Boston Marriages: The Victorian Workaround for Queer Women

The Victorians had a genius for the unspoken. They built an entire moral architecture on the assumption that women did not desire — and then, quietly, they let a great many women live as though they did. The most elegant of these workarounds had a name, at least in nineteenth-century New England: the Boston marriage.

The phrase entered common use after Henry James's 1886 novel The Bostonians, in which two women share a home, a political life, and something the narrator never quite calls love. But the arrangement itself was older and wider than the label. On both sides of the Atlantic, unmarried women of independent means were setting up house together, pooling incomes, raising each other's nieces, keeping each other's diaries, and — crucially — being left alone to do it.

The loophole in respectability

Victorian society had a problem it refused to name and therefore could not police. Sex between women was, in the legal imagination of the period, essentially impossible. The 1885 Labouchere Amendment in Britain criminalised "gross indecency" between men; no parallel law was ever written for women, because to write one would be to admit the thing existed. Queen Victoria is popularly said to have refused to sign such a bill on the grounds that women did not do that. The anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal. The silence it describes was very real.

Into that silence stepped a generation of women who had, for the first time, options. The late nineteenth century produced female college graduates, teachers, doctors, writers, settlement workers, suffragists — women with salaries, pensions, or inheritances of their own. A woman with her own income did not need a husband to keep a roof over her head. And a woman who did not need a husband could, if she was careful, choose something else.

What she often chose was another woman. They took long leases together. They wrote wills leaving each other everything. They travelled as "companions." They were photographed side by side in matching high collars, hands folded in each other's laps. When one died, the other wore mourning, sometimes for decades.

What we know, and what we're allowed to say

The historian's temptation is to hedge. Were these women lovers? Sometimes the letters survive and the answer is unmistakable — the poems, the pet names, the ache of separation across a summer. Sometimes the letters were burned by a sister or a niece who understood exactly what she was protecting. And sometimes the record is genuinely quiet, and we are left with two women, a shared grave, and forty years.

A generation of scholarship has swung between two poles: reading every intense Victorian female friendship as necessarily sexual, or reading none of them as such because the women themselves didn't use our vocabulary. Both readings flatten the same thing. What the Boston marriage actually offered was a life whose shape did not require a word. The women inside it did not need to identify. They needed to be left alone. And, for a little while, they were.

The women who lived it

The examples pile up once you know what to look for. The novelist Sarah Orne Jewett shared her home and her life with Annie Adams Fields for nearly thirty years after Fields's husband died; their letters read as marriage in everything but law. The poet Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote America the Beautiful, lived with Katharine Coman for twenty-five years and, when Coman died, wrote a grief-book called Yellow Clover that any widow would recognise. Frances Willard, the temperance leader, called her companion Anna Gordon "my other self."

Further back, and further afield, the pattern recurs. The Ladies of Llangollen — Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby — ran away from Ireland together in 1778 and spent the next fifty years in a Welsh cottage receiving visitors who came specifically to admire them. Anne Lister, in Yorkshire, took Ann Walker to communion in 1834 in what she recorded in her (coded) diary as their marriage. None of this was legal. All of it was, in its quiet way, done.

Why it matters to these books

I think about Boston marriages a lot when I'm writing Laura and Maya, and especially when I'm writing Miss Chambers and the Countess. The Victorian setting is not incidental. It's the whole point. A woman like Miss Chambers — educated, unmarried, travelling alone to catalogue a stranger's library — is a woman who has already stepped, quietly, outside the plot her century had written for her. She has a salary. She has a train ticket. She has nobody waiting for her at home.

The Countess understands this immediately, because the Countess has been watching women like her for a very long time.

What the historical record of Boston marriages gives a novelist is permission — not to invent queer women into the nineteenth century, but to stop apologising for the fact that they were already there. They kept house. They kept accounts. They kept each other. The genre we now call sapphic historical fiction is, in a real sense, the act of returning the language to lives that had to be lived without it.

They didn't have the word. They had the life.