Beneath the Almond Tree

“Beneath the Almond Tree” is a creative exploration of sapphic historical fiction and an attempt to provide an alternative to historical dramas where homosexuality presents the story’s conflict. These texts – including Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019), The Price of Salt (Highsmith, 1952), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Reid, 2021), and Tipping the Velvet (Waters, 2011) – play an important role in portraying queer heartache and the struggles queer people have endured for so long, but their saturation in media may leave us with limited avenues to imagine what queer sexuality and queer joy might look like in the past, present, and future. This short story and exegesis follow the logic of Linda Garber (2021) who points out that with the exclusion of women and women-loving-women in historical records, historical fiction lets us reclaim and validate our existence amongst centuries’ worth of forgotten, unwritten history. Perhaps historical romance fiction – with its imperative, satisfyingly optimistic “ever after” (Roach, 2016, p. 167) trope – can expand our imagination, whether by situating us in a time that precedes modern conceptions of queer identity or by letting us believe that queerness need not signify impending doom.