“Lover’s Silence” by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson is a poem written out of Robinson’s love for Vernon Lee (Violet Page). Robinson and Lee shared a close relationship for many years, although it was never discovered if it was platonic or romantic. The poem fits the theme of queerness in that the speaker is describing silence that fills the room when the woman she loves enters, and her beauty almost stuns the speaker. The speaker tries to recall that feeling when she saw her, when she is alone. Robinson could be talking about the way she feels about Vernon Lee during the time when they separated, a time that had a hard impact on Lee. This poem and the Victorian Queer Archive changed my way of understanding nineteenth century life, sexuality, and literature through the way they describe queer relationships during a time when different types of sexuality were not recognized in a positive way. Even though people were not allowed to talk openly about how they felt for people of the same sex, they could express themselves in poetry. Because I saw the restriction that society put on expressing sexual desire in the nineteen hundreds, I thought people did not feel the same way back then, but that is just not true. People had these feelings, they were just restricted in how they expressed them. It takes poems like these to show how queer men and women had an important place in history, and in this case, literature.