Yeah, yeah, we're well in March now, but it's never too late to highlight @Goyavoyage’s Februaryuri reviews. I have at some comments to add to hers:
First, like @Goyavoyage I will point you to Dee's AniFem article about Goodbye, My Rose Garden, which I think is a shining example of Anime Feminist at its best: review articles that combine stylish writing with rigorous sourcing and insightful analysis — like a good academic paper but without the academic stuffiness and obscurantism.
Second, a major virtue of Goodbye, My Rose Garden is that its characters actually think and act as one would expect of people living in that time and place. In a lot of manga and other works featuring historical and semi-historical settings, the protagonists come off as people of modern sensibilities isekai-ed into the past and cosplaying as natives. Like typical isekai protagonists, as characters they're unrealistic at best, smug and annoying at worst.
On that note, if you want to get a good feel for the sorts of queer-coded fictions created by contemporary writers of that era, I strongly recommend checking out Sarah Orne Jewett’s story "Martha’s Lady,” referenced in the manga. It's a lovely story in its own right, and also a good example of how a premise like that of Goodbye, My Rose Garden might have played out in real life.
Finally, if you're inclined to write your own historical fiction on queer themes, you could do a lot worse than to consult the various articles Heather Rose Jones has created as part of her Lesbian Historic Motif Project, which collects and presents information “that would be useful in grounding a fictional lesbian character in the context of historic human experience.”