“Gay, Elderly, Self-Standing Lady From the Castle Rauhenstein”: Elements of Romantic Friendship in the Works of Pavlina Pajk

Text analyzes the work of novelist and poet Pavlina Pajk (1854–1901), who is considered to be “the first lady of Slovenian women’s novel”, but most of the time her opus was disregarded and misunderstood. Pavlina Pajk was ranked, among other things, among those “inappropriate, excessively emancipated women”, “adherents of George Sand”, as signified by feminists at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, who with their life and work raised more radical class, status, gender and sexual, in short, identity issues as it was established by the then dominant national canon. Among other things, Pavlina Pajk advocated sexual relativity and opposed gender and sexual conventions of her time. In many of her works we can find elements of romantic friendship, specific form of love between women, in American and European societies quite frequent until the early 20th century. Thus we can gain an insight into the pre-homosexual or pre-lesbian discourse of the 19th century literature in Slovenian language