With this book, Charlotte Ross has done a great service to historians working on female same-sex desire in modern Italy and also to those working in the broader fields of queer, lesbian and gay studies. She has demonstrated that, contrary to commonly held assumptions, female same-sex desire was pervasive in the cultural discourses of the period. By exploring a wide variety of genres from medical texts to novels, from poems to erotic literature, from newspaper and review articles to diaries and letters, ranging from more prominent or mainstream publications to marginal and even clandestine ones, including translations from other languages, Ross brilliantly scrutinises the various ways in which female same-sex desire was represented in Italy between 1860s and 1930s. She warns that many of the literary artifacts she has studied are not examples of high literature, but this in no way detracts from the importance of these texts as cultural products which, indeed, under the author’s careful scrutiny reveal a great deal about cultural attitudes to sexuality in modern Italy.

The book is divided into three parts, covering three historical phases: 1860–1901, 1901–1919, and 1920–1939. The structure of each part is by and large similar: after an overview of the broad cultural context, Ross analyses the dominant medical ideas on female same-sex desire of the period and then how various literary productions recast or even at times challenged medical texts. By employing a perceptive and nuanced close reading, informed by queer and poststructuralist approaches, Ross shows how different cultural genres merged, borrowed vocabulary and opened up new possibilities for speaking about subjects quite often considered to be taboo. The author identifies a number of different broad trends spanning the 70 years under review. Fin-de-siècle Italy witnessed a pathologisation of same-sex desires; in the first two decades of the twentieth century sexological ideas reached a broader audience, yet increasingly we find that Italian writers, including some women, were emboldened to write and publish confessional erotic texts. An example of this genre is Nada Peretti’s L’eredità di Saffo (1908). Finally, in the 1930s, literary representations of female same-sex desire moved towards a ‘gendered psychological narrative’ with works such as Natalìa (1930) by Fausta Cialente, Disordine (1932) and Barbara (1934) by Marisa Ferro, and Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) by Alba de Céspedes.

Ross’s choice to start by analysing medical sources, most of them already familiar to historians working on the history of same-sex desires, is not casual: sexology has provided a vocabulary with which to talk about sexuality that is still currently in use; a term such as homosexuality does after all have a medical origin and the modern way of thinking about sexuality has indeed been shaped by sexology. In the Italian context, it was medical men such Cesare Lombroso, Paolo Mantegazza and Pasquale Penta who in the second half of the nineteenth century helped to legitimise public debates about sexuality. In a country where the Catholic Church imposed silence on subjects such as same-sex desires and practices, late nineteenth-century sexologists increased public awareness of the importance of sexual matters in general and of same-sex desire in particular. Indeed, sexology was consciously pitted against the sexual ideology of the Catholic Church, which rested on the belief that it was better not to talk about same-sex desire, on the grounds that talking about it encouraged curiosity and consequently the spread of such practices.

Using literary texts alongside medical texts, Ross shows how late nineteenth-century sexological texts provided a language and a logic that had an impact beyond medicine until at least the 1930s. She illustrates how on the one hand medicine pathologised women who loved other women, marshalling a whole host of prejudices, stereotypes and discriminations that women who loved women had to contend with. On the other hand, Ross skilfully illustrates how medical practitioners who articulated female same-sex desire simply in order to condemn it, sometimes perhaps unintentionally might legitimise non-normative sexualities, or at least display tacit sympathies towards women who loved other women. While some sexologists such as Lombroso mainly popularised an extremely detrimental stereotype of female homosexuality, others such as Mantegazza argued that women were in fact sexually active and had the right to enjoy sex. This was by any measure a radical argument to propound at the end of the nineteenth century. Ross rightly highlights the fact that sexologists such as Mantegazza and Penta discussed the limitations of heterosexual intercourse and in doing so they made visible the appeal of homosexual intercourse for two women. At the turn of the twentieth century, Italian feminists were not so bold, and instead, at least publicly, supported traditional ideas about hegemonic heterosexuality.

Novels such as L’Automa (1892) by Enrico Butti, and Disordine (1932) and Barbara (1934), by Marise Ferro, which portrayed women who loved other women as suffering from mental disorders, testify how from the 1880s to the inter-war period (and arguably beyond), medicine had an impact on the broader culture in shaping ideas and stereotypes of female same-sex desire. By the same token feminists and queer women such as Sibilla Aleramo internalised the hostile and pejorative notions of female same-sex desire elaborated and promoted by late nineteenth-century sexologists. In her own writings, Aleramo, who had a relationship with Lina Poletti, went so far as to evoke notions of degeneration when discussing female homosexuality (pp. 172, 176–177).

Ross’s analysis of erotic literature (pp. 109–137 and 217–230), and of what she terms ‘erotic parodies’ of scientific texts (pp. 109–137), which historians have invariably overlooked, is enthralling, compelling and original. Texts such as Alberto Orsi’s La donna nuda (1906), the anonymous Tribadismo (1914), or Nada Peretti’s L’eredità di Saffo (1908), while reiterating some of the medical arguments and employing a language inflected by sexology, criticised a narrowly clinical idiom and evinced the widespread presence of non-normative sexualities and desires. Peretti, for example, attacked the notion of sexual normality and tried to gain acceptance for stigmatised desires (pp. 129–135). As Ross points out, these were radical discourses regarding the legitimacy of non-normative sexual desires.

Ross’s book also has the merit of challenging established narratives in queer and lesbian studies. For example, anglophone scholars generally assume that Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (1952) was the first mainstream novel depicting love between two women to have a happy ending. Ross dispels such an assumption and shows that there is at least one Italian precursor. More than 70 years before the publication of Carol, and before Italian sexology had even taken off, Alfredo Oriani published Al di là (1877), which focused on non-normative female sexual desires. In Al di là the female protagonists, Mimy and Elisa, managed to live happily together at the end of the book. Legitimising female same-sex desire, Oriani portrays Mimy and Elisa not as sexually perverted, but as sexually fulfilled and free. This of course was an unusual text in its day. Indeed most of the literature examined by Ross is by contrast tainted by descriptions of women enduring tragic destinies, stricken by illnesses of all sorts and inevitably condemned to suffer. Yet Oriani’s novel is an example of how the history of Italian literature can and should lead scholars to modify approaches to lesbian studies that have tended to be dominated by anglophone sources and secondary literatures.

Certainly there remains a great deal still to discover in the history of women who loved other women in the modern period in Italy, especially in the long nineteenth century. Perhaps the most urgent task for scholars is to uncover the lived experience of women who loved other women and the formation of ‘lesbian’ subcultures, if indeed there were lesbian subcultures. But Ross’s book has done much to make Italian cultural discourses on female same-sex desire intelligible and has undoubtedly enriched our knowledge of the history of sexuality in modern Italy.