Anne Charles

In 1985, Esther Newton’s trailblazing essay “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: RadclyffeHall and the New Woman” appeared within the pages of the lesbian issue of the prestigious feminist journal Signs. Written in 1981 and published in this landmark volume, the piece, Newton explains, “was my return to scholarly work, and it made masculine lesbians my subject. Finally, I could pull my career and my queer life together” But it is the period preceding this fusion that is the subject of Newton’s memoir, My Butch Career (a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for lesbian memoir/biography). Newton follows a conventional chronological path tracing her ancestral line and unorthodox childhood as she struggled to adjust as a half Jewish illegitimate […]