"Her Scottish father put her in an institution in Calcutta when she was small. Guilt made her Highland gentry grandfather send for her, but he considered her an encumbrance and boarded her in Elgin. When she was an adolescent, her grandmother enrolled her in an Edinburgh boarding school where she developed a crush on one teacher and received harsh rebukes from the other. Brushed off by the former and chastised by the latter, she retaliated by alleging that they were sexually intimate. The teachers sued for libel; in the case that ensued, she was seen through sexist and racist lenses, constructed as an Other. While the case was still going on, she was married to a Presbyterian minister. If the idea was that he would tame her and make her conformable as other household Janes, the plan failed. He turned out to be a womanizer and Jane took revenge on him by reporting his unchaste behavior to his fellow ministers. Later she made a laughingstock of him by joining another church. Posthumously, she became a mean show-stopping character in a play by Lillian Hellman. Such was the life of Jane Cumming, the biracial woman whose recovered story is the subject of this biography. Spanning three continents and more than two centuries and based on archival research, this offers a sympathetic portrait of the protagonist, seeing her as a resilient figure who, when threatened by figures of authority, took arms against her sea of troubles so as to oppose and end them"--

Bringing together research from queer linguistics and lexicography, this book uncovers how same-sex acts, desires, and identities have been represented in English dictionaries published in Britain from the early modern to the inter-war period. Moving across time – from the appearance of the first standalone English dictionary to the completion of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – and shuttling across genres – from general usage, hard words, thieves' cant, and slang to law, medicine, classical myth, women's biography, and etymology – it asks how dictionary-writers made sense of same-sex intimacy, and how they failed or refused to make sense of it. It also queries how readers interacted with dictionaries' constructions of sexual morality, against the broader backdrop of changing legal, religious, and scientific institutions. In answering these questions, the book responds and contributes to established traditions and new trends in linguistics, queer theory, literary criticism, and the history of sexuality.

1650-1850 combines fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy. Volume 27 expands around a landmark special feature on worlds and worldmaking--on the imagining of new, exotic, unexplored, ideal, and utopian worlds ranging from south sea islands to polar utopias to zones of intercultural encounter to the conjectural territories of interpretive cartography. Enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews.

Pretended is a vivid historical, political and cultural account of schools and teaching under Section 28, a law that banned schools in the UK from promoting homosexuality as a 'pretended family relationship'. Catherine Lee was a teacher in schools for each of the 15 years that Section 28 was law (between 1988 and 2003). In Pretended, she considers the landscape for lesbian and gay teachers leading up to, during and after Section 28. Drawing on her diary entries from the Section 28 era, Lee poignantly recalls the challenges and incidents affecting her and thousands of other teachers during this period of state-sanctioned homophobia. She reveals how these diaries led to her involvement in the 2022 feature film Blue Jean, and describes how this unexpected opportunity helped her to make peace with Section 28. Pretended will resonate with every lesbian and gay teacher who experienced Section 28 and will shock those who previously knew nothing about this law. Crucially, Pretended will explain to those who were lesbian and gay students during Section 28 why they never saw people like them in the curriculum, never had a role model and never had an adult in school to talk to about their identity.

Exploring the economic status of women in the 19th century, author Lilliam Faderman details the true-life case of two young Scottish schoolmistresses who were deprived of their livelihoods after being falsely accused of carrying on an affair in front of their students. Faderman examines the customs and attitudes of the era in relation to women today.