Although the Romantic Friendship hypothesis provided lesbian readers with a host of foremothers and a more complicated notion of lesbian history and literature, it also, according to some, understated the element of sexuality. Surpassing the Love of Men seems comfortable with dismissing the issue of genital sexuality between women, seeing it as a relatively insignificant aspect of lesbian identity.

Whereas the "woman-identified-woman" of the 1970s and early 1980s celebrated the notion of Romantic Friendship, "queers" of the 1990s, perhaps informed by the feminist "sex wars," often see the whole concept as conspicuously asexual, a reduction of lesbian genealogy to a continuous history of feminists who like to cuddle.

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Some contemporary critics, like Lisa Moore, feel that the model, though enlarging the canon of lesbian literary history, has created a "prohibition against reading sex between women in history." The erasure of the sexual potential of homosocial relations in the Romantic Friendship hypothesis is itself an indication of the fact that the idea emerged at a particular moment in the recent history of lesbian-feminist politics.

Informed by Adrienne Rich's idea of a "lesbian continuum" and the concept of the "woman-identified-woman," the Romantic Friendship hypothesis, as an invention of historians and literary scholars, was an expression of the lesbian-feminist values of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Faderman admits that she found a "contemporary analog to romantic friendship" in lesbian-feminism, and that "in a sense female same-sex love had come full circle."

Reconsidering the Assumptions Underlying Romantic Friendship

Although Faderman's most recent book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, claims that "women's intimate relationships were universally encouraged in centuries outside of our own," thus more firmly inscribing the distinction between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the assumptions underlying the Romantic Friendship hypothesis continue to be reconsidered.

Lisa Moore has argued that the ideology of romantic friendship coexisted with a "wariness" of women's sexual relations with each other. She reads English writer Maria Edgeworth's novel Belinda (1801) and the Pirie and Woods trial of two Scottish teachers accused of having sex with a pupil as illustrating the fear of lesbian sexuality and the attempt to dissociate it from white, middle-class women by blaming it on foreign and servant-class women.

Mary E. Wood also departs from the Romantic Friendship hypothesis and the focus on sexological discourse, seeing the ideology of separate homosocial spheres as providing a model that nineteenth-century American women like Margaret Fuller appropriated and manipulated for the creation of a subversive form of lesbian identification.

Conclusion

The idea of Romantic Friendship thus remains a contested category in the history of same-sex relations, a category that ultimately represents the tricky relationship between history and the historian's own contemporary moment.

Despite the quibbles over the meaning of intimate and erotic relationships between women prior to the emergence of modern lesbian identity, the Romantic Friendship concept has deepened our understanding of women's relationships in distant and not so distant history. As a part of the idiom of our gay and lesbian literary heritage, Romantic Friendship continues to raise issues about the place of sexuality in lesbian identity and in lesbian literary and social history.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

One of the masters of French nineteenth-century fiction, Balzac provocatively includes both lesbian and gay male characters in his novels.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

Known as the Ladies of Llangollen, an enduring emblem of female romantic friendship, Butler and Ponsonby eloped to Wales where they lived together for over fifty years and entertained several important writers.

Emily Dickinson's poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.

Popular nineteenth-century French actress Marie Dorval enjoyed an intense romantic friendship with the writer George Sand that fueled much speculation among Parisian gossips of the time, as well as among later biographers and historians.

Dutch friendship glasses, which were made on order to celebrate friendship in the eighteenth century, may also have covertly celebrated same-sex sexual desire; one surviving friendship glass celebrates sodomitical pleasure.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Many of the celebrated short stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman are characterized by intense love and passionate devotion between women.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

Sarah Orne Jewett is a major figure in the literature of female romantic friendship, the precursor of modern lesbian literature.

Adrienne Rich, who has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.

The bisexual writer Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, better known as George Sand, is as infamous for her cigar-in-hand cross-dressing as she is famous for her eighty novels, twenty plays, and numerous political tracts.