Sex variant women in literature

Olga’s efforts to persuade and caress her into intimacy are worse than futile, and in retaliation for Rose’s contempt Olga spreads gossip of an affair with the director which does Rose grave professional injury. After some further experiment, Rose returns to her family a more mature and humble woman. Olga is presented as a strongly antipathetic personality, and Rose’s quest for self-expression proves sterile and unrewarding for all concerned. Learning unselfish adjustment in marriage is “The Great Adventure.”

In January 1917 the first British novel appeared which was devoted wholly to variance, and the first in English since James’s The Bostonians of 1855—Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women. Its attitude is as bitter as Lawrence’s in The Rainbow, but any question of influence is excluded by the author’s indication that it was written before the latter was published. Title and initial quotation announce the theme as “the monstrous empire of a cruel woman,” and its four-hundred-page plot revolves about a subtle sadist, outstanding mistress in a girls’ day school. Clare Hartill (the surname is surely symbolic), brilliant, sardonic, and never attractive to men, has colleagues and pupils alike well under her domination. The other mistresses stand in awe of her superior intellect, her uncanny success as a teacher, and her mordant tongue. The girls—she is really interested only in the higher secondary classes—are emotionally subjugated by her alternation of warm praise and stinging raillery, the praise intensified by “sudden brilliant smiles” and the discreet laying on of hands.

Clare is a woman of feverish friendships and sudden ruptures, “unmaternal” to the core

But her interest even in these favorites “required their physical nearness” and died with their departure from school. Just as Clare has reached the “dangerous age” of thirty-five a new teacher of nineteen enters upon the scene:

But even so, Alwynne was “too obviously subject through her own free impulse to entirely satisfy. Clare’s love of power had its morbid moments, when a struggling victim pleased her.”[31]

So great is the older woman’s magnetism that Alwynne, wholesome and spirited enough to hold her own at first, does not detect the other’s egotistical cruelty until it is exercised upon a student. This hypersensitive child of thirteen, Louise, whose precocity approaches genius, Clare has forced intellectually beyond her strength and reduced emotionally to half-hysterical subservience. Alwynne’s strong maternal instinct moves her to intervene on Louise’s behalf, and a dangerous triangle develops. When, ill from tension, Louise fails in an important interscholastic competition, Clare turns suddenly hostile and excoriates her, not only for the failure, but for her interpretation of a dramatic role rehearsed in addition to her school-room load. Playing the tragic child Prince Arthur in King John has already driven Louise past the limits of stability, and after this double humiliation at the hands of her idolized persecutor, she leaps to death from an attic window. (This antedated by fifteen years Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform, of which the denouement and certain other details are so similar that some influence seems beyond question.)

The tragedy and its aftermath—Clare, crowding her own guilt below the threshold of consciousness, persuades herself and Alwynne that the latter is in part to blame—brings Alwynne to the verge of breakdown, and so she goes on leave to relatives in the country. A sympathetic cousin who is something of an amateur psychiatrist gradually probes to the root of her trouble and offers an impersonal estimate of Clare, whom he has never met and has reconstructed solely from the girl’s still loyal accounts. His opinion gives her pause, and subsequent encounters with Clare, so shaken by the suicide and by Alwynne’s long absence that she lacks her usual finesse, complete the girl’s disillusionment. She finally marries the cousin.

This overlong narrative carries psychological conviction but suffers from blurred focus. Clare’s heartlessness once her victims are enthralled supports the initial claim that sadism is its thesis, but the spell she casts is variant passion no less intense for being subjectively induced and never allowed expression (the one real caress in four-hundred pages figures early in her conquest of Alwynne). This passionate element assumes primary importance during her final struggle against a male rival. Close to the end a woman who has known Clare all her life tells her:

Egotism is implied here, but the main issue is variant seduction, and Clare’s retort is a long boast as to her prowess in that line amply justified by earlier incidents. She concludes defiantly that she and Alwynne “suffice each other. Thank God there are some women who can do without marriage.” The reply is: “Poor Clare! Are the grapes very sour?”

Surprisingly, this “final triumphant insult” touches the quick.

Clare’s reaction is not prepared for in advance. Moreover, this episode is so placed and treated as to make it the supreme climax of the plot, and the implication is clear: it is the sex starvation of spinsterhood which produces variance, a barren substitute for married love. If the spinster is brilliant and proud, a sadistic egotism constantly requiring fresh victims will be a concomitant. Clare’s spinsterhood is involuntary; she is, then, a potentially tragic figure, and the novel would have gained in power had she been so presented throughout. But she is shown only as momentarily pathetic, and after such moments her recoveries are too ready and her retaliations too mean to permit of sustained sympathy. One is left with a sense that the author had known a Clare Hartill all too well, had emerged hating her, and had not yet achieved the detachment necessary for producing artistic unity.

Later in 1917 I, Mary MacLane provided an autobiographical sequel to the author’s volumes of fifteen years earlier. Like her first book, it is an impressionistic journal of the preceding year which includes considerable retrospective information. Once more Mary is in Butte, convalescing from a grave illness induced by a half-dozen hectic years in Boston and New York. She still hates men, who have never stirred any emotion in her, and with whom in their “crude sex-rapacity” she has been careless as no “regular woman” would dare to be. One gathers, then, that the heartbreak from which she has suffered for a year is not the work of a man.

That Mary is now well aware of all potentialities between women is clear from other comments; for example, that she “wasted” several years in the two eastern cities on friendships (with women) from whose ill effects she will never recover, having given too much of herself in the “headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after long young loneliness.”[35] Elsewhere, she mentions translating Sappho, and says:

She believes lesbianism to be subjectively induced, as against those who consider it due to “prenatal influence.” Some women are lesbian because they are born aggressive, some feel themselves challenged by the limitations imposed on women, some are merely so lonely that the first understanding person “wins a passionate adoration the deeper for being unrealized.” She believes that all women “except two breeds, the stupid and the narrowly feline,” have a lesbian strain; that is, there is always some “poignant flair” of sex in their close friendships, though all “good non-analytic creatures” would deny it with horror. (This last suggests at least an acquaintance with Freud.)

She has now returned to cultivate in solitude the Me neglected during her preceding distracted years. There are evidences that she has more than dabbled in oriental philosophy and believes in reincarnation, which, she says, gives her many buried selves to delve for—surely Valhalla for a narcissist. Mild as this volume is in its condemnation by comparison with the preceding two, its stress upon the suffering and “waste” in variant friendships, and its reference to lesbianism as “repellent vice,” align it with them as opposed to variance.

Such pointed attacks as those of Lawrence and Miss Dane were bound to stimulate counterattack. The first appeared in A. T. Fitzroy’s Despised and Rejected (1918), though women’s variance was of secondary importance in a novel whose main issue was the tragic wartime persecution of Conscientious Objectors; particularly of male homosexuals who took refuge in that camp. Because both “Conchies” and homosexuals were anathema in 1918, the publisher was prosecuted and fined some £160.[37] The author, wife of the composer Cyril Scott, apparently weathered the storm without major consequences, though she wrote nothing more under the same name.

The feminine incidents in the novel concern an actress who, at thirteen, had adored a boarding school teacher; however, she cooled when the latter responded, because she hated to be caressed. Her teens included similar attractions, and she had several unpleasant experiences with men during her years of becoming established in the theatre. These experiences precede the opening of the story. The action begins with amateur theatrical activities at a summer hotel, in the course of which Antoinette falls in love with a taciturn dark woman reminiscent of her first idol, and, on the other hand, rouses emotional interest in an effeminate young man in the cast. The summer interlude ends without resolving either affair. Both amours are continued by letter, a medium which frees Antoinette of her physical inhibitions. Thus, she learns that Dennis has previously been much drawn to men; and on her part, she becomes so attached to the dark Hester that she visits her in Birmingham. She is as yet unaware of any “abnormality” in her feeling, knowing only that Hester represents the promise of some imperative emotional release. When she discovers that Hester has had a liaison with a man, her love is instantly chilled, although it had reached the verge of overt expression.

Meanwhile, Dennis, obtaining no response from her, has become involved with a poet in desperate circumstances for whom he feels a maternal tenderness. From this point on, the long narrative is concerned chiefly with its male cast, but it includes Antoinette’s finally considering herself in love with Dennis. He has now, however, irrevocably elected the homosexual path; he tells her that he recognized her at first meeting as another homosexual and that that was the reason for his instant attraction. Despite his immediate detection of her proclivities, Antoinette is presented as feminine in both appearance and temperament. The cause of her narcissistic failure in either normal or variant adjustment is that throughout adolescence she was always awaiting the charmed age of eighteen, when the thrilling business of Real Life would begin. That is, she nursed a romantic ideal impossible of realistic achievement (cf. Gourmont’s Songe d’une Femme). At the end she complains:

This is a fair enough statement of a variant argument which will be encountered again later.

A more oblique and much more artistic species of defense is incorporated in Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady (1918), of which the main theme is the relation between a wealthy London bachelor and a Parisian courtesan war-bound in London. Despite the outcry the book raised among reviewers, the sexual aspects of this affair are subordinated to the soothing effect of the French woman’s simple and cosy subjective complaisance, in contrast to the hectic wartime mood of the Englishwomen with whom Hoape is thrown together. One of these, Concepçion Smith, is the daughter of a British financial magnate who operated in Lima, and it is not wholly clear whether her mother or merely her given name and her upbringing were Latin-American. Orphaned at eighteen, she returned to London and kept house for her bachelor uncle, a cabinet minister, earning a reputation as hostess and wit. Having married for love, and lost her husband within the first few weeks of World War I, she leaves for Glasgow early in the story to dull her sorrow through canteen work in a munitions plant. She is described as having a masculine mentality, being relatively indifferent to feminine graces, and lacking somewhat in obvious sex appeal. She is at this time about thirty.

Her closest friend has been Lady Queenie Lechford, perhaps a decade younger, a spoiled only child, capricious, flippant, the type of hectic and brittle “flapper” who was to become so common a figure in the fiction of the 1920s. That the two quarrelled bitterly over Concepçion’s leaving London one learns only when they are reunited late in 1916, after Concepçion has broken under the strain of overwork and the shock of a horrifying accident to a factory girl. The two women’s reunion is delineated with the subtlest indirect touches, but it is clearly passionate. Of the two, Concepçion seems the more deeply involved. Though there are hints that she herself is not uninterested in Hoape, she tells him Queenie is in love with him and urges him to marry the girl in spite of the considerable difference in their ages. She would do anything in the world, she declares, to win even a few weeks’ happiness for her young friend. Even while Hoape is evading her suggestion, Lady Queenie, given to reckless watching of air-raids from the roof of her parents’ town house, is killed by falling anti-aircraft shrapnel. Concepçion, with nothing now to live for, plans suicide, but is dissuaded by Hoape’s concern for her, and one foresees that these two will eventually marry. Bennett thus appears to diagnose variant (possibly lesbian) connections as one phase of wartime hysteria, induced mainly by the shortage of eligible men. Though there is a shade of satire in his picture, there is certainly no disapproval.

The next two novels, both American and both published in 1920, made relatively brief but quite significant additions to variant literature. By a count of lines, Kate Chancellor occupies little space in Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White, story of a shanty-town boy’s rise to prosperity and a good marriage. But she supplies the most vivid thread in the pattern of his wife’s emotional development. When Clara leaves her father’s farm for the state university she is wholly uninformed in matters of sex. From some bungling early experience she is wary of men, though conscious of a certain power over them. The relatives with whom she lives while in college play little part in her life save to repeat her father’s misunderstanding of trivial “petting” incidents which are unsought and distasteful to her.

Clara finds her college courses no help toward the practical conduct of life in any field, and her one fruitful contact is with a girl two or three years her senior who plans to study medicine. Kate Chancellor, as masculine as her musical brother is effeminate, is quite frank in admitting her homosexual nature (thus implied to be innate), though she never mentions lesbianism. For three years the girls are constantly together. Their avid discussions range through politics, religion, and philosophy, but center most often on sex differences in temperament, and the problem facing all women in marriage: how to continue as individuals and not become mere colorless stereotypes like most housewives of their acquaintance. Kate is more drawn to Clara than to any other woman she has met, dreads marriage for the girl, and yearns to take her along as companion in the free and purposeful life she means to live. But she is honest enough to admit that her own pattern is not Clara’s, and that to bind her emotionally would only increase the groping girl’s confusion. Her closest approach to physical expression occurs during one of their customary walks together, when to drive some point home she stops and takes Clara by the shoulders.

On her return from college Clara becomes involved at once in the business of getting married. She manages to resist her father’s pressure toward a match profitable to him, but soon is plunged by circumstance into marriage with the book’s main character—the union is emotionally a premature step for both of them. Throughout this troubled period Clara tests all that happens against her memory of Kate’s honesty and gentleness, and on her wedding night itself, offended by the crude “surprise party” sprung by the farm hands, she thinks of Kate, “who had known how to love in silence.”

In the end, however, her marriage proves no worse than the average in understanding and happiness. There have been few such sympathetic and unexaggerated pictures of a variant woman in our literature; and none of the others was written by a man.

The year’s total balance of sentiment was evened by James Gibbons Huneker’s Painted Veils. This picture of musical and literary New York was so continental in its cynical frankness that it was first issued privately, though it soon found regular publication and is now available in paper covers. As its epilogue states, its hero Ulick is a young man whose favorite authors are Thomas à Kempis and Petronius, and whose experience reflects this duality of taste. Heroine of the Petronian chapters is a dynamic girl, Easter, who rises by her own efforts—in more fields than one—to the status of world-famed prima donna. Early in her career she considers sources of revenue for European study. To accept support from her lover would give the man too much claim upon her. So her thoughts turn to a fellow student of voice, a dilettante with whom already “an intimacy had developed.”

Although Allie makes relatively few appearances, it is clear that she financed and accompanied Easter for a number of years. It is also implied that the cause of Easter’s duel with Mary Garden in Paris was not, as the newspapers claimed, a man. “When Allie Wentworth, who was Easter’s second, read this in Le Soir she burst into laughter.” (When the book appeared, gossip claimed that Mary Garden was the model for Easter, and that this duel naming her as opposite was inserted for camouflage.)

Upon Easter’s return to New York she says to Ulick, who is jealous of Allie:

Later, Easter, now the pursuer because Ulick has turned cool, follows him to the apartment of his current mistress, a vulgar little creature who is transported at

Finally, there is a party in Easter’s quarters including a handful of lesbians, one or two smoking cigars, and Allie Wentworth, whose jealous rage is so childish that she must be publicly reproved. With this Zolaesque portrait of a lesbian woman who is unscrupulous, ruthless, and promiscuous, there is no need for Huneker to articulate his opinion of variance.

Few contrasts could be sharper than that between the continental sophistication of Huneker and the midwestern simplicity of Helen R. Hull. As early as 1918 she had published in Century Magazine a short-story (“The Fire”) of a small-town girl’s love for the middle-aged spinster who gives her not only art lessons but her first contact with a mellow and cultured personality—a benign reverse of the destructive relationship in Regiment of Women. The innocent friendship is broken off by the girl’s jealous mother on the grounds that “it’s not healthy or natural for a girl to be hanging around an old maid.” Miss Hull’s Quest (1922) records the effect upon a growing girl of constant tension between her parents. As precocious as Miss Dane’s Louise, Jean falls in love at twelve with a high-school teacher, and simultaneously forms a feverish alliance with a classmate considerably older and less naïve who adores the same woman. Because the other girl is so much more accessible than the teacher, it is the former who draws the mother’s fire here, and she terminates the connection with a touch of melodrama which leaves her daughter wary of variant emotion, in the same way that the family situation has affected her with regard to heterosexual love. Jean’s subsequent relations with men are inhibited, and her two or three very warm friendships with girls and women during college and her early years of teaching never approach the intensity of her first love.

In Labyrinth (1923) Miss Hull attacked from a feminine angle the problem posed in The Great Adventure: the frustration of a versatile woman cut off from personal and intellectual contacts by housework and the care of children. After a decade of marriage Catherine returns to a challenging position which she held during World War I, though her husband, a professor, disapproves of the venture. A series of domestic crises plus the professor’s calculated move from New York to a small midwestern campus finally thwart his wife’s efforts to escape unrelieved domesticity. No variance complicates Catherine’s problems, but through minor characters three other emotional adjustments are presented, one involving two women.

The ménage of a professor whose wife is nothing but a Hausfrau is dull beyond endurance for all concerned. A woman physician and her husband appear happy, but the man privately mourns his wife’s sacrifice of maternity to her professional career. Catherine’s younger sister, a social worker and unmarried, has broken away from her mother because “I can’t be babied all my life—all sorts of infantile traits sticking to me,” and is living with an older fellow-worker. When her sister advises marriage, she retorts:

This is Miss Hull’s nearest allusion to physical intimacy, and while not explicitly implied, neither is it repudiated. Sympathetically as the variant pair are portrayed, they are no more romanticized than the heterosexual couples. The older woman has been a fanatic in many causes and a hunger-striker for suffrage, is moody and violent, and quarrels with any critical male at sight. The younger is cool, practical, and a bit hard. But the alliance apparently stands as good a chance of survival as any in the book, and the author accepts it as a matter of course. The only dissenting voice is the professor’s; he is bitter in his animosity and contempt.

Publishing simultaneously with Miss Hull but more nearly in the vein of Huneker was England’s Ronald Firbank, whose delightful absurdities began to flower with Vainglory in 1918. Firbank was particularly fascinated by all aspects of homosexuality, and not one of his brief novels is without some reference to it. To render these allusions delicate he cultivated a frivolous obscurity, but it was no more designed to conceal than are a dancer’s veils to hide the form beneath. Probably the most significant in our field is The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923).[45] Its setting is a principality the approximate size and importance of Monaco, with a court circle madly international. Here, as always, the lesbian glimpses are oblique, but there are three of them. A visiting Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land of Dates becomes so openly enamoured of the blonde and bovine English ambassadress that the whole court fears an “incident.” A lady in waiting in love with the Prince, after her romance is shattered by his diplomatic marriage, flees to an adored Sister in the convent where she was educated, dreaming of a return to earlier delights. She is a bit chilled at being invited, as an adult now, to wield a whip. And last, two of the queen’s ladies are becalmed for a summer afternoon alone in a small sailboat. One (she reminds her colleagues of Anthony Hamilton’s Miss Hobart) is a girl of “delicate sexless silhouette, whose exotic attraction had aroused not a few heart-burnings (and even feuds) among several of the grandes dames about the court.”[46] Her companion is a ripe and languishing widow. The exiled count upon whom they intended to call catches sight of their motionless craft and trains his telescope upon it.

Needless to say, no judgments are even hinted in Firbank’s tales. If his paired ladies are rather ridiculous, so are his pretty gentlemen and his mixed couples young and old, his kings and social climbers and mad old ladies. Since all life is clearly so absurd, he seems to say, what to do save sit back (with all possible grace) and titter at the spectacle? Edmund Wilson’s diagnosis of Gertrude Stein might apply also in some measure to Firbank, though he did not retreat so far into literary obscurity.

Post-War Crescendo

These novels of Firbank’s, shot through with allusions to both male and female homosexuality, remind one that two-thirds of the volumes of Proust’s Recherche du Temps Perdu had been published in France by 1923, and were, of course, known to many English and American writers before being translated. It is easy to overrate the influence of Proust, especially as both James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson had anticipated him in “stream of consciousness” technique, the one with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915), the other with Pointed Roofs (1917). But in no one else of Proust’s quality was homosexuality so integral a part of the narrative fabric. Translations of Proust’s most significant volumes appeared in English between 1924 and 1930. It might also be noted that Margueritte’s La Garçonne was translated in 1923.

A second increasingly important influence was that of Freud, already discernible in Regiment of Women (though a good case could be made there for Adlerian overtones also), and becoming more and more obvious in other novels of the same calibre. A striking example was Harvey O’Higgins’ “Story of Julie Cane,” which ran serially in Harper’s Magazine during 1924, and was as much a dramatized psychiatric case-record as the earlier work of Dubut de LaForest in France. Its main emotional themes are a virtually incestuous devotion between the male protagonist and his mother, and the passion of a spinster school mistress for the young heroine, her ward. The author, who delivers a good many brief lectures along the way, labels this last emotion thwarted maternity, but by the time Julie has reached late adolescence he is describing Martha Perrin’s feeling for her as follows:

Few passages have been so explicit since Sappho’s famous Ode, which was less extended.

When Julie is about to leave for college, Martha suffers complete collapse, one symptom of her illness being that, though starving, she cannot touch food. A new physician, in the act of taking her pulse as Julie enters the room, at once prescribes Julie as nurse. During the period of sickroom intimacy the two fall into each others’ arms and have some weeks “as happy as a honeymoon,” though O’Higgins is careful to repeat that the rapture is essentially that of mother and daughter. If the sensations described above are offered as maternal, one can only say that the author was convinced of an incestuous element in all parent-child relationships. One rather remarkable aspect of the whole is that though patently psychiatric, the book does not express that condemnation of the emotions described which was common to later disciples of Freud. Indeed, a physician encourages the intimacy of Julie and Martha, as did Violet Ashwin’s father in Lady of Leisure, though, of course, without advocating lesbian activity. In the situation as presented by O’Higgins, however, some physical release would have been inevitable.

In the same year there appeared in England a much subtler treatment of variance in Radclyffe Hall’s early novel The Unlit Lamp. Unlike her better known Well of Loneliness, this narrative relegates love between women to secondary importance, its focus being the forced martyrdom of unmarried daughters in the name of filial duty. Joan Ogden is the one competent and unselfish member of a neurotic family bent on maintaining social position in their country village. Elizabeth Rodney, a dozen years older, has won a degree from Cambridge before coming, under pressure, to keep house for a bachelor brother in the same community. Her one interest is tutoring Joan, whom she hopes to see achieve a college education and some sort of life beyond small-town domesticity. Mrs. Ogden believes herself bent upon a successful marriage for her daughter, but her actual purpose is to hold her beloved child at any cost; her chief weapon is hypochondria. Joan wants to become a doctor, and Elizabeth offers to provide joint living quarters in Cambridge and to help finance the medical course, but the two girls’ long struggle ends with the mother victorious. Elizabeth, unable to endure repeated frustration, leaves the town, eventually marries, and settles in South Africa, refusing to return or to communicate with Joan.

Beneath this drama of parental tyranny runs a strong current of variant emotion. Mrs. Ogden is fragile, jealous, hysterical and over-demonstrative. Both younger women are unfeminine in appearance, cool and fearless in temperament, both affect a masculine simplicity in dress, and Joan crops her hair decades before fashion sanctions that mode. Elizabeth has a masculine distaste for easy caresses and meticulously conceals the depth of her feeling, so that Joan’s shy reciprocal emotion never finds outlet (the “unlit lamp” is the passion Elizabeth refuses to set alight). The basic situation, then, is a variant triangle in which the clinging and helpless mother wins against a rival who will employ none of the tactics of seduction, and the result is the virtual ruin of both girls’ lives. There are intimations here of what was to become open championship of lesbian love four years later in Well of Loneliness. But they are only implicit.

Also in 1924 Arnold Bennett contributed a short draught of his cool common sense in Elsie and the Child. With customary realism and irony he presents a London physician’s household centered about Miss Eva, aged twelve, an only child. The doctor, busy day and night earning every advantage for his daughter, sees little of her. His wife is a domestic perfectionist and strict disciplinarian. The emotional center of the child’s life is Elsie, the wholesome but rather dull servant who was hired originally because Eva (like Metta in The Scorpion) took an instant fancy to her. Elsie is all heart, quick only in her intuitions, humbly devoted to the aristocratic young mistress whose care falls largely upon her. A crisis is precipitated when the parents, aware of their daughter’s too-great dependence upon Elsie, attempt to send the girl to boarding school. She is acquainted with the headmistress, a hearty tweedy friend of her mother’s, quite the type to captivate some schoolgirls, but not Eva. Having shot up like a weed to Elsie’s considerable stature, the child is all nerves, and when crossed by her mother she breaks out with the hysterical declaration that it is not her parents but Elsie whom she loves and from whom she will not be parted.

Elsie realizes at once that the outcome will be the dismissal of her and her husband. The latter, a victim of shell shock in World War I, is a bemused introvert given to dangerous fits of temper. It is he who turns upon Eva with the charge that her feeling for his wife is not love, since she does not care if her stubborn whim brings ruin on Elsie and himself. Made aware for the first time of the problems of others, the girl gives in and goes off to school. Bennett contrives with great skill to imply strong emotional undercurrents in Eva’s childish demands for personal service and caresses, and in Elsie’s doting ministrations. He also makes clear that the husband’s violence is actually aroused not by fear of losing his place but by jealousy, though none of the three persons involved are aware of this.

Concerning as it does a girl of twelve, this story might not be classed as variant by psychologists, but one cannot help feeling that Bennett contributed it to the rapidly swelling count of variant fiction as testimony to his own stand in the matter. Despite Eva’s unusual height and her susceptibility to Elsie’s spontaneous warmth, she is not conceived as a prospective homosexual. Stimulated one summer night by watching a sophisticated garden party from her window, she slips down to the servants’ quarters to practice a nascent coquetry on Joe as well as Elsie. There could hardly be a clearer statement of Bennett’s opinion that variant emotion is as natural to puberty as growing pains, particularly where maternal affection is wanting, but that its natural span runs out with early adolescence.

In 1925 four novels dealing with variance reached the English reading public—the translation of Rolland’s Annette and Sylvie and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, both treating it briefly and with sympathy, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, touching upon it even more casually and with disfavor, and Naomi Royde-Smith’s Tortoiseshell Cat, devoted wholly to the theme and wholly condemnatory. Rolland’s lesbian interlude between the half-sisters Rivière has already been described. Anderson’s heroine, a married woman on the verge of taking a lover, recalls privately her first trip abroad under the guidance of a couple whose sophistication she did not suspect until on shipboard. The woman had made skillfully veiled lesbian advances which she recognized for what they were and resisted with equal skill. Anderson clearly condemns this deliberate attempt at seduction, but no more severely than he condemns the woman’s ruses to snare wealthy subjects for her portrait-painting husband. The episode is slighter than the one in Poor White and of little weight in its chief actor’s life.

Mrs. Woolf’s passages are much more subtle, though most of them, like Anderson’s, are incorporated in Clarissa Dalloway’s reminiscences of her girlhood. Even preliminary to these, however, we learn that Mrs. Dalloway is happy that her husband insists on her sleeping in a separate room after an illness.

Her first experience of this sort came to her in her late teens or early twenties in connection with the delightful madcap Sally Seton.

When the men of the party (one of them in love with her) return and make casual, half-teasing conversation,