But to me, there are just certain pairings that wouldn't be likely. (Much as I'd enjoy some good Violet femmeslash, for instance, I just don't see it happening with Isobel [or so far, with any of the canon possibilities.] I'm completely with you here! Though if you don't mind me jumping here with a little train of thought I've been having on just those two, I think that this is perhaps where "femslash" would be too anachronistic a category for those two -- if we consider stories as "femslash" where there is a romantic, sexual, or erotic attachment between women that is understandable to us 21st-century westerners as "lesbian" (rather than, I believe, what has been termed -- not quite fortunately, I think -- "lesbian-like", or otherwise non-heterosexual/queer).
But here we have an opinionated, conservative, aristocratic dowager and an opinionated, value-conservative and otherwise probably liberal-bourgeois upper-middle-class philanthropist, who don't even like each other (but may be drawn to each other in other ways, say, as sparrings partners.) In the hands of a good writer, I can imagine their banter turning towards some unspoken, subtle erotic tension that lies more in the game and the exercise of brains and wits than in physical attraction, but taking it too far could easily make the story implausible. There exists a piece of writing by a bourgeois feminist who lived with a woman (and whose attitudes I'd mine if I were to write Isobel getting a kick out of being with women), and in it she says that she considers it in her interest to establish women not as sexual beings but as persons with brains. She therefore advised sexual ascetisism to unmarried feminists, which however would not mean renouncing to (a) eroticism because that could be had in intellectual contact with other women, and (b) motherhood because that could be had through social work. I'm sure there were English women who thought like that, given that the Germans had those ideas from English and American feminists in the first place.
So no, like you, I can't see how Violet and Isobel could have an "affair" that people today would recognise as one. Physical elation, unspoken and perhaps even unacknowledged attraction, though? I think that could work. But I'm not sure it could be called "femslash"...
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I'm completely with you here! Though if you don't mind me jumping here with a little train of thought I've been having on just those two, I think that this is perhaps where "femslash" would be too anachronistic a category for those two -- if we consider stories as "femslash" where there is a romantic, sexual, or erotic attachment between women that is understandable to us 21st-century westerners as "lesbian" (rather than, I believe, what has been termed -- not quite fortunately, I think -- "lesbian-like", or otherwise non-heterosexual/queer).
But here we have an opinionated, conservative, aristocratic dowager and an opinionated, value-conservative and otherwise probably liberal-bourgeois upper-middle-class philanthropist, who don't even like each other (but may be drawn to each other in other ways, say, as sparrings partners.) In the hands of a good writer, I can imagine their banter turning towards some unspoken, subtle erotic tension that lies more in the game and the exercise of brains and wits than in physical attraction, but taking it too far could easily make the story implausible. There exists a piece of writing by a bourgeois feminist who lived with a woman (and whose attitudes I'd mine if I were to write Isobel getting a kick out of being with women), and in it she says that she considers it in her interest to establish women not as sexual beings but as persons with brains. She therefore advised sexual ascetisism to unmarried feminists, which however would not mean renouncing to (a) eroticism because that could be had in intellectual contact with other women, and (b) motherhood because that could be had through social work. I'm sure there were English women who thought like that, given that the Germans had those ideas from English and American feminists in the first place.
So no, like you, I can't see how Violet and Isobel could have an "affair" that people today would recognise as one. Physical elation, unspoken and perhaps even unacknowledged attraction, though? I think that could work. But I'm not sure it could be called "femslash"...