| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. By Martha Vicinus. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xxxii, 314 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-226-85563-5.)

As I approached Intimate Friends, I could not help wondering whether anything new could be written about this topic. My doubts were quickly overcome. Martha Vicinus synthesizes her lifetime of research in women's literature and lesbian history in an original and nuanced account of varieties of upper- and middle-class women's passionate and erotic friendships. The book makes at least two major contributions to lesbian and women's history. It offers models for exploring different kinds of educated women's intimate relationships; and it provides an interpretation of lesbian history that eschews linear narratives. The cumulative effect of the analysis is powerful, freeing the imagination from the strictures of scientific discourses about so-called healthy and normal relationships.

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