Keeping Queer Company in the Short Fiction of Alice French

On December 4, 1903, the fifty-three-year-old Alice French—then one of America’s most prominent short story writers—was arrested at the Senate Saloon in Davenport, Iowa. That night, she and two friends (Margaret Williams and Anna Smith) had used a private ladies entrance to enter the saloon’s downstairs wine room, a space that gave a wink and a nod to the state laws that banned women from saloons.¹ While Davenport had long ignored such laws, by December 1903, an anti-vice campaign produced enough pressure to trigger a temporary crackdown.² The arrest must have been embarrassing to the august French, whose father had been a Davenport mayor and whose social circle included the families of Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, and Teddy Roosevelt;³ yet the limitations imposed on her social life must have also felt familiar.

Twenty years earlier, French had written an article for Harper’s Bazar bemoaning the lack of social spaces available to women, especially unmarried women whose lack of home ownership, she argued, prevented them from having meaningful social and public lives: “There seems to be no place in the social order for her,” French complained. If the woman lives with her parents, she “gives up her own friends and tastes,” and though “she loves her brother and sisters, [the emotion] does not impel her to merge her life into theirs.” “The real solution,” French concludes, “is—a house.”⁴ If French had hoped to parlay the article into a home of her own, she was disappointed. The following year, French’s father built two homes across the street from his—but neither was for her.⁵ Instead, her two younger married brothers moved out, while French (one of the highest paid writers in America)⁶ remained at home, living with her parents and younger siblings into her thirties, with her mother (after her father died) into her forties, and with her brother and his family (after her mother died) into her fifties.⁷ Meanwhile, French’s life-long partner, Jane Allen Crawford, with whom she shared a summer home in Arkansas, did the same, living with her widowed mother and (later) her brother’s family⁸ and making the long walk to French’s home about a mile away for regular sleepovers.⁹ Not until 1905, at the age of fifty-five, did French finally set up a home with Crawford in Davenport.¹⁰

Figure 1.

“Miss French’s Study” from Mary J. Reid, “Octave Thanet in Her Davenport Home,” Book Buyer, ns 12 (February 1895), 25.

While nineteenth-century “romantic friendships” were respected social institutions,¹¹ they were also constrained. In Davenport, legalized prostitution meant unmarried women experienced heavy scrutiny as they navigated its complex social geography, circumventing the saloons and music halls of the popular Bucktown district and even paying dues to wait for street cars indoors lest they risk their reputation waiting on the street.¹² (One even wonders if Davenport’s preponderance of brothels, defined as a place where two or more women slept, might have contributed to the delay in French and Crawford’s co-habitation.) Whatever the reason, French lived most of her life under her father’s roof;¹³ yet the fiction she wrote—from the desk in her father’s study no less (figure 1)—organized against the expectations of heteronormativity that held her there.

In the three stories discussed here—“My Lorelei: A Heidelburg Romance” (1880), “The Stout Miss Hopkins’s Bicycle” (1897), and “A Rented House” (1899)—French took aim at the expectations of heteronormativity. Of the three, only “My Lorelei” is expressly about same-sex desire. Climaxing with an erotic kiss between two women, the story not only challenges the presumed celibacy script of nineteenth-century romantic-friendship but also considers the challenges of expressing same-sex desire in a world that denied its existence. “The Stout Miss Hopkins’s Bicycle” and “The Rented House” likewise “queer” heterosexuality, not because they feature a same-sex romance, but because their characters’ “queer” bodies...