Sex variant women in literature

Introduction

The variant novels still to be surveyed in English number well over a hundred. In part this surprising count reflects the general growth of interest in sexual psychology and the increase in the number of feminine authors, both of which trends developed slightly later in the English-speaking countries than elsewhere. But beyond doubt it is also due in some measure simply to the greater accessibility of material in our own language. Book reviews in English and the indexes locating them have multiplied enormously since 1900, and, non-committal though reviews may be with regard to variance, a practiced reader grows sensitive to significant evasion. Even more fruitful, of course, is the wide, if superficial, skimming of each year’s output, a habit which nets not only unreviewed trivia but minor variant incidents in better novels as well. Had titles in French and German been equally ready to hand, the score here would certainly be more equitable.

In rapid survey of this century’s English fiction certain rough divisions emerge. The first fifteen years might be called the age of innocence, in that no published work referred to overt lesbianism, variance was not a subject of dispute, and no particular school of psychological thought had come to the fore. After 1915 more sophistication was apparent and variance became a controversial issue, particularly in England where the struggle for suffrage exacerbated any reference to women’s departure from the feminine and domestic role. Thereafter, for a decade or so partisan shots echoed intermittently back and forth as they had in France a quarter-century earlier, with the difference, however, that now the attack frequently employed the batteries of Freud. During the first of these decades World War I exerted a perceptible influence, quickening cross-fertilization between continental and Anglo-American attitudes in general, and, in particular, leading to the translation after 1920 of enough French fiction so that occasionally specific influences could be detected in our own novels. Another aftermath of war was that relaxing of all sexual strictures which characterized the Twenties, and, in line with the growing freedom, literary treatments of variance multiplied rapidly, reaching a first peak in 1928.

In that year Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness incurred legal prosecution for its explicit defense of a lesbian woman.[1] The restrictive effect of this action was no more than local and temporary, and as usual in cases of censorship the long range result was wide publicity for the banned title and for others on related themes. Consequently, the number of novels giving attention to variance swelled to a second peak in the middle Thirties, but the general tone was altered. Authors were now more self-conscious. The best, if at all sympathetic, dealt more gingerly with the delicate subject than before the attack. The majority, of intermediate popular quality, were careful to sound a disparaging note. And there sprang up also for the first time in English the wave of mediocre work which always follows profitable publication of better material in any field. Some of these inferior tales were censorious, some defensive, but all were so unrestrained that in this country, at least, certain pressure groups, notably the Catholic League for Decency, were roused to crusade for wholesale suppression.

A less obvious influence was also at work. The “flaming youth” of the Twenties, product of war and of general rebellion against Victorian inhibitions, had reached a point of disillusionment with sexual freedom, and now, as the “lost generation”, were groping toward emotional stability. This quest for adjustment called forth a quantity of popular psychology and sociology, stemming largely from Freud, which deprecated irregular attachments, especially the homosexual, and exalted marriage and family life. Thus, some decline in variant fiction was evident before the end of the Thirties. Then, in 1939 the second World War exerted initial pressure in the same direction, for, as always, the younger generation’s urge to perpetuate itself before too late threw added emphasis upon heterosexual relations and parenthood. And finally, in the publishing business, to usual wartime handicaps was added the new military requisition of cellulose for explosives, which resulted in an unprecedented shortage of paper and stringent selectivity in published fiction. Altogether it was inevitable that during the early Forties the variant literary stream should run low.

It did not, however, cease entirely, and since the end of World War II, trends in fiction suggest that variance is on its way to becoming a recognized if not accepted segment of human experience. The probable underlying reasons for this change are varied. One is the usual aftermath of war. Besides regularly producing a bumper crop of infants, war has, since the days of Sappho, swelled the number of variants by segregating the young to some extent during just those years when sexual interest is at its height. More conscious effort was made to combat this tendency during World War II than ever before, both in the armed forces and on the home front. Preventive measures this time were as much educational as disciplinary, so that the war generation emerged with some grounding in “psychiatry at the fox-hole level.” One result is that among women there was no such deliberate post-war affectation of masculinity as occurred in the Twenties. Another is that many incipient authors were prepared to write of variance with some balance and perspective.

A further possible reason for the relaxing of at least the American attitude toward variance is the publication of the Kinsey reports on sexual behavior.[2] The appearance of the male volume in 1948 encouraged the production of several serious novels featuring male homosexuality, a subject hitherto stringently banned from English fiction. It is not safe to say that this lifting of taboo significantly affected the feminine picture, since female variance was never so rigorously outlawed, and the count of pertinent titles was as large in 1943 and 1944, for instance, as in 1949 and 1950. For this same reason Kinsey’s second volume on the female (1953) seems unlikely to produce an effect comparable to his first. But one fact is certain—the inclusion of incidental variant and even lesbian episodes and characters is on the increase in popular current fiction.

This statement leads to consideration of a third and purely practical reason for the increase—post-war innovations in the publishing business. Before 1941 experiments in producing books of high readability and low cost had not achieved financial success, but four years of government subsidy to the end of providing the armed forces with reading matter put the venture on a paying basis. At present, fiction available at magazine cost and from all magazine outlets has become a commonplace of daily life. While these paper-covered novels were at first reprints of titles notably successful in other editions, since 1950 a number of companies have issued originals in the same format. Quite naturally one sure-fire selling feature on the newsstands is frankness with regard to sex, and the multiplication of both reprints and originals dealing with female variance provides objective evidence of interest in that subject. Another requisite for fast sales is a not-too-exalted literary level, and the combination of sex latitude and popular quality has alerted would-be censors. For some years these self-appointed groups have sought to control the paper-backed market and have here and there succeeded. Variant titles have been conspicuous in all lists under fire from moral vigilantes, and the current question is whether censoring agencies will succeed in once again checking quantity circulation of such material.

The Age of Innocence

The last mentioned variant narrative in English was Henry James’s novelette The Turn of the Screw (1898). Treating as it did the seduction of a girl of eight by a depraved governess, it was considered along with French titles of its decade which it resembled more closely than did any of the novels soon to appear in English. Of these last, none offered more contrast to French sophistication or could more fittingly have ushered in twentieth-century fiction in our own tongue than the innocuous tale published in 1900 by a now-forgotten British novelist, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.

Within the first quarter of The Farringdons Mrs. Fowler includes a series of three passionate attachments experienced by the motherless heroine. These occur before Elisabeth is twenty, but they are noteworthy because of the author’s peculiar stress upon them.

Despite this insistence on normal femininity, the object of the girl’s comfortable friendship is a boy neighbor; that of her passionate attachment a tall, handsome and witty Cousin Anne, a decade older than she is.

Deep in the reading of mythology, Elisabeth sees her cousin as Diana, builds a shrine to her in the garden, and practices a ritual of burnt offerings before it. She also takes great interest in the Book of Ruth, sensing “a parallelism to herself and Cousin Anne (in feeling at least).”

This devotion occupies Elisabeth from twelve to sixteen, when the cousin’s death plunges her into melancholy which threatens her health. She is accordingly hurried off to boarding school, where during the next four years she experiences a case of passionate hero-worship for the headmistress, and a “devoted friendship” with a schoolmate who became for a time “the very mainspring of Elisabeth’s life. She was a beautiful girl ... and Elisabeth adored her with the adoration ... freely given to the girl who has beauty by the girl who has not.” Upon this girl Elisabeth lavishes

The latter experience she meets at twenty. All these careful statements indicate the author’s full awareness of the nature of variance and her taking a deliberate stand with regard to it. Equally definite is the implication that none of these early adorations involved physical intimacy.

Two years later (1902) a Canadian-American girl of twenty-one published The Story of Mary MacLane, written as a journal covering three months during her nineteenth year and purporting to be literal autobiography. Like the comparable “Story of Opal,” printed as authentic by the Atlantic Monthly in 1920, but partially “debunked” by discerning critics, it was probably laced with more than a dash of fiction. In its day it created sufficient sensation to be burlesqued in Weber and Field’s revue of that year, and sold well enough to allow its author a half-dozen years in Boston and New York.

Conspicuous in its self-revelation is undying hatred of the father whom Mary lost at the age of eight.

Of her mother she says later,

Mary feels herself unloved also by the rest of her family—older sister, older and younger brothers, and stepfather—all of whom are “strictly practical and material, seeing close human relations as the stuff of literature, not real life....” She is herself a genius, infinitely apart from the crude barrenness of Butte, Montana, though she owns to keen sympathy for women there who are “outside the moral pale.” All this, of course, is once again the “dark hero complex,” that sense of being outcast but superior, which has since been so well analyzed by Romer Wilson in Emily Brontë and others. For 1902, three decades before the era when parents could do no right, it was fairly strong meat.

As for men, MacLane is certain none can ever rouse or possess her except the Devil. “He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man.” He will hurt her, and passion for him will free her from herself, but it will last only three days, and “there must be no falling in love about it.”

It was this devil fantasy upon which Weber and Fields seized, and on the stage the Dark Gentleman, played by William Collier, fled in terror before the enfant terrible.

The pertinent point to which all the foregoing leads is an attachment to a high school teacher of literature first encountered when Mary was eighteen, “the first person on earth who ever looked at me tenderly,” to whom she refers with adolescent sentimentality as the “Anemone Lady.” About this woman she spins passionate reveries, wishing they might live together high on a mountainside away from the world. With the beginning of this friendship “I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking away of flood gates—and a strange new pain ... a convulsion and a melting within.”[10] Nevertheless, caresses went no farther than “your hand in mine,” and the association seems to have lasted but a year. Still Mary says:

This pseudo-naïveté wakes a suspicion of literary influence which is strengthened by her second volume, My Friend Annabel Lee (1903). Here she proclaims her few early literary loves to have been Poe, the juvenile books for boys of J. T. Trowbridge, and “‘Three Grains of Corn,’ by a woman named Edwards,” and she voices acute loathing for Archibald Clavering Gunter without citing reasons. Mathilda Betham-Edwards was an Englishwoman who lived in France during the late nineteenth century, and the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse includes a sonnet of hers, “A Valentine: The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” ending with the following sestet:

This MacLane would have loved, as she would have hated the farcical treatment of variance in A Florida Enchantment, and to assume her acquaintance with both would explain her otherwise unaccountable singling out of these two authors alone for special mention. Both of MacLane’s volumes betray a disingenuous effort to present herself as a child genius springing as it were by parthenogenesis from the intellectual wasteland of Montana. It is probable that her reading had been more extensive and had influenced her more than she admitted.

As to the volume of 1903, it is not only less startling than the first but seems more youthful. The “friend” of the title is a Japanese statuette in which her fantasy sees “a woman of fourteen” who has known love for a week, after which “the strong stranger went away,” leaving life drab. Here is the Devil again, and “Annabel” is obviously no more than Mary’s own persona, hard, experienced and self-contained even before adolescence. One wonders whether MacLane may have suffered some early traumatic experience with a man which produced this recurrent fantasy and prompted her sympathy for the déclassées of Butte. As for women, “Annabel” is her only admitted friend. The volume records nothing beyond Mary’s roaming alone in Boston, falling in love momentarily with Minnie Maddern Fiske as the Magdalen, and adoring the Puvis de Chavannes murals in the Public Library—those delicate wraiths so remote from reality. Of human contacts there is no mention; she is solitary and bitterly nostalgic for the Anemone Lady, or, rather, for their mountainside eyrie of her own imagining. Passages in her third volume, I, Mary MacLane (1917) shed some light on her actual experiences at this time, but must await discussion in proper order because the later volume reflects the comparative emotional sophistication which had permeated this country in the intervening years.

The next variant item was an historical novel by John Breckenridge Ellis (1902), but precedence will be given to the recently published Things As They Are (1951), written in 1903 by Gertrude Stein, because of its closer similarity to MacLane’s autobiographical volumes. This earliest effort of Miss Stein’s, written when she was twenty-nine, is recognized as very near to her own experience by Edmund Wilson, a long-time student of her total work.[13] It records the emotional entanglements among three young American women over a period of two years, and opens on a transatlantic liner carrying them to Europe. Adele, the central figure from whose viewpoint the whole story is written, is oppressed by exhaustion and “the disillusion of recent failures” in Baltimore, and as Mr. Wilson points out, Miss Stein herself went abroad in the summer of 1902 after having abandoned hope of a degree from Johns Hopkins where she had pursued the medical course for five years.

The three girls are characterized at length. Helen is

that is, definitely a masculine personality; but actually she is no more than “a brave bluff.” Sophie is a New Englander with “the angular body of a spinster but ... a face that would have belonged to the decadent days of Italian greatness,” and with “the unobtrusive good manners of a gentleman.” Events prove her, however, to be both feminine and feline. Adele has “the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort that suggests a land of laziness and sunshine.” Very early in the narrative she exclaims, “I always did thank God I wasn’t born a woman,”[15]—this surprising statement is neither then nor later elaborated in any way—but everything about her save her intellect is passive to the point of inertia, and she struggles against being drawn into the “turgid and complex world” of passionate intimacy.

She finds it impossible, however, to remain indifferent to Helen’s subtle courtship, which includes “fluttering” caresses as the three lie on the deck under the stars. Her familiarity with attraction between women is evident from some early self-searching:

At one point Helen charges her with “middle-class morality,” to which Adele retorts:

But that (says Helen) means cutting passion quite out of your scheme of things. Adele replies:

In accordance with these principles Adele spends her summer in Spain, happy in the mere “family” comradeship of a cousin. But during the subsequent winter she plays a divided game. She cannot resist going repeatedly from Baltimore to New York to see Helen, though once there she is not only passive but resistant to the other girl’s wooing. She even says explicitly that they have few interests in common, but still it is she who does all the traveling to make their growing intimacy possible, for Helen’s resources are sharply curtailed by unsympathetic parents.

Thus far, the third girl, Sophie, has remained surprisingly passive in view of her long-established intimacy with Helen, but in the course of this winter she enlightens Adele as to the precise nature of that intimacy. Adele is so shocked that it is implied clearly that the relation is physical and, up until then, wholly outside her own acquaintance. Not even this revelation, however, can detach her from Helen, although she deliberately elects a second summer abroad alone and suffers when Helen’s letters are stopped by a visit from Sophie. During the subsequent winter her own relations with Helen reach the stage of physical expression, but the change is not a happy one.

This is trite enough to readers of modern sexual psychology as set forth in marriage manuals. It was not trite coming from an unmarried American girl in 1903.

At this juncture Sophie invites Helen to accompany her on another European trip. (As Mr. Wilson drily remarks, for the more prosperous American college graduate, Europe was then an imperative.) Helen accepts, and although Adele is certain that Sophie is financing the trip she dares not put the question directly. Or perhaps she does not want to, for Helen has urged her to spend the summer abroad also, not with them, but within easy reach.

And so the lover of serenity travels for her third summer as a kind of semi-detached appendage to the other pair, and the remainder of the action is almost as tedious and confusing to the reader as to Adele herself. Because of the physical incompatibility so well described above, Helen has now cooled considerably in that respect, but her emotional dependence upon Adele increases with Sophie’s balking of private communication between them—one more testimonial to the soundness of “Proust’s law”: the inverse proportion between “love” and accessibility. Because Adele, on the other hand, is now rather more than less physically attracted, her health and peace of mind suffer noticeably during her frustrating periods with the other two. But she is bound not only by her genuine love for Helen but by her confidence that the other girl really loves her. When she reads Helen’s final desperate letter promising that she will never again allow such a situation to develop, Adele exclaims with impatience:

This sentence concludes the book, to which Miss Stein originally gave the title Quod Erat Demonstrandum, the implied proposition being that such an emotional game could never be worth the candle. The current title, chosen by the editor, throws the emphasis upon Helen’s inability to be honest with herself or others, in contrast to Adele’s ruthless clarity. If Adele acted against her own middle-class convictions, it was at least without self-deception at any stage of the game. Mr. Wilson suggests that continued preoccupation with women, and her unwillingness to abandon herself again or to write openly about it, was responsible for the increasing obscurity of Miss Stein’s work and the lofty emotional detachment of her viewpoint.[20]

* * *

John Breckenridge Ellis’s The Holland Wolves, published late in 1902, was largely in the cape-and-sword tradition of the time, but he inserted a variant touch by making its central figure a transvestist and treating the emotional consequences seriously. Rosamunda, daughter of a Spanish leader in the war with the Netherlands, has been bred in a convent where flagellation was a common practice. When, at nineteen, she must choose between becoming a nun there or accompanying her father to the Low Countries, she elects the latter course. Disguised as her father’s squire, she engages in espionage and from expediency pays court to Anna, a Dutch girl in her teens. The latter falls deeply in love with her and abandons family and reputation to follow her. But Rosamunda’s fancy has been caught by an officer in the Dutch forces, to whom she confesses that she is a woman. When he pronounces Anna no better than a camp follower, Rosamunda challenges him to a duel, worsts him, and consequently is cured of her passion for him. Thereafter she becomes one of the most cruel of the inquisitionary soldiers.

Since she has never been in love with Anna, and the latter throughout much of the story believes her to be a man, the variant issue is as confused as always in a romance of sex disguise. Like Gunter’s farce, however, the tale bears witness to interest in intersexual types even among superficial American readers, for Rosamunda has no feminine characteristics. It also indicates the author’s belief that such types result from environment rather than heredity. Rosamunda, despite her Spanish coloring, is revealed at the end as Anna’s sister (stolen from Holland in infancy), and not related at all to the Spaniards upon whom she has modeled herself. The blood kinship between the two girls, moreover, is evidently meant to account for Anna’s spontaneous attraction, which after the revelation of Rosamunda’s sex becomes a profound sisterly devotion. Readers were thus provided with a spicy morsel but spared the slightest moral indigestion. (If this account makes the tale seem one of mere sex disguise, comparison with Compton Mackenzie’s Sylvia Scarlett of a few decades later will make the difference apparent.)

The first of the century’s openly published titles by a major writer was John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), its author’s least-esteemed novel to judge from the neglect accorded it by literary historians, libraries, and secondhand catalogs. It is true that from the standpoint of artistry it falls into two almost unrelated halves; but it is, nevertheless, a convincing study of a young dramatist in search of his soul—that is, of the “high and austere” character he feels essential to a great artist. He does achieve his end via some gruelling years with a medical unit in South Africa, but he is driven to this heroic measure by a series of major and minor frustrations reminiscent of the tricks of Fate in Thomas Hardy’s work. Among the major tragedies is the death of the woman he has long loved, and this calamity is the end of a chain of trivial mischances in which the detonating factor is jealousy on the part of his beloved’s woman friend. There is an artistic preliminary sounding of the variant note early in the book when, depressed at failing to find Ottalie in her London apartment, he stops at a café where he sees

After Ottalie is drowned while crossing to Ireland, her friend Agatha tells the lover what he had already guessed: Ottalie’s visit to her Irish relatives was partially the result of his not having definitely proposed marriage. And his failure to do so was (again in part) due to Agatha’s jealously interrupting a tête-à-tête between the lovers, and later delaying a letter from Ottalie to him. Agatha confesses all this during her prostration after her friend’s death.

There is no suggestion that Ottalie reciprocated Agatha’s love, nor any implication of lesbian intimacy. Ottalie’s brother, however, tells the hero that although she loved him she thought him “too ready to surrender to immediate and perhaps wayward emotion”—an obvious hint at the heroine’s physical coldness or Victorian repression in the heterosexual field.

Two years later and half a world away the Australian woman known to letters as Henry Handel Richardson recorded the emotional development of an adolescent girl in The Getting of Wisdom (1910). At fourteen Laura is already too hard and independent to feel close to her emotional widowed mother, and at boarding school she is subjected to refined cruelty by her mates because she is so “different”—partly in her precocious literary interests but most of all in her dislike of boys. To gain face among them she invents a romance with a curate; the exposure of this fiction brings more ridicule which hardens her further. Her inner withdrawal becomes complete after the expulsion of an adoring younger girl who stole in order to buy her a keepsake.

In the midst of her bitter isolation she is chosen as roommate by a popular girl a few years her senior, and at once succumbs emotionally to the first kindness and championship she has ever known. It is clear, however, that no physical intimacy ensues—Laura kisses Evelyn only once, and then impulsively when the latter, in a fit of pique, remarks that all men are fools. The friendship is slowly blighted by Laura’s passionate jealousy if the older girl goes out with men or shows attention to other girls, a “tyranny” to which the senior will not submit. The school gossips about this conspicuous attachment, but without censure or apparent awareness of questionable possibilities even on the part of the mistresses. After a brief and abortive religious “conversion” Laura sets herself to cultivate her literary talent by way of emotional outlet, for there are hints that she will never feel attracted to men. The wisdom gained during this difficult adolescence is summarized at the end by the author, who says that though the girl returned home feeling that she “fitted no hole,” she could not yet know that

That is, in the somewhat narcissistic world which they, as writers, create. This is a penetrating recognition of authorship as sublimation, written as it was several decades before psychiatrists began to take the writing fraternity apart.

Another novel with rather stronger variant overtones appeared in England in 1914, Ethel Sidgwick’s A Lady of Leisure. This pleasant social romance had for its main theme a muted echo from the Women’s Movement: the wealthy and idle girl’s need of a routine occupation. Violet Ashwin, daughter of a frivolous social belle and a Harley Street physician, is driven by a sense of utter futility to fly in the face of convention—and her mother’s prejudices—and apprentice herself to a modiste. Her co-worker, Alice Eccles, is an enterprising cockney who supports a neurotic mother, preferring this burden to marriage with a suitor whom she suspects of engaging in illegal enterprises. Alice is tall, handsome, high-spirited, and infinitely more self-reliant than the sheltered upper-class girl, whom at first she assists and patronizes with a kind of affectionate raillery. Soon, however, the two are close personal friends, to the horror of Violet’s snobbish mother. Between Violet and her father, though, a close alliance has always existed, and he applauds both her job and her new friendship, seeing at once the solid quality beneath Alice’s unpolished surface.

When Violet works herself into a collapse and is sent to the country for the summer,

Somewhat later, Mrs. Eccles’ mental condition having become a danger to her daughter, Dr. Ashwin copes with the mother and engages Alice as lady’s maid to his wife, hoping that her companionship may restore his still convalescent daughter’s interest in living. When he tells Violet that Alice is in the house she colors visibly and runs upstairs, “her face still pink and her heart thumping.”

The only further detail mentioned is Alice’s kissing the other girl’s hands. The friendship survives Alice’s marriage and the birth of her first child, and she is the only person save Violet’s parents to attend the latter’s subsequent wedding. Here, then, is an unmistakably passionate relationship between adults—both girls are in their middle twenties—presented with complete sympathy and approval, and encouraged by an established physician. It is, of course, quite innocent of lesbian implications.

Since Miss Stein’s novelette remained unpublished for half a century, MacLane and Ellis would be America’s only representatives in this early period but for short stories which appeared sporadically. One of Josephine Dodge Dascom’s Smith College Stories (1900), “A Case of Interference,” just skirted the variant field. A junior, prominent because of her literary ability, enters the despised arena of campus politics to save an unpopular gifted freshman who worships her from leaving college. A little later the Ladies’ Home Journal published a slighter college story, “The Cat and the King,” by Jennette Lee, in which a freshman shams illness in order to join her senior idol in the infirmary, and is extricated from ensuing complications by a wholly sympathetic woman physician. These were both written on an adult level. The only known variant juvenile, The Lass of the Silver Sword by Mary Constance Du Bois, ran in St. Nicolas Magazine during 1909 and was published in book form later.[26] Centered about the adoration of a fourteen-year-old girl for a senior of nineteen in her boarding school, it was sympathetic but so circumspect as to lack full vitality. Catherine Wells’s “The Beautiful House” (Harper’s Magazine, 1912) pictures an idyllic relation between two adult artists, for the older and less feminine of whom the connection ends tragically with the marriage of the younger woman. Helen R. Hull’s “The Fire” (1918) will be discussed later with its author’s longer narratives.

It is noteworthy that none of this early fiction records disapproval of variant experience on the part of either the authors or society. It is seen as educative and beneficial during the teens, or even in the following decade for the single woman, and it provides the only happiness during adolescence for several girls more gifted than their peers. If in Masefield’s novel its sequel is tragic, jealousy rather than variance per se is responsible, and Miss Stein condemns the experience she describes, not as lesbian, but as generally spineless and unintelligent. In the cases (Miss Stein’s and Miss Richardson’s) where antipathy or indifference to men is noted, women’s attraction to their own sex is not responsible, but is rather a concomitant product of unspecified factors.

Sophistication and Dispute

In 1915 D. H. Lawrence, with The Rainbow, hit the first ringing blow upon the anvil of controversy. As the messiah of robust heterosexual passion, Lawrence needs no introduction, and in this early novel he attacked right and left all factors which militate against it in modern society—unhealthy urban and industrial life, sterile intellectuality (especially among women), and lesbianism. It is in the final portion of his three-generation panorama that the current representative of the Brangwyn clan, sixteen-year-old Ursula, contracts a passion for a schoolmistress. She has just had a brief but complete heterosexual experience, and Lawrence implies that the tide of emotion which overflows toward Winifred Inger is little more than an aftermath of that physical awakening. A ten-page chapter significantly entitled “Shame” gives the history of their affair, which reaches its first climax at Winifred’s river cottage when the two bathe nude at night. Immediately after this episode the girl’s one desire is to get away. Over a period of months, however, “the two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly to fuse into one.” During the long vacation, Ursula, as always when away from the older woman, is desolate and afire for her, but with their reunion

Winifred, deeply in love with the younger girl, wishes to leave the school and live with Ursula in London where they can mingle in literary circles and participate in the Women’s Movement. Ursula repudiates the suggestion and goes on to other heterosexual adventures, but—possibly as a result of her lesbian experience?—she is always too much concerned with her own emotions to become a satisfactory partner for men. Her leaving a lover and going out to steep herself in the light of a full moon is offered as symbolic of her narcissistic self-absorption.

This novel was published by the solid firm of Methuen, but was withdrawn after a police court verdict of indecency which was based on attacks by three or four reviewers. The charge was general, only one (Robert Lynd) making an oblique allusion to its lesbian aspect. Lawrence was not notified directly of the court order, and since he had neither funds nor influence to launch a legal protest,[28] this act of censorship raised few echoes in comparison with some cases to be noted later. It did, however, postpone general circulation of the novel, and undoubtedly focussed some attention on lesbianism.

A year later the American Henry Kitchell Webster touched briefly but scathingly on the subject of variance in The Great Adventure (1916). In this history of a marriage the girl who has looked forward to motherhood is frustrated by the birth of twins, the implication being that she desired merely an object upon which to project her own personality, and the self-abnegation demanded by two young entities, boy and girl, is beyond her. Accordingly while the children can still be cared for by nurses, Rose leaves her home and seeks self-realization on the stage. In the course of her first year she takes an artist’s interest in a beautiful but inferior colleague in the chorus of a revue, whom she coaches in diction and for whom, among others, she designs flattering costumes. But when her Galatea becomes infatuated with her she is disgusted.