Cailey Hall engages with contemporary queer historical romances set in the long eighteenth century as counternarratives to established conventions in which queer relationships uniformly ended in tragedy. Too often in eighteenth-century studies the emphasis is on mourning—on grieving Black enslavement, Indigenous displacement, anti-queer and transphobic violence—but criticism that ends with a metonymic association of queerness with death or loss may only reinscribe these correspondences and deny other possibilities for queer being and belonging in myriad geographies of the eighteenth century. We seek here not rose-colored optimism but also not a mind-numbing nihilism; if such a happy medium is possible, Unsettling Sexuality reaches for it. (13)
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Chapter 5, Cailey Hall’s “Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels,” pivots to contemporary reimaginings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intimacies in recent queer romance novels. Hall considers Olivia Waite’s Regency romance novel, The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019), as an exemplum of the recent turn to queer historical romance within romance publishing. For Hall, Waite’s novel offers a counternarrative to the assumption that queer historical love stories are inevitably tragic and, in doing so, meditates on the affordances and limits of reparative archival practices that inflect romance novels’ speculative dimensions. (14)
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What I hope to argue in this chapter is that, even though Waite’s novel is not based on a true story, so to speak, it is nevertheless telling a story that could be true. Or, to put this in slightly different terms that are significant to what follows: while the novel is not drawn from extant archives, it narrates a love story that might not be out of place in the archives of queer history.
The first female/female historical romance released by romance publishing powerhouse Avon books, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics is still one of relatively few queer historical romances published [...] As I see it, Waite and a small cohort of recent queer historical romance novelists—including Alyssa Cole, Courtney Milan, Cat Sebastian, and Alexis Hall—conceive of their relationship to long-eighteenth-century history as both reparative and revolutionary, offering a counternarrative to the assumption that queer historical love stories are inevitably tragic. By drawing on archival resources and innovating within archival lacunae, these queer historical romance writers are engaged with questions of historical accuracy while also challenging who dictates the terms of historical accuracy. (96)
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The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics is an exemplary case of what I have found holds true in the still small subgenre of queer historical romance more broadly: when queerness is made central to historical romance, the foundations of the marriage plot—bourgeois culture and property consolidation—also recede. That is to say, even when queer historical romances are indebted to the marriage plot and follow some of its key beats, they resist the sense of narrowing possibility that is often associated with romantic closure. Instead, and without devolving into the counterfactual or the radically ahistorical, these novels almost always find ways to open up new possibilities of love, of companionship, and of being in relation to others. (102)
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I am captivated by this ending. It both honors and plays with the conventions of romance novels’ required HEA in order to revise narrow ideas about what romance and the marriage plot can look like. While the shared publishing mission replaces marriage and, perhaps, any reproductive futurity, it also expands the happy ending beyond Lucy and Catherine. Rather than turning to literal procreation as a way to endure beyond death, Lucy and Catherine embark on a publishing project that makes possible a far more capacious queer community—and queer lineage. The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics promises a kind of happiness—or at least justice—to the lovers’ (fictional) peers, as well as (fictional) future scholars. (103)
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If the only narratives from the past are traumatic ones, it becomes that much more difficult to envision happiness in the present or the future—and that much easier to accept less in the name of some kind of gradualist Whig notion of progress. (104)
The introduction states that:
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