sapphic romance - Felicia Davin

Felicia Davin

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sapphic romance

A collection of 19 posts

Book covers for Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Sherry Thomas's Ravishing the Heiress, and Darcy Liao's Make Room for Love

sci fi or fantasy

Answerable

on The Left Hand of Darkness, Ravishing the Heiress, and Make Room for Love

an Impressionist oil painting depicting a happy crowd of people eating and drinking and flirting

French literature

Crush and pash

the overpowering violence of infatuations, Renoir and Maupassant, and of course, romance novels

A costly dish

in which I’m perilously out of my depth re: food words (but perfectly at home re: romance novels)

$graphic showing fractions of the covers of the romance novels reviewed$

historical romance

Absolute skulduggery

sneaking around and romance novels

black and white photograph described in caption

Kamarband

a little fashion history and some romance novels

graphic of 4 fragments of book covers

Behind closed doors

shacks, cabins, toilets, cahoots, and a real “one of these things is not like the others” set of book reviews

I do cock a snook, but not at thee

rude gestures, death, and romance novels

And yet they were surprisingly moderate

The Black Jacobins, revolution, romance, and horror

contemporary romance

Shedding some light

TORCH, n., FLASHLIGHT, n. I recently had to look up, for novel research, when handheld battery-powered lights were invented (1899). Wikipedia revealed why US and Canadian English speakers call these things “flashlights” while the rest of the English-speaking world calls them “(electric) torches”: Early flashlights ran on zinc–carbon batteries,

sapphic romance

and sucks in his turn

VAMPIRE, n. These fanged undead creatures show up in romance novels a lot, often as protagonists, so it’s sort of surprising that I haven’t looked up the word until now. People love to argue about vampire lore—what powers they have, what weaknesses—and I’m not sure

sapphic romance

Weaved and wove

WEAVE, v., and also WEAVE, v., but differently. Yeah, it’s confusing. Do you ever open the dictionary and find out you’ve been wrong about something your whole life? This rocked my world. I mean that positively, though I did have to stare slack-jawed at my screen for a

Jorge Luis Borges

God's secret dictionary

JACTITATION, n., also jactation. I’ve been reading the work of Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges again. In one translation (Douglas Crockford’s), I ran across this word, “jactitation,” for Spanish “jactancia,” which I think is more usually translated as “boasting.” “Jactitation” has the same meaning in English, but it’

Octidi 18 Nivôse

Octidi 18 Nivôse

CALENDAR, n. Timely, right? I looked this word up for reasons that will become clear below, but I figured the first newsletter of January was a great moment to tell you about it. We get “calendar,” meaning the way we organize our months and years (as in “the Gregorian calendar”

French literature

Roosters, horses, ginger, figs

COCKTAIL, n. I was at a bar with some friends and one of them said, “Where does the word ‘cocktail’ come from? No, don’t look it up—it can’t possibly be as good as what I’m imagining.” Telling me not to look up a word has never

contemporary romance

Myschyvys

MISCHIEVOUS, adj. Now that I’ve put this word in the title of a novel that will be published on Tuesday, I have to come clean: I can’t ever type it right on the first try and I was pronouncing it wrong (sorry, as good descriptivists, we say “in

Snits

Hello, Word Suitcase readers! This newsletter normally arrives in your inbox on Sunday, which today is not. In theory it also comes every two weeks. I meant to send this last weekend, but our household was struck by back-to-back illnesses, the second of which was covid. We’re recovering, but

body or sex words

Legally obscene

This week’s Word Suitcase is sexually explicit. Or perhaps I should say “more sexually explicit than usual.” CUNT, n. It was inevitable that I’d write about this word eventually, I think. This time last year, I was writing about “pudendum” and “the obscenest picture the world possesses,” so

Let's have a bouba

body or sex words

Let's have a bouba

BOOBS, n. This term for breasts shows up in print in US English for the first time in 1929, which means people were saying it before that. “Boobies” is older than just plain “boobs,” and it’s a variation on “bubbies,” which goes all the way back to the 1600s

To have the horn

body or sex words

To have the horn

HORNY, adj. I wanted to know if I could use “horny,” as in “lustful,” in my current novel draft without it being an anachronism, and I am thrilled to report that Green’s Dictionary of Slang has the first recorded instance of “horny” as “sexually eager” in 1826 in US