Thread by @jessnevins

Did I talk about the first lesbian romance & trans happy ending in science fiction yet?

I shoulda saved this for tomorrow, but--

So there's this guy, Gregory Casparian. Not much known about him--Armenian, officer in the Turkish army, came over to the US and worked as an artist, painter, and photoengraver.

They say everyone's got one story in them. This was his.

He writes a novel set in the far future of 1960 in which two women, Aurora Cunningham (British) and Margaret Macdonald (USian), attend the same ladies' seminary and becomes friends and more than friends.

The novel's got some social & technological anticipation in it--it's sf.

(It's also got some racism in it, be warned)

Aurora & Margaret's relationship is described without weasel words, without coy hedging, without allusions to Boston marriages. They are shown as two women in love with each other, no more, no less. (The novel is sf-romance, really)

The novel shows how society doesn't accept Aurora & Margaret's relationship--society is Edwardian But In The Future. And Casparian, caught within his premise of a one-world government, couldn't see a future for the lovers as they were.

So in the novel Margaret, after graduating from the seminary, undergoes sex reassignment surgery and becomes Spenser Hamilton, although my memory of the novel (it's been a few years) is that the change is purely physical and not reflected psychologically in any way.

Spenser marries Aurora, and they live happily ever after.

The novel's THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE, published in 1906 by "Mayflower Presses," Casparian's vanity press. It was the only novel published by Mayflower, and it sank pretty much unnoticed.

gutenberg.org/files/52913/52…

Obviously the ending isn't what we'd choose today. But for 1906, the ending is remarkably progressive. The premise even more so. The novel appeared only twenty years after Henry James' THE BOSTONIANS, but it went where James wouldn't go or couldn't imagine going.

The first novel about a lesbian romance after THE BOSTONIANS was Edward Heron-Allen & Selina Dolaro's THE PRINCESS DAPHNE (1888), and the lesbian couple in that novel has to endure the Tragic Death cliche.

Casparian, guided by who knows what impulse, avoided all that.

I suppose it's possible he somehow read Gertrude Stein's Q.E.D. (1903), the first lesbian novel by a lesbian author, and was inspired to write a lesbian sf romance.

Anyhow. 1906. It's hard to say that the novel was a missed opportunity--it was a vanity press production. But--

it's a hint at what we could have had in sf rather than what we eventually got.