My love - all Love excels

Norena Shopland specialises in diverse history with books includingForbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales which celebrates Welsh LGBTQ+ history, and A History of Women in Men’s Clothes: from cross-dressing to empowerment. In 2021 the Welsh Government commissioned Shopland to deliver LGBTQ+ training to local Welsh libraries, museums, and archives.An offshoot was the Welsh County LGBTQ+ Timeline Collection, the only country in the world to have this kind of detailed local history. Shopland has a monthly column for Nation.Cymru on Welsh history.

Katherine Philips has many accolades – the first woman to have a play commercially produced; a seventeenth-century Civil War poet of distinction; someone who broke the rules of poetry; one of the first notable female poets in the world; one of the first to write of same-sex attraction, the list goes on.As with many early women writers who have been ignored by historians – mostly because they were women – and because of her reputation for female affection, Katherine slipped into obscurity a few decades after her death in 1664. She was rediscovered in the early twentieth century by an American lesbian poet and the first female town mayor in Wales, and interest in Katherine grew, but slowly. It was not until the late twentieth century, that people began to recognise how truly extraordinary Katherine was. Only recently has it been acknowledged that her political and landscape writing were some of the first in the UK by a woman. Equally, Katherine is the first notable poet to adaptthe standard poetic template couched in the male voice, making it hers, she created a female poet with a male voice.She lived in violent times; the Civil War pitted families against each other, she was a Royalist while her husband was a Parliamentarian and with the restoration of the monarchy she faced a choice, leave him to his fate or save him. Yet it is her love for two Welsh women that dominated Katherine’s life, and these rollercoaster relations were writ large in her poems to the point where a sex scandal, detailed for the first time in this book, threatened everything. As she and the male poets raced to praise the new monarch, Katherine won, but balanced on the edge of triumph, she lost it all.