Actually, Master and Commander is a Domestic Fantasy About a Codependent Life Partnership!: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith on the Queer Subtext of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin Series (Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, February 4, 2025, LitHub)
Concerns aside, as someone who enjoys both historical fiction and not being straight, I was ready to give the books a chance to charm me on both fronts.
Here’s where I ended up, three months and seven thousand pages later: the Aubrey/Maturin series is not only a military-historical epic but also—I would even say primarily—a work of domestic fantasy about a life partnership so codependent it breaks the space-time continuum.
First: this story is, indeed, a romance. (This is almost certainly against O’Brian’s intentions, but—here we proclaim the mystery of queer resonance in fiction—the characters speak for themselves.)
All great literary romances are about the love between/among men: it’s the text, not the subtext. It just isn’t sexual.