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• Scotch verdict* : Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon
  A “Scotch Verdict” results in the Scottish legal system if a case is “not proven” or is inconclusive. Using archival documents, historian Lillian Faderman (1940-) explores this outcome in the 1810 case of Edinburgh teachers Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods. The two women were accused by pupil Jane Cumming of having a sexual relationship which led to the removal of all pupils from the school. Having lost their work, Pirie and Woods brought a libel case against Jane’s grandmother, Dame Cumming Gordon, which ended in the titular Scotch Verdict. Unlike many of the ‘Operation Tiger’ titles, this book is still in print. The Pirie and Woods case also inspired Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play ‘The Children’s Hour’ which was later filmed.
• Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present
  Academic Lillian Faderman (1940-) uses literary and documentary sources to present a history of romantic love between women, one of the first comprehensive studies of its kind. Following initial research on poet Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Faderman expanded her scope to consider a period of five hundred years and the lives of many women (including those featured in the ‘Scotch Verdict’ case explored in another Faderman work seized during the raids). The book describes how societal attitudes to love between women moved from tolerance (albeit not to women who dressed as men), to prejudice and eventually, to liberatory lesbian feminism. The book, dedicated to Faderman’s partner Phyllis Irwin, is shown here in the UK edition, although it is likely to have been the US William Morrow edition that was seized from Gay’s the Word.