Chosen Sisters is the working title of my current writing project, which I hope will become my next poetry collection.
I’m researching the lives of women from the past who lived in intimate relationship with other women – or expressed a desire to do so – and am writing poems inspired by their stories. I know it colloquially as my ‘dead lesbians project’, although very few of the women I’ve written about would have used that word to describe themselves.
‘The cottage ladies’ – Anna Gurney and Sarah-Marie Buxton
The working title, Chosen Sisters, is inspired by a joint memorial stone in St Martin’s Church, Overstrand, to two women, Anna Gurney and Sarah-Marie Buxton, who died in 1857 and 1839 respectively. The full inscription on their plaque says: ‘They were Partners and chosen Sisters knit together in the Love of God and Heirs together of Eternal Life through Christ Jesus.’
Buxton and Gurney, a philanthropist and scholar, lived together just outside Overstrand and jointly founded a school in the village, which still bears their initials in flint on its wall. They were known as ‘the cottage ladies’, and were pillars of the local community. Anna Gurney used her own funds to purchase a pioneering piece of lifesaving equipment, ‘the Manby Mortar’, and was renowned for directing rescues of seafarers from her wheelchair on the shore. When Buxton died, Gurney led her funeral, and is said to have leaned over her partner’s coffin until it went into the vault. The poem I’ve written about Anna Gurney and Sarah-Marie Buxton is called ‘Deep History’, and was published in the Summer 2026 issue of ‘Poetry Wales’.
An invisible history
Growing up in Norfolk, I must have walked or been driven past the school these remarkable women co-founded many times, but I had never even heard of them until very recently.
I had no notion, growing up, of any joint gravestones to pairs of women. And I had no clue about any lesbians from the past. Indeed, as a child, I could count the number of famous lesbians I knew from the present on one finger (thank you, Martina Navratilova).
But how much has changed today? If asked to name a lesbian from history, most people might come up with Anne Lister, largely thanks to the BBC series Gentleman Jack. A few might have heard of the Ladies of Llangollen. But for many, including lesbians themselves, that’s it.
My project seeks to address that, not by making wild claims about already famous historical figures (see the regular rehashing of the ‘Was Jane Austen gay?’ question), but by sifting through evidence of women’s lives, most of whom are not well-known at all.
This isn’t always an easy task. Lesbian invisibility is a well-known phenomenon, and the details of women’s lives are notoriously under-recorded. Medieval historian Jacqueline Murray’s description of lesbians in the Middle Ages as ‘twice marginal, twice invisible’, is apt far beyond that historical period.
‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’
Where records do exist, it’s often for nefarious reasons: quite a few of my poems draw on court reports, where the subjects were tried for fraud or witchcraft, in the absence of laws specifically prohibiting sex between women. Where women lived together quietly and happily, it’s likely that their stories died with them. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously wrote in 1976, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
But I don’t want these poems to give an overwhelming impression of tragedy. My job is to listen to the voices of these women, reading between the lines of the evidence they have left behind, and hearing what else they might be saying, and how it wants to be said.
And some of the women I’ve written about achieved remarkable things, like the footballer Lily Parr, and the social historians Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley. I studied the history of the First World War in great depth at school, but never learned about the Endell Street Hospital, founded by Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray (another pair of women with a joint gravestone), whose all-female staff treated over 26,000 soldiers between 1915 and 1919. Their stories deserve to be more widely known.
A work in progress
So far, I have written over 40 poems for Chosen Sisters, spanning the period between about 690CE and the 1970s. I’m always on the lookout for new subjects to write about, so do get in touch if you have any suggestions. I’m particularly keen to hear of more shared gravestones or memorials to pairs of women.