melts

[nenya_kanadka]

Eee. That was one of fmy big questions too! ❤❤️❤

It really seems like there was a little more social openness, at least in some circles, to relationships other than one-man-one-woman-married-for-life than in some later decades I could mention. Is my impression about that accurate? (Obviously gay men still got the pointy end of the stick a lot.) I kind of wanted to hug Clorinda in her last entry and assure her that, yes, the wheel will turn and things will be freer again. But I also had no idea there was even as much leeway as there was, in C-'s time.

Sorry, something in my eye...

[the_comfortable_courtesan]

Sharon Marcus has a chapter in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England about 'female marriages' that were widely socially accepted at the time: class and an appearance of respectability factored in considerably to this. Marcus I think pushes the evidence a little beyond what it can bear to suggest that such egalitarian relationships between women reformers/philanthropists modelled a new paradigm of marriage generally. See also Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928.

Complex patterns of relationships were very far from unknown in the Georgian era - have you seen the movie Georgiana? - though often had to do with 'marriage for family/political motives', and provision of an heir and spare before opening up. There were some non-standard arrangements even in the Victorian era, but usually a lot more covert (or else among radical freethinkers).