2020/063: Creatures of Will and Temper -- Molly Tanzer

...they were connected by a will not their own that loved them both equally and sought to add their uniqueness to its understanding of the world. [p. 305]

Evadne and Dorina Gray are sisters, but there's little common ground between them. Dorina is the golden child, indulged by their parents, fond of art and clothes and beauty: Evadne is plain, restrained, and a practitioner of the unfeminine art of fencing. When she inadvertently witnesses her sister debauching one of the local girls, she tattles to their mother -- and ends up as chaperone to Dorina on the latter's long-anticipated trip to London. The girls are to stay with their uncle, the painter Basil Hallward, and Dorina hopes that he will help her in her ambition to become a noted art critic.

But Basil is reserved and melancholy, mourning the death of the close friend he's immortalising in oils, and all would be dire for Dorina if she had not been introduced to Basil's friend Lady Henrietta Wootton, known as Henry. Henry's aesthetic interests intrigue Dorina, while Evadne is appalled to see a grown woman dressing in men's suits.

Evadne seeks solace in a fencing school, recommended by the young man she hoped to marry: Dorina throws herself into the social whirl that has Henry at its heart. But both the fencing school and the aesthetes' dinner parties harbour secrets which put the girls in danger ...

Victorian lesbians! Diabolists! Fencing! Art! And a dialogue with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray! (As the author says in her afterword, "envisioned through a glass…not darkly, but brightly": this is a much more cheerful tale than Wilde's original.) I found the final few chapters rather breathless, and the epilogue glossed over too many aspects of the situation: but this was a madly enjoyable read with a complex and credible relationship between the sisters, and tantalising hints of the relationship between Lady Henry and her ginger-loving guest. (The diabolism in this novel is quite different to the usual midnight sacrifices and raving possession.) The villain wasn't too difficult to identify, especially given some of their habits, but on the whole the plot progressed satisfactorily.