Clintr434
Flowers of the Rhine: A Story of Women's Love
A serialized historical lgbtq literary romance novel - new chapters every week
Berlin, 2020. A librarian sorting through archive boxes discovers a cloth-bound manuscript - the only surviving copy of a book published in 1895 and lost to history. Its title: Der Liebe Lust und Leid der Frau zur Frau. Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women. What follows is the story of the woman who wrote it.
Berlin, 1878. Emilie Knopf is eighteen, gifted, and expected to disappear quietly into a suitable marriage. When she attends a Kostümball dressed as Athena, she is determined to do her duty to her family. Instead she meets Marie von Czarwinski, violinist, composer, widow, and the most dangerous woman in the room.
What begins as an unexpected encounter becomes a love story that will carry them from the salons and drawing rooms of Berlin across Europe and North Africa, and back again to a city transforming beyond recognition - through the wreckage of one World War, the electric freedom of the Weimar years and Berlin's notorious gay underground, and into the gathering shadow of the Third Reich.
Athena Untamed is a novel about two women who chose each other across fifty years of history that did everything it could to keep them apart. It is about art, music, desire, and the particular courage of living honestly and remaining true to oneself.