Jane Ripley

I write literary queer historical fiction about women who live under surveillance—by family, by state, by empire. My novels span from WWI London to 1984 Britain, exposing how reputation, law, and patriotism were used to control women’s bodies and silence queer lives.

In my work, duchesses are traded through marriage contracts, newspapers are censored in wartime, and lesbian soldiers are investigated for loving the “wrong” person. I’m interested in the machinery of respectability—who builds it, who enforces it, and who gets destroyed by it.

As a guest, I speak about queer erasure, women as property under the law, military persecution before policy change, and why reputation has always been a weapon. My conversations are layered, literary, and unapologetically political.