The Chronicles Of Peculiar Desires In The Briti... May 2026

It took the form of the intense friendship . The diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) of Shibden Hall, written in coded Greek, detail explicit same-sex relationships. But less famous is the case of the Ladies of Llangollen—two upper-class Irish women who eloped in 1778 and lived together for 50 years, dressing in riding habits and being celebrated by Wordsworth and Byron. Their peculiar desire was for a domesticity that looked like marriage but was officially “romantic friendship.”

Consider the case of Sir Reginald Flinders-Haig (1834–1901), a lesser-known botanist in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Flinders-Haig did not simply collect orchids; he obsessed over pseudocopulatory orchids—flowers that evolved to resemble female insects to lure male pollinators. He wrote sixteen volumes (unpublished, mercifully) on the “vaginal mimicry of the Ophrys speculum .” His peculiar desire was not for women or men, but for the botanical replication of intimacy. When the Royal Horticultural Society banned his paper “On the Labial Turgidity of Endemic Epiphytes,” he reportedly wept into a specimen jar for three hours. The Chronicles of Peculiar Desires in the Briti...

E. M. Forster’s Maurice , written in 1913 but published posthumously, hints at this geography of desire. The protagonist finds freedom not in Cambridge but in the greenwood—a pre-industrial, almost pagan Britain. Similarly, many colonial administrators found that distance from the Drawing Room allowed for peculiar arrangements. The diaries of Colonel Arthur Conyngham (1847–1923), discovered in a trunk in Gloucestershire in 2012, detail a thirty-year “domestic partnership” with a Punjabi horse trainer named Zulfiqar. The colonel’s peculiar desire was not for the exoticized “native,” but for a mundane, boring, monogamous love that the Empire’s laws rendered illegal at home but invisible abroad. It took the form of the intense friendship