#i am simply a member of the edward edward squad

[titleleaf]

hi ❤️ a long while ago you mentioned Edward, Edward on here and i read it and i LOVED it. i don’t read much historical fiction but i love that time period and that fucked up relationship between edward and the earl. could you recommend anything similar, preferably including those kind of relationships? thank you 🥀

Omg, thank you so much for joining me in the wild dark world of Lolah Burford! (I almost called her Lylah Clare, which seems fitting on some level.) 

I’m trying to think of anything I’ve read with a relationship that’s comparable to the dark push-pull between Edward and the Earl — it’s so squarely gothic but it goes into psychological territory that 18th and 19th century gothic lit couldn’t quite broach directly, I wish I had a really good rec off the top of my head because it’s such a striking aspect of the novel. 

The 18th and early 19th century isn’t so much my wheelhouse for historical fiction (I’m much more in late Victorian/Neo-Victorian/early 20th century hell) but there’s a lot of academic writing about queerness, taboo relationships, and the Gothic genre in that era — if you’re interested in that era and the novel’s thematic influences that might be a good place to start. I also recently asked for gothic lit recs dealing with trauma/queerness and got some good ones here.

For fucked-up 70s historical gothic romances, these ones are more hetero than Edward Edward but sound bonkers enough to be on my next-up-to-read list regardless:

This Other Eden - Marilyn Harris

The Flesh And The Devil and The Silver Devil - Teresa Denys

For dark m/m period novels about complicated relationships:

As Meat Loves Salt - Maria McCann

Dark Water - Elizabeth Lowry

Gaywyck - Vincent Virga (cornerstone 70s queer gothic but it’s tonally more of a loving pastiche of the 20th century gothic than the 18th century like EE is)

Lolah Burford has several other bonkers-sounding books like MacLyon, Alyx, and Vice Avenged but I don’t think any of them deal with m/m relationships or anything as close and dark as in Edward, Edward— Vice Avenged sounds very much thematically in line with some of the 18th century libertine stuff in EE, so I might pick it up next.

Hilariously, Goodreads features Edward, Edward on a list of “M/M Books With Potentially Outside Of Comfort Zone Themes”  — I wish it was easier to sort lists on Goodreads more like on Letterboxd, by publication date and the like. I feel like I should be tagging in @chthonic-cassandra and @forthegothicheroine as two people much better informed wrt [libertines in fiction/the Gothic and the taboo/20th century Gothic romance/just about everything] than I am. It’s really interesting to me that Burford’s other work comes up in an academic context (at least judging from a trawl through Google Scholar) in critical overviews of the romance genre and nonconsent in the m/f 1970s romance novel — I would love to read an annotated version of EE or even just an essay on it dealing with its own unique complexities.