Today on the site I”m pleased to welcome Norena Shopland, author of My Love All Love Excels, the biography of Katherine Philips: the seventeenth-century Welsh poet whose love for two women dominated her life. Before we get to the post, here’s a little more info on the book:
Katherine Philips: the first woman to have a play commercially produced; a seventeenth-century poet writing about love, society and relationships during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War. But as with many early women writers, she has been largely forgotten by historians, and she slipped into obscurity a few decades after her death in 1664.
She lived in violent times; a Royalist while her husband was a Parliamentarian. With the restoration of the monarchy she faced a choice, leave him to his fate or save him. Yet it is her love for two Welsh women that dominated Katherine’s life, and these relationships were writ large in her poems to the point where scandal, detailed for the first time in this book, threatened to destroy her reputation.
My Love All Love Excels is an extraordinary account of a remarkable writer who was deeply passionate, complex and loyal. A woman who lived life on her own terms.
Buy it: Parthian Books | Bookshop (November preorder)
And here’s the post, by Norena Shopland:
Same-sex relationships between women in the historic past are often harder to find than those of men. Many that do exist in queer history are there because of what was written about them, rather than because we hear from the individuals themselves.
Katherine Philips is different. She wrote openly of her love for two women.
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Welcome to the most magical bakery — Witchycakes! Little Blue, a witch-in-training, delivers baked goods all over their town, and helps their neighbors with a touch of magic. Cozy up with this sweet chapter book with irresisitible full-color art on every page!
Xan van Rooyen is an award-winning autistic and non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland. Xan has a Master’s degree in music, and–when not teaching–enjoys conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, and Galaxy’s Edge among others. They have also written several books including Waypoint Seven (Mirari Press), and My Name is Magic (Tiny Ghost Press). Xan is also part of the Sauútiverse, an African writer’s collective, with stories in the multi award-nominated anthology Mothersound as well as the forthcoming Sauúti Terrors anthology (Flame Tree Press). Xan has also had a number of non-fiction articles published, which you can find in the Locus Award winning Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (Bloomsbury, Australia) among others. You can find Xan online here: 
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