What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Queer Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
Pride can be so booty shorts and body beats. And we love that… most of the time. But what about when we’re in our quiet queer era? At those times, we might want something earnest, sweet, and hopeful—a vibe which has lately felt in short supply.
When we’re feeling sincerely, ardently gay, we’re looking for a period lesbian romance. Bonnets as big as the passionate glances they contain. Poetry scratched out with an ink quill. Oddball eccentricities that we just accept!
In Charity and Sylvia, a new 260-page graphic novel based on the lives of 1800s seamstresses Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, the eponymous “two maiden ladies” commission an adult-sized cradle so they can rock one another during times of stress, illness, or simply as a reward for finishing the day’s labors. (Sounds kind of nice.) Their surrounding community barely blinks at this practice because it flies under the greater strangeness of two unmarried women living together in the same house, sharing a bed, and supporting themselves independently.
This is not to say the 19th century was an accepting time for LGBTQ+ relationships. At the novel’s opening, Charity Bryant visits the small community of Weybridge, Vermont to escape “choice words” aimed at her in her home of Massachusetts. In Weybridge, she’s able to rent a room and begin her own tailoring business. As the story unfolds, the people of Northern Vermont seem to have greater worries (blizzards, disease outbreaks, leech-forward health care) than the propriety of two spinsters—who are willing to make them a pair of pants on credit.
It’s hardly a spoiler and much more of a selling point that the bonded lovers experience 44 years together—as happy an ending as was possible in that and any era.
The work’s author and artist, Tillie Walden, hit the indie comics scene running in 2017 with her Eisner-Award-winning graphic memoir Spinning and runaway-success webcomic On a Sunbeam. The massive double debut earned her the title of prodigy, which is why people are still calling her that at age 30. Walden has since become a professor at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, spearheaded the Walking Dead spinoff series Clementine, and been named Vermont’s cartoonist laureate for a tenure of 2023-2026.
Charity and Sylvia is the product of a commission—funded by Vermont Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities—but that doesn’t mean she’s any less obsessed with its subject matter. Walden actually created a companion website to the book (charityandsylvia.com) where she painstakingly unpacks her research. It includes an assertion that adult-sized cradles were normalized by Shakers and therefore not all that unusual. These Vermont lesbians were Congregationalists.
If it seems like we’re fixated on that cradle, we are! But that’s merely one small detail to this dense history that Walden artfully unfolds. Like many period pieces, it starts out a little slow and Dickensian, the latter quality found here in more than just stiff collars and regards conveyed to family relations. Walden structured her packed pages with little titles, giving the work a serialized feeling. No single section could stand on its own, but the titles are another way to add story without overloading the reader.
The muted-brown 12-panel pages of Charity and Sylvia may not be as visually striking as Walden’s other works, like 2020’s vivid, dreamlike Are You Listening?, but the illustrations fill her scenes with unexpected emotion. Right at the beginning, on the eighth page, there’s a panel of a chastised child barely holding back tears that heralds the kind of artful lines Walden goes on to employ. Hold tight, because you’re going to love that kid so much by the book’s end.
Let the deeply engrossing history of these pious—yet stubbornly rebellious—lovers give you a break from hot girl summer and plunge you into Intimate Lesbian Winter.
Charity and Sylvia will be published by Drawn and Quarterly on June 15.
