In the most basic sense, Summer Will Show can be defined as a lesbian novel as it largely follows the intimate relationship between two women, specifically noting the displacement of the male figure associating them both together. However, the complexity of identity, the surrounding politics, and the deliberate vagueness in the exploration of sexuality within the novel leave much room for uncertainty regarding the nature of Sophia and Minna’s relationship. Rather than facilitating the pigeonholing of the narrative as a distinctly lesbian one, Warner’s tentative depiction of love and lust, existing in a glaringly uncertain political climate, suggests a desire to move away from the certainty of labelling that defining the novel in this way enables. 

Warner strongly suggests through sexually suggestive imagery and romantic language that following their meeting at the house where Minna speaks, Sophia and Minna enter into a romantic relationship that continues until Minna’s death. However, very important in determining to what extent Summer Will Show can be defined as a lesbian novel is the question of sexuality and Sophia’s internal life. The novel’s third person perspective, focalised through Sophia, provides us with both access into her thoughts and objectivity and through the deliberate ambiguities created by narrative gaps and contradictions, Warner indicates that Sophia is a less than straightforward character. One of the ways this is most apparent is in her feelings towards her children. While she appears to somewhat care for children in her excessive worry for their health, there is a very evident disconnect between her and them, with the passage of her thoughts as she tends her horses being particularly revealing: “The texture of the muzzle searching her hand for sugar, satisfied something in her flesh which the kisses of her children could not appease”. Being one of many instances whereby Sophia’s internal monologue confounds meaning, this could suggest many things from a preference for her horses over her children, apathy for her children, and maybe even disdain towards them.

This is furthered by the fact that supposedly underpinning her trip to Paris and resolve to seize Frederick is her desire to get closure for the grief of her children, whose deaths are so distressing she demands a replacement child from the common man in a dissociative state, yet whose memory is strangely almost entirely absent from the narrative once in Paris. The peculiarity of these inconsistencies in Sophia’s internal life seems to undermine the veracity of her character, making the nature of the relationship she forms with Minna difficult to understand. Therefore while the two women seem to be in what is a visibly lesbian relationship, Warner’s narrative methods draw our attention to the issues surrounding the presentation of reality and it is the consequent mystery surrounding Sophia herself — her thoughts, feelings, desires — that problematises the characterisation of the novel as a definitively lesbian narrative. 

Also important to consider is the way in which female homosociality is represented in the novel. After part one, Sophia and Minna’s life together becomes the focal point in a novel with no prior precedent of female relationships and whose events are in fact characterised strongly by Sophia’s relation to other men, whether that be her husband, her uncle or the lime kiln man. Thus, once in Paris and finally faced with Minna, the husband’s mistress who has been subject to her animosity back in England, a female centred relationship is born in an entirely unprecedented way. In the context of Sophia’s consuming unhappiness with her life, exacerbated by her children’s death which solidifies her feeling of  meaninglessness, Minna presents Sophia with an opportunity to experience a different kind of relation to another person which Warner demonstrates through the novel’s three part structure. The first part, which follows Sophia’s life in England, has a notably dull mood, demonstrated by the ever-present threat of disease looming over the family while part two in revolutionary Paris is significantly brighter in mood, encompassed by the revelation that “Minna had revealed a new world.. washing off all her [Sophia’s] care and careful indifference to joy”. This suggests that Sophia’s growing affection for Minna may not arise from unrecognised homosexuality or bisexuality but the recognition of a different avenue to escape the alienation of her everyday life. This is emphasised by Sophia’s realisation further into their relationship, that “she [Minna] offered her one flower, liberty”. Ultimately, both women find unanticipated comfort in the other, with the unorthodoxy of their life within their house reflecting the unorthodox social climate without.

By using the backdrop of the revolution (and Sophia’s personal trauma) to depict the women’s relationship, rather than opposing patriarchal capitalism with lesbian socialism, Warner posits female centred relationships — whether lesbian or not, romantic or unromantic — as a viable and fulfilling alternative to the established social order, emphasised by her choice to leave the women’s relationship inexplicit. This suggests an avoidance of determining their relationship in the conventional way of sexuality, undermining its consideration as a ‘lesbian novel’.

Similarly, the prominence of multiple identities through class, race and gender and the implications of this on the narrative as a whole complicates the idea of defining the book as a lesbian novel. Set in the backdrop of the 1848 Revolution, the novel very transparently chronicles the fluctuation of Sophia’s politics and in many ways, Minna is the vehicle through which Sophia’s ideological change is propelled, a shift which is one of the most significant aspects of the novel. After Frederick’s renunciation of her and appropriation of her wealth, in a declaration of love Sophia decides that she will stay with Minna if Minna wishes it, but not “because my sympathies are with the Revolution”, to which Minna replies that “though you may think you have chosen me, Sophia, or chosen happiness, it is the Revolution you have chosen”. This suggests that whatever the nature of their relationship, their love for one another is secondary to Sophia’s change of heart, and more importantly, merely exists to enable it. Through Minna, Sophia discovers the concept of revolutionary thought and social progression, a stark contrast from the conservatism of her life in England. While initially she resists the Paris revolution, viewing it with disdain, in the final rebellion at the end of the novel, she is the one who, when she hears approaching footsteps, unconsciously loads the gun and adopts the revolutionary motto “bread or lead” with the pain and rage of a mother “whose children were starving, when there was no more bread in the cupboard, no more milk in the breast”. The fact that the novel ends with Sophia actively choosing to further read the Communist Manifesto, “obdurately attentive and by degrees absorbed”, despite her aunt’s protests at the futility of her activism, suggests this further. Because of the novel’s emphasis on class struggle (with life in Paris without Frederick pushing Sophia to confront a reality in which she must actively and manually labour for survival), and Sophia’s mobilisation towards the Revolution, defining the novel in a way focussed solely on Sophia and Minna’s relationship is misleading, that perhaps the novel can only be defined as a lesbian novel insofar as their lesbianism aids the Revolution.  

Moreover, critically underpinning Sophia and Minna’s relationship is patriarchy and imperialism, and more importantly, patriarchal imperialism as a structure restricting access to liberation. This is most visible in Frederick whose recklessness, facilitated by the attitudes of his class and gender, victimises both women. What primarily joins the two women in the first place is his infidelity, accepted as characteristic of a man of his class through the assertion that “she had known without illusion what lay before her… that a married woman should feel for a man who must be made allowances for”. In addition, his rightful claim to Sophia’s wealth as her husband sentences her and Minna into poverty, and he also weaponises Caspar by employing him to the National Guard solely to further degrade the women’s relationship, perpetuating the commodification of black bodies in imperial Europe.

From the outset it is clear that Sophia harbours racist attitudes, describing her uncle’s biracial child as “that boy from the West Indies” who she assumes “might tease Augusta, or corrupt Damian”. Similarly, Minna’s Jewish identity is the driving force behind her animosity towards her as  “it was not that Frederick had ceased to love her, but that he should choose such a one as Minna, that had tormented her”, a “Jewess, a nonsensical creature”. Therefore, while it appears that England represents a rigid class structure and ethnic prejudice, and Paris as the home of the revolution is on the other hand a liberal paradise of unfettered thought and free love, this binary is dismantled by the latent homophobia and antisemitism in Frederick and the glaring antisemitism in Sophia as well as Caspar. Ironically, Sophia and Minna’s relationship becomes a casualty of the very fight against capitalism that propelled it forward in the first place as in the literal sense, Minna’s murder by Caspar, a very visceral manifestation of his antisemitism as he yells “Jewess! This is the end of you”, is the ultimate suppression of revolutionary feeling and interpersonal unconventionality. Sophia and Minna’s love story therefore exists within a space keenly exploring multiple forms of repression through narratives of patriarchy, imperialism and heterosexuality and because of the complex ways these structures interact to form the entire narrative, to define the novel wholly as a lesbian narrative fails to account for the ways in which the women’s relationship is heavily informed by (and equally informs) these interactions. 

While Summer Will Show certainly explores the experiences of two intimately involved women, meaning to some extent it could be defined as a lesbian novel, solely viewing it as such is perhaps reductive. Alongside the relationship between Sophia and Minna (which is very strongly suggested to be romantic and at the very least, sexual) , the stiflingly present Revolution, the nearing collapse of European imperialism focalised through Caspar, and the problematic interaction of class, gender and race are much too poignant and have much too integral a role in the overall narrative to allow the novel to be defined in such a singular way. Through the structure of the novel, and the almost absurd interconnectedness of the events of different characters’ lives, Warner demonstrates that all of these themes exist simultaneously at the forefront and in the background of the novel, defeating any attempt to define it definitively as a lesbian novel. This is further complicated by the question of what Sophia and Minna’s relationship actually represents, with Warner’s vagueness around it privileging what one woman is able to fulfil in the other over defined sexuality.  Perhaps a more accurate definition of the novel would be that Summer Will Show is a story about the many forms of confinement and liberation, and the love that can accompany and facilitate liberation.