Bertha Harris

Bertha Harris (December 17 1937 – May 22 2005) was an American lesbian novelist. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, she moved to New York City in the 1960s. She is highly regarded by critics and admirers, but her novels are less familiar to the broader public.

Career and published works

She is best known for her stylistically bold novel "Lover", published in 1976. She published two other novels, "Catching Saradove" (1969), and "Confessions of Cherubino" (1972). "Lover" and "Confessions of Cherubino" were brought out by the independent house Daughters, Inc., a small publisher of women's fiction. In all three novels, Harris engaged the aesthetics of late twentieth-century literature; they may be considered examples of literary postmodernism. Her novels are stylistically akin to the work of modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes (whom she greatly admired), and she has acknowledged as inspiration the work of Jill Johnston and the dancer Yvonne Ranier. She once proclaimed that Djuna Barnes's work was "practically the only available espression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho.

Much of Harris's work, most notably "Lover", is written with the Women's Movement of the 1970s as its primary inspiration and its audience. Indeed, "Lover" might be viewed as a literary mother of Queer Theory; her novel resonates almost as strongly with third-wave feminism as it does with the second-wave feminism of its origins.

Harris co-authored "The Joy of Lesbian Sex" in 1977 with Emily L. Sisley, and in 1995 she published "Gertrude Stein", a biography for young adults. "Lover" was reissued in 1993 by the New York University Press with a new introduction by the author, mainly recounting her involvement with Daughters Press and its two owners.

At the time of her death she was completing her fourth novel, a comedy, "Mi Contra Fa".

She died in New York City.

External links

* [http://www.glbtq.com/literature/harris_b.html Bertha Harris] on glbtq.com
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE1DD1131F936A35754C0A9639C8B63 Death notice in the New York Times]