Recovered texts. Lesbian lives.
Lavender Octavo publishes annotated editions of public domain works chosen for what they say to lesbian readers and for anyone who suspects the literary canon left too much out.
Now Available
POETRY IN TRANSLATION · ORIGINAL TEXT 1894
BILITIS: THE NEW TRANSLATION
Pierre Louÿs — Translation, New Poetry & Essays by Louise Martin
A literary hoax presented as ancient Greek poetry, claimed by generations of lesbian readers as their own — now newly translated, with a lesbian feminist reading running alongside it.
Details
When the hoax was exposed, it might have consigned Bilitis to a footnote in literary history. Instead, generations of lesbian and queer women claimed the text as their own — Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien among them, and in 1955 the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, who took the book’s name for the first American lesbian civil rights organization. This edition brings a fresh English translation by Louise Martin, a lesbian feminist reading alongside the original, and new poems composed to fill gaps Louÿs left untranslated.
Coming Soon
FICTION · ORIGINAL TEXT 1927
DUSTY ANSWER
Rosamond Lehmann — Essays by June Fuller
A young woman’s Cambridge years, and the boy next door and the girl who becomes her whole world — loved with the same reckless intensity and lost in the same way. Rosamond Lehmann’s 1927 novel of desire, longing, and what remains after both.
Details
Judith Earle grows up watching the house next door, waiting for the children who come and go there each summer: Roddy, golden and unreachable; Julian, brilliant and cruel to himself before he is cruel to anyone else; steady, devoted Martin; lovely, lost Mariella. She loves them all long before she understands what loving means.
At Cambridge, everything changes. Jennifer Baird walks into her life and fills it entirely — the bathing in the river, the nights talking until dawn, a happiness so complete that nothing before it seems to have counted. Then Jennifer is drawn away by someone else, and Judith is left to carry what she felt back into a world that has no use for it.
What follows is Judith’s slow, aching negotiation with desire itself: with Roddy, who wants her only for a night; with Julian, who wants her more than she can return; with the girl she has lost and cannot stop loving. Rosamond Lehmann, twenty-six when the novel appeared in 1927, writes all of it — the longing for Jennifer, the longing for Roddy, the whole unruly want of a young woman becoming herself — with the same fearless, unclassifying tenderness.
Dusty Answer is a novel about what it costs to feel everything at once, and what is left when the feeling has passed.
MEMOIR · ORIGINAL TEXT 1930
THE STONE WALL
Mary Casal — Essays by Sherry Wilson
The first known lesbian autobiography published in the United States — its author vanished behind her pseudonym for seventy years. Returned to print with three companion essays.
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In 1930, a woman calling herself Mary Casal published the story of her life: her childhood in rural Massachusetts, the men who abused her, the women she loved, and the private marriage ceremony she shared with the woman she called Juno. It was the first known lesbian autobiography published in the United States. Then the book disappeared, and the woman behind the pseudonym vanished with it.
Her name was Ruth Fuller Field, and her identity remained unknown for seventy years. This edition returns her extraordinary memoir to print, accompanied by three companion essays on the social world she navigated, the trauma she refused to let define her, and the pseudonym that protected her voice and erased her legacy.
POETRY IN TRANSLATION · ORIGINAL TEXT 1903
SAPHO
Renée Vivien — Translated, Edited and Introduced by Louise Martin
A poet’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, paired with her own verse: Renée Vivien’s landmark 1903 work, in English for the first time.
Details
Only fragments of Sappho survive: broken lines salvaged from two and a half thousand years of silence. In 1903, poet Renée Vivien filled the gaps not with scholarship but with devotion: a daring French translation of the ancient fragments paired with her own poems written in answer to them. This edition, translated into English for the first time by Louise Martin, brings Vivien’s singular act of reclamation, one woman speaking across millennia to another, to English-language readers for the first time.