Drewey Wayne Gunn - Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981: A Readers Guide

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1841-8

2014 Drewey Wayne Gunn. All rights reserved

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Sins of the Cities author

Walter Pater; A. C. Benson (as Christopher Carr); Hall Caine

Oscar Wilde

Howard Overing Sturgis

Teleny authors

Robert Hichens

A. W. Clarke; H. A. Vachell

Samuel Butler; Edward Perry Warren (as A. L. R.)

Memoirs of a Voluptuary author

Forrest Reid

E. M. Forster; Lytton Strachey

D. H. Lawrence

Rose Macaulay

Gerald Hamilton (as Patrick Weston)

Joseph Conrad

John Gambril Nicholson

E. F. Benson

Alec Waugh

Rose Allatini (as A. T. Fitzroy); John Buchan

Ronald Firbank

Ernest Raymond

Beverley Nichols

Compton Mackenzie; T. H. White (as James Aston); Norman Douglas

Kenneth Macpherson; Bryher

Rosamond Lehmann; Radclyffe Hall; Mary Butts

Sylvia Townsend Warner; Wyndham Lewis; Virginia Woolf; James Hanley; Frederick Rolfe

Ernest Milton

Evelyn Waugh

Keith Winter

William Plomer

Christopher Isherwood

Fortune Press novelists: Terence Greenidge; Richard Rumbold; Reginald Underwood; Michael Scarlott (Stanley T. Fisher); Aubrey Fowkes

Cyril Connolly

Noel Langley; Nol Coward

Seaforth Mackenzie

John Lehmann

Frank Sargeson

W. Somerset Maugham

Tom Hopkinson

Ernest Frost

Nancy Mitford; Villiers David; Pamela Hansford Johnson

Norah Lofts; Helen A. Mahler; Margaret Campbell Barnes; Alfred Duggan

Walter Baxter

Michael Meyer; Graham Greene

Desmond Stewart

Douglas Sanderson

Colin MacInnes; Hal Porter

G. F. Green

Robert Liddell; Lawrence Durrell

Angus Wilson

Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus)

Mary Renault.

Jocelyn Brooke

Francis King

Edith de Born; Gillian Tindall

Audrey Erskine Lindop

John Taylor

James Mitchell; John Cantwell; Michael Hastings; Colin Wilson

Kenneth Martin

C. H. B. Kitchin

Martyn Goff

Angus Heriot; Michael Nelson

Lennox Cook

Iris Murdoch

James Courage

Paul Buckland

David Caute

Simon Raven

John Rae

Hugh Ross Williamson

Arthur Calder Marshall (as William Drummond)

Gillian Freeman (as Eliot George)

Julian Mitchell

John Broderick.

Stuart Lauder (David Leslie)

Michael Power.

David Storey

Colin Spencer

Nicholas Monsarrat; Anthony Firth; Peter Leslie

Montague Haltrecht; Richard Chopping

Maurice Leitch

G. M. Glaskin (as Neville Jackson)

John McIntosh

Wole Soyinka

Desmond Cory

John Pollock

Rodney Garland (Peter de Polnay)

George Moor; Royston Ellis

Leonard Cohen; Scott Symons

Robin Maugham

Michael Campbell

Christopher Dilke

Angus Stewart

Maurice Capitanchik; Andrew McCall; Richard Green; Peter Kortner

Charles Dyer

Marc Deschamps; Jonathan Lynn

Michael Porcsa

Rupert Croft-Cooke

C. J. Bradbury Robinson

L. P. Hartley

Paul Bailey

T. C. Worsley

Susan Hill

Reginald Hill; William McIlvanney

V. S. Naipaul

Leo Madigan

Hunter Davies

Laurence Collinson; Mark Harris (Carl Ruhen); Robert Adamson and Bruce Hanford

Yulisa Amadu Maddy

Aubrey Menen

John Batchelor

Clive Murphy

Eleanor Spence; Barrie Hughes

John Bruce; Thomas Keneally

David Watmough

Eve Zaremba

Roderick Grant

David Rees

Patrick White

Frank Moorhouse

Anthony Burgess

Michael Schmidt

Julian Barnes (as Dan Kavanagh)

Roger Raftery; Lance Peters

Edward Phillips

The title of the book sums up its scope and its goal: to provide a map, across 101 years, of longer fiction in which homosexual or bisexual males play important roles: gay novels and novellas written in English by authors associated with the British Isles and seven Commonwealth nations, regardless of the writers gender or sexuality. While this map does not chart entirely virgin territory, it blazes a trail across a landscape that has been, generally, a bit off the map, to borrow the title of a short story by Angus Wilson. In contrast to the attention paid to gay American fiction, nothing comparable has been accorded gay British or Commonwealth fiction. There have been studies of gay aspects of eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction, and a few critical works have edged towards the present, but scholars have tended to stick to the well known in their choices of texts to examine. This guide includes both canonical works and lesser known novels that deserve attention.

This survey begins with a book published in 1881. To be sure, there are homosexuals in Tobias Smolletts The Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748; John Clelands Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (also known as Fanny Hill), 1749; and Charlotte Cibber Charkes The History of Henry Dumont, Esq., 1756. They are, however, minor characters. (The relevant pages about their exploits are available in Mark Mitchell and David Leavitts anthology Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. Additional passages from Roderick Random appear in Byrne Fones The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature.) One might also be tempted to ferret out closeted characters in gothic novels from Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto, 1765, through William Beckfords Vathek, 1816, and The Episodes of Vathek, 1912, to such later examples as Robert Louis Stevensons Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886; Bram Stokers Dracula, 1897; and the anglicized Henry Jamess The Turn of the Screw, 1898.

One could also make a case for beginning with the narrative poem Don Leon, based on the life of Byron and published anonymously in 1866. And there are male couplings in the anonymous The Romance of Lust, 187376. So why begin with a piece of pornography, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or The Recollections of a Mary-Ann? For one thing, it is the first prose work I have found with an unabashedly homosexual protagonist, one who enjoys sex to the fullest (sometimes also with women) without guilt or any particular shame despite Victorian morals. Unlike Don Leon or the Romance, it has a decidedly modern tone. More: since we know that Oscar Wilde read the novel, it has links to both his sole novel and the anonymous Teleny, neither of which can be ignored. And it remains a fun, even an educational, read.