“Novelist, feminist, mother, essayist, editor, professor, misanthrope, and lesbian”: this is how Bertha Harris introduced herself in her article on the definition of lesbian literature in the 1977 issue of Heresies, the American journal devoted to lesbian art and artists. Just a few months earlier, she had published Lover, a psychedelic and experimental novel, known only to a small readership and still never translated.
A cult book that often led critics to dub her the “American Monique Wittig”—a comparison both telling and flawed. Wittig herself dedicated a copy of Le Corps lesbien to Harris, writing: “while waiting for a closer international gay sisterhood” and “hoping to meet you soon.” Dorothy Allison, who was once her student, evokes her in several texts later collected in Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature (1994).
This collective reading will be an opportunity to discover several of Bertha Harris’s writings—not only Lover but also Confessions of Cherubino (1978) and The Joys of Lesbian Sex (1977), soberly translated into French as Les joies de Lesbos.