Bertram Cope’s Year (eBook), Henry Blake Fuller

Description

Bertram Cope’s Year by Henry Blake Fuller is a clever, quietly subversive campus novel that offers a rare glimpse into queer-coded social life in early twentieth-century America.

The story centers on Bertram Cope, a handsome young literature instructor who returns to his college town while pursuing an advanced degree. Intelligent, self-possessed, and disarmingly charming, Cope quickly becomes the focus of fascination within the town’s drawing rooms and social salons. Middle-aged hostesses admire him, young women attempt to attract his attention, and curious observers wonder what exactly lies behind his cool composure.

Yet Cope’s deepest attachment is not found in the flirtations of polite society. Instead, his closest emotional bond is with his devoted friend Arthur Lemoyne, whose presence quietly reshapes the expectations of those around them. As gossip spreads and social pressures mount, Cope must navigate the careful dance between friendship, reputation, and the rigid conventions of early 1900s academic life.

First published in 1919, Bertram Cope’s Year is now widely recognized as one of the earliest American novels to portray same-sex relationships with surprising openness and wit. Henry Blake Fuller crafts a sharp comedy of manners set amid college teas, musical evenings, and drawing-room conversations—where beneath the polite surface, questions of desire, identity, and independence quietly unfold.

Sophisticated, ironic, and daring for its time, this novel offers modern readers both an entertaining campus drama and an important early work in the history of LGBTQ literature.