I remember ‘Despised and Rejected’ (Christina Rossetti) which also deals with oppression, but rises to the challenge with authenticy (at the price of being banned in Britain). Mary Renault’s ‘Charioteer’ also seems more honest in this regard. Reading the Leaf suggested a strange parallel with Huck Finn. As Twain wants Jim to achieve his freedom, so Maxwell wants to assert the possibility and beauty of homosexual (or at least homophilic) love, but in neither case is the author prepared to challenge the oppressive society in which they live and write, and which denies the possibility of these things. Jim is not freed by escaping to the north, but is legally manumitted in the widow’s will, while Lymie ‘grows out of’ his homosexual phase and miraculously becomes ‘normal’. Both seem to be inadequate critiques of oppression, which I would prefer to see being challenged and resisted. I do not understand the frame of mind which wants to write about oppression without challenging it in anything more than a lilly-livered way.

A friend with whom I discussed the book saw Lymie’s future as being a bachelor academic like the characters in the book with whom he is compared, so other interpretations can be argued for.

Thanks, Mark – at the moment I’m just wading through The List (although my library lets me down 4 times out of ten) but when I was setting The List up, I scoured Amazon for everything that had any tags for gay or historical – I’m sure there will be more yet to be discovered.