This paper traces two often-fictionalised and re-examined real queer lives – Sappho and Mademoiselle Maupin – and examines the ways in which authors, biographers, poets and playwrights from the early Greeks to postmodern British writers have interpreted and reinterpreted those women.
I use these examples to examine the tension between the quest for an authentic portrayal of historical characters and voices, and the contemporary words put into their mouths by authors across the millennia.
Presented at the Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds conference, November 2011.
