There is no further reference in the novel to Sally, and Clarissa Dalloway lives on for us into her mid-fifties, wife and mother, never again in such intimate touch with life, unless it is in her relation to her daughter. For although above she has said that the charm of a girl never moves her, her love for the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth is the most vital element in her current existence. The girl is undergoing a spell of inexplicable devotion to a shabby, unkempt, embittered woman tutor, for whom Mrs. Dalloway finds it difficult to repress a burning hatred, and one realizes that this hatred is but the obverse of the emotion she will not recognize for the beautiful daughter so different from herself and so aloof.

The reader will remember that in the other strand of the dual narrative Septimus Smith, shell-shock case from World War I, fails to regain his mental balance or to respond to his devoted wife because he cannot admit to consciousness the love he felt for a fellow-officer who was killed. In her preface, the author says that Smith is intended to be Clarissa Dalloway’s “double,” and that in its first conception the story, lacking him, ended with Mrs. Dalloway’s death. It would seem that her contribution here to the problem of variance is the possibility of its being a happy experience where innocence is easy—as for a woman; but for a man too scrupulous to accept the almost inevitable outcome in the male, it may be fatal.

It is a radical step from Mrs. Dalloway to the forthright Tortoiseshell Cat, in which a lesbian woman plays a sinister part. The central figure, a motherless girl in her late twenties, is still a pristine innocent, thanks to her exclusive devotion to a scholarly father lost a short time before. Gillian is baffled by her worldly-wise younger sister’s hold upon men, and by the quixotic devotion of a girl who leaves her private school in protest when Gillian (a teacher there) is dismissed. It is this innocence which cost her her teaching position—she chose French poetry to read aloud on the basis of its beauty alone, genuinely unaware of its sexual connotations—and presently it leads her into even more serious danger.

After her sister’s marriage, left alone in a dreary residence club and bored with a part-time secretaryship, she meets a fellow resident, half American and completely bohemian and fascinating. The initial encounter is significant:

A definitely masculine figure, as the passage goes on to emphasize, and a masterly analysis of romantic love-at-first-sight. The woman’s voice is flat and unlovely, but Gillian, for all her musical ear, is too enthralled to care. All that she is aware of for some time are the lavish personal ministrations and caresses with which she is showered. She learns without grasping the implications that V.V. has lived with a long succession of women, many of them minor actresses. Early in her life there was one, mentioned seldom and cryptically, on whose account she was evidently disowned by her family and incurred debts not yet paid.

Before long, Gillian’s emotional preoccupation evokes remonstrance from her sister, the once-adoring student, and the latter’s recently acquired sculptor-husband; but to her their warnings are absurd. The sculptor lived before his marriage with a faunlike musician whom he loved and protected from fortune-hunting women. This elfin Heinrich is as bewitched as Gillian by V.V.’s physical beauty, and as V.V. has an eye to the main chance, she inveigles him into an engagement. As soon as he becomes importunate and “boring,” however, instinct conquers interest and she shakes him off, clinching the matter one evening by refusing an invitation because she must bathe Gillian and put her to bed. With a stolen key, V.V. manages to enter the apartment where Gillian is actually bathing in a meager British “portable” before an open fire, and attempts to embrace her. Gillian, though excited by the caresses, fights her off in sudden horrified realization of what their long ambiguous dalliance has been leading to. For the first time in her life she comprehends the passion she has observed in others, and her revulsion is violent. Heinrich, however, reads quite another meaning into the shadow-struggle he sees silhouetted on her drawn blind, and goes home to shoot himself.

Gillian falls gravely ill from shock, but finally, safe in her sister’s comfortable home, regains her balance.

However marred it is by such expository passages and by its sudden melodramatic suicide, the story carries more conviction than Regiment of Women through coming to grips with the physical issue and through its more sympathetic presentation of the lesbian woman.

* * *

In 1926, drama for the first time took precedence over fiction, of which the year’s sole example was the translation of Louis Couperus’s The Comedians. This historical novel laid in the reign of Domitian includes a pair of lesbians, the emperor’s cousin and his wife’s niece, who frequent the inns of Rome disguised respectively as gladiator and street wench. Life at court is such a nightmare of intrigue and surveillance that only their mutual passion and their secret adventures make existence tolerable. The “gladiator” is shortly killed in a street brawl, and the other girl, though her interests have seemed bisexual, fades into melancholia.

As to the theatre, the international success of Bourdet’s La Prisonnière has already been cited. Its New York run as The Captive began in September, and its drawing power very likely led to the presentation of two related plays later in the season. Thomas Hurlbut’s lesbian Hymn to Venus opened in Atlantic City in late November and was scheduled for further trial in Chicago before appearing on Broadway. Its initial performance rated a single brief review in the New York Times,[54] chilly and vague, saying of the play only that its theme was that of The Captive and that it ended with a suicide. There was no indication whether the treatment was sympathetic or otherwise, and the text of the play has not been available. It was withdrawn after a second performance and reached neither Chicago nor New York.

The second effort, The Drag by one “Jane Mast,” made its debut in Boston in February 1927 with Mae West among the cast. Because, as the title indicates, it dealt with the stringently tabooed subject of male homosexuality, it was at once suppressed, and sufficient adverse sentiment was aroused to bring about the closing of The Captive after a successful run of five months,[55] especially interesting in view of the strong condemnation of lesbianism in the French play. This official action seems to have had only local effects, for no difficulties attended the publication in England of the translation of Lacretelle’s La Bonifas, or of Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, in which the middle section is a study of variance. There were also oblique variant allusions in Mrs. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

Lacretelle’s stout championship of Marie Bonifas needs no further comment. To the Lighthouse was Mrs. Woolf’s most subtle study of the contrast between masculine and feminine personality. Here Mrs. Ramsey personifies the selfless unifying influence of woman’s intuition in her dealings with an intellectual husband, a diverse brood of six children, and a swarm of family friends of all ages and temperaments. The individual most devoted to her is an artist of thirty-three, who “with her little Chinese eyes and puckered up face ... would never marry.... She was an independent little creature.”[56] With masculine honesty Lily Briscoe recognizes that she is not so much in love with Mrs. Ramsey as with the mysterious force, intuitive and emotional, which she radiates and which Lily herself must always lack. And so she masters her own emotions in moments when Mrs. Ramsey is maternally tender, and quivers with uncontrollable laughter at the older woman’s failure to understand the situation when she urges marriage upon her. Still, nearly a decade after Mrs. Ramsey’s death, she weeps for her loss when she returns to paint again at the site of their earlier association, “feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have.”[57]

Miss Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, like many first novels written before their authors are wholly mature, was autobiographical in structure, following its heroine from childhood to her early twenties. Daughter of a scholarly father who tutors her at home and a frivolous mother who lives much abroad, Judith grows up in virtual solitude, her only acquaintances a group of children who occasionally visit an adjoining country house. These exotic cousins, four boys and a girl, fascinate the lonely child, who looks forward to their infrequent appearances and does her best to achieve some personal relation with one or the other, but they continually elude her. The object of her secret first love is Roddy, most elusive of all; at the moment when some mutual spark seems about to leap between them, his friend Tony comes for a weekend, a jealous effeminate boy who at once absorbs Roddy completely.

During Judith’s course at Cambridge she and a very beautiful classmate are mutually attracted and spend two rapturous but innocent years scarcely out of one another’s sight. When Judith returns after her last “long vac,” however, she senses a profound change in her friend, who spent her own free time in residence making up delinquencies. From a gossiping classmate Judith learns that Jennifer had a guest for much of the period, and that the two indulged in “wrestling matches” on the lawn which many of the girls found in doubtful taste. This dark Geraldine, a deep-voiced older woman of powerful physique and personality, presently reappears. Though Judith pointedly avoids the pair, Geraldine seeks her out and commands her to “let Jennifer alone,” since the latter is “beginning to find herself” and Geraldine plans to take her abroad. This scene is a triumph of subtlety; presented from the viewpoint of the innocent Judith, it still conveys the exact nature of Geraldine’s feeling for and hold upon Jennifer. Judith withdraws completely, leaving Jennifer so torn between her old love and her new passion that even after Geraldine’s departure she cannot regain nervous stability, and is forced to leave college.

After a melancholy last term, Judith goes home to a single passionate summer night with Roddy, but upon discovering that what to her was a pledge of lasting love was to him but a casual episode, she breaks with him forever. In the course of the next year or so she wins from each of the remaining cousins just such personal responses as she once craved, but these are now empty. Her only vivid moment comes with a letter from Jennifer, incoherently half-explaining their broken friendship (which Judith has long since comprehended) and begging for a meeting in Cambridge. But when Judith keeps the appointment, Jennifer fails either to appear or to send a message, and the final flick of irony is a distant sight of Roddy and his friend Tony strolling past in intimate absorption. While Miss Lehmann takes artistic pains to point no moral, first Roddy’s and then Judith’s absorption in a variant friendship seem deterrents to happy emotional resolution through other channels.

First Peak: 1928

In contrast to the two preceding years, 1928 offered a harvest as rich and varied as any single season until then: Radclyffe’s Hall’s Well of Loneliness, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Not foremost in literary rank but certainly best known is The Well of Loneliness, for its censorship became a cause célèbre in the publishing world. Issued in January by the solidly established firm of Jonathan Cape, with an introduction by Havelock Ellis, the work was reviewed favorably in reputable literary periodicals. Shortly, however, it was attacked in the sensational London newspaper, The Express, with the result that it was banned in England and its publisher sued. Forty-five leading British authors, from Lascelles Abercrombie and Arnold Bennett to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, signed a letter of indignant protest, and a half dozen physicians and legal authorities volunteered to testify at the publisher’s trial, but their testimony was not allowed.[58] The reason for its condemnation while so many other variant novels were passed without action was its explicit defense of lesbian experience.

Although for a decade or so the novel has been freely available in inexpensive editions, a brief summary may be offered. Stephen Gordon, only child of solid county parents whose dearest desire is a son, receives the name and upbringing that would have been his. From infancy she is the image of her father, masculine in build, mannerisms, abilities and tastes. At eight she experiences unmistakable passion for a housemaid; throughout adolescence she despises feminine garments and amusements; in her late teens she rejects a first suitor, long her good friend, whose sudden amorousness seems to her unnatural. The death of her father leaves her without an ally and bitterly solitary. At twenty she becomes infatuated with a new neighbor’s wife, a former American chorus girl, who plays the coquette and accepts lavish gifts but evades caresses by pleading her husband’s jealousy. Stephen’s discovery that a male rival has been successful drives her to frenzy, and the American, fearful that the girl may inform her husband of her infidelity, forestalls the possibility by showing him Stephen’s last letter. This outpouring of naked passion, at once passed on to her mother, leads to Stephen’s being turned out of her home and virtually driven from England. Soon she achieves a literary reputation of sorts, but her lack of passionate experience proves an artistic handicap. In London and Paris she meets both male and female homosexuals but shuns them, hating their immediate interest in her because she hates her own “difference” and wants only to be accepted as a normal human being.

Then World War I gives her, along with others of her sort, the chance to do a man’s job in an ambulance unit. She falls deeply in love with a younger co-worker, innocent and feminine, whom she struggles to protect from danger. After their release by the armistice, a holiday together forces both to admit the nature of their love—an interlude less specifically detailed than Lawrence’s lesbian passage in The Rainbow, but, of course, presented with complete sympathy. Now united, the two girls attempt to make a life for themselves in Paris, but neither finds tolerable the bohemian existence which is open to them, and both suffer under the slights which exclude them from conventional society. Eventually, Stephen’s early suitor seeks them out and falls in love with Mary, who responds but will not consider disloyalty to Stephen. The latter, realizing that Mary can never be happy with her outside the social pale, makes the dramatic gesture of pretending intimacy with a distinguished lesbian she has known superficially for years. She achieves her purpose—Mary accepts the man, and Stephen is left once more to loneliness.

The story is more engrossing than The Unlit Lamp because of swifter pace and greater intensity, but inferior in literary art, since it is often over-emotional and occasionally lapses into bald special pleading. Moreover, there is a blur in the explanation of Stephen’s variance. Emphasis on her physical masculinity indicates hereditary causes, as does her father’s early recognition of her anomaly. But his consequent indulgence of her proclivities, and the stress laid on both parents’ desire for a male child, hint at belief in prenatal as well as childhood conditioning. Miss Hall’s evident purpose was to absolve Stephen of the slightest responsibility for her temperament, and inevitably one is reminded of Lacretelle’s Marie Bonifas, translated in the preceding year but probably known to Miss Hall in French upon its appearance in 1925. The two differ in that Lacretelle lays Freudian stress on negative childhood conditioning, while Miss Hall’s comparative hereditary emphasis marks her a disciple of the older school of Ellis and Hirschfeld. Despite its shortcomings, The Well of Loneliness made a heroic gesture for tolerance of lesbian relations among persons of integrity, and the author had the satisfaction before her death of seeing it widely accepted.

Compton Mackenzie entered the variant lists armed with gentle satire. Extraordinary Women, like Norman Douglas’s South Wind to which its foreword pays respect, is laid on the island of Capri, here called Sirene. It includes almost as many lesbian individuals as Peladan’s La Gynandre of forty years earlier, and considering its author’s Catholic affiliation, it may have been written with some similar, though milder, intent. Every nationality is represented and every age, from Lulu de Randan, sent vacationing with her governess to break off a flirtation with a tradesman’s son, to a fading Roman wife given to tearful sentimentality over the boyish young beauty she adores. Roughly there are two generations of lesbian women, among the older a poet who poses as a modern Sappho, a tailored Englishwoman who has bred bulldogs and supported boxeuses in Paris for a few decades, and Lulu’s Anglo-French mother. The younger group includes a stormy and self-defeating Greek concert pianist, an American hypochondriac, millionaire’s daughter, and the picturesque and irresistible poseuse, Rosalba Donsante, child of the third of her Swiss mother’s five international marriages. What plot there is centers about Rosalba and Aurora Freemantle, the Englishwoman, who finds the girl an incarnation of the boyish ideal she has celebrated in her lesbian verse for years. “Rory,” dreaming of permanence at last, remodels a villa halfway up to Anasirene at reckless expense, but her beloved is of no mind to be caged there, and leads practically every woman in the cast a hectic chase before the curtain falls upon her unheralded departure in pursuit of a last inamorata, leaving poor Rory in tears in her empty paradise.

The tale offers a potpourri of sophisticated intrigue fertilized by idleness and wealth. Its various types are superficially convincing enough, but they are largely unaccounted for beyond the influence of their frivolous environment. Many of the older women have been married at least once, and even young Lulu has narrowly missed a heterosexual entanglement before succumbing to Rosalba’s glamorous seduction. Few men enter upon the scene save hotel servants and one or two twittering homosexuals and eccentrics. Rory alone (physically as masculine as Stephen Gordon) is treated with some gentleness as a victim of hereditary forces, although even she is more ridiculous than appealing, and the total effect of the novel is one of cool detachment, the report of a witty and superior observer.

Among these outspoken narratives Miss Bowen’s quiet social comedy, The Hotel, is conspicuous for a sexual reticence as absolute as any before 1915. The hotel of her title, a conservative Riviera establishment frequented by professors, clergymen, retired officers and their families, provides a lively background for her understated central drama. In this, the actors are two: a British girl of twenty and a cosmopolitan widow twice her age with a son at school in Germany. (The action antedates World War I.) Sydney is ostensibly recuperating from overstudy for a recent university degree, and acting as companion to a married cousin. Actually, as she is wretchedly aware, her relatives have financed her holiday in the expectation of her capturing a husband. But Sydney is wholly absorbed in Mrs. Kerr. This exquisite worldling, of whom the other guests stand a bit in awe, accepts the girl’s small services and gifts with just enough warmth to keep her enslaved and the onlookers socially envious. Malicious gossip naturally flourishes over the bridge tables, and though it stops just short of slander, Sydney finds the association all in all more wearing than rewarding.

When the son arrives on holiday it is clear that he is held captive on a similar emotional leash, and Sydney’s intelligence recognizes that their charmer is playing one against the other and battening on their mutual jealousy. But not until, piqued at a black mood of Sydney’s, Mrs. Kerr accuses her of playing for a passionate response, and voices disdain for “emotions so unbalanced,” is she moved to rebellion. The injustice of the charge, when she has all but broken under the strain of emotional control, finally dissolves the spell. On the rebound Sydney tries being engaged to an estimable but rather colorless clergyman, but Mrs. Kerr’s brilliant subtlety has spoiled her for finding happiness in a commonplace association. Her final saddened conclusion is that the whole Hotel interlude has been a kind of lotus-eater’s dream bred of idleness in an artificial environment, and her only hope is that all its cloying preoccupations will fade with return to “reality” in England.

This study of heartless egotism may owe something to Regiment of Women, but it achieves the unity and detachment which Miss Dane’s study lacked. The problem here is simpler, of course; Mrs. Kerr’s beauty and assurance lead to conquest without effort, and aside from her vanity her own emotions are little involved. Of the pair, then, Sydney alone is variant, a telling example of that protracted adolescence which is common among the intellectually precocious. Her attaining adult perspective without benefit of a happy heterosexual romance marks Miss Bowen’s independence of current Freudian theory, a point of artistry in her favor. Another is her humorous vignette of a pair of elderly spinsters whose one-time variant devotion has withered into querulous possessiveness. All in all, pale aquarelle though The Hotel is among the year’s more positive canvases, its quiet statement carries authority.

Any cursory treatment of Mrs. Woolf’s Orlando must do it grave injustice, but here the emotional thread must be drawn from the rich fabric and examined as nearly as may be alone. No one yet has analyzed Orlando fully, and such critics as have not slighted it in discussing Mrs. Woolf’s work have tended to find it uneven and confusing. Complex it is indeed, but a part of the critical confusion has come from failure or refusal to recognize as perhaps its main theme the relation of intersexual traits to creative ability. It attempts in fact to sustain four parallel motifs. The most obvious is the biography of a timeless individual who enters as a boy of sixteen acquainted with Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, and is still living in October 1928 as an English woman of thirty-six. A second is the changing social roles of the two sexes from century to century and their consequently shifting relations to one another. A third is the corresponding fluctuation—perhaps resultant, perhaps only concomitant—in the emotional “Spirit of the Age” in English literature. This is least coherently traced and may be ignored here. The fourth and most cryptic is a parallel between the history of Orlando and the literary and perhaps personal biography of Mrs. Woolf’s colleague and friend, Victoria Sackville-West, more than one of whose photographs illustrate Orlando’s later career, and whose family estate of Knole is clearly pictured in the descriptions of Orlando’s ancestral house. (For judicious comment on this last motif and on Mrs. Woolf’s other variant references, the reader is referred to David Daiches’s laudatory study of her work published in 1942.[59])

In the sixteenth century Orlando is a budding poetic dramatist (as was Thomas Sackville, of the family living even then at Knole). As a debonair boy he lives the sexual life of a lusty age, and is far from innocent when in his late teens profound passion overtakes him. With a Russian girl-princess, niece of the ambassador from St. Petersburg, he lives out a burning romance worthy of the period, which ends tragically when Sasha sails for home without adieu. The Russian girl is no innocent either; she is secretive, older than he emotionally, though younger in years; he suspects her of dalliance with a muscovite sailor and even, after her desertion, of being the ambassador’s mistress rather than his niece. Though anything but masculine, she is robust and by spells cruel in temperament; she wears Russian trousers against the cold, and skates, rides and loves with the zest and endurance of another boy. But her desertion has a woman’s cruelty, and it throws Orlando presently into a state of delayed shock which produces a seven-day trance.

He emerges a melancholy seventeenth-century philosophic poet, ridden by a passion for fame. Soon he is stalked by a ridiculous and masculine Roumanian bluestocking who—perhaps because she is six-feet-two—plays the man’s role in the game of hearts. For a moment “Orlando heard ... far off the beating of love’s wings.” But at the point of becoming ensnared, suddenly “it was Lust the vulture, not Love the bird of paradise, that flopped foully and disgustingly upon his shoulders. Hence he ran....”[60]

He escapes by accepting a diplomatic post in Constantinople, where he achieves brilliant success until a local uprising terminates his mission. He lives in the ornate luxury befitting an emissary of Charles II to the Sultan, and becomes “the adored of many women and some men,” but only from a distance. In private he is still melancholy, and escapes to write poetry in the hills by day, by night to roam the city streets, where he meets a gypsy dancer, Pepita. With her he contracts a marriage of sorts and, rumor hints, has a trio of offspring. This episode is sketched so briefly that one can only guess at its significance. It cannot well have repeated the early romance with Sasha, since she was a court lady of brilliant culture and Pepita is a daughter of the streets. But neither can it have echoed the passage with the Archduchess Harriet. Honest passion for an illiterate woman does not inspire the self-loathing bred of an itch for an otherwise hateful social and intellectual peer. Whatever it meant to Orlando, after the uprising ends his official services, he bestows a farewell embrace upon the gypsy and falls into his second seven-day trance. It may be that this one registered inability to endure an emotional impasse any longer.

From it he awakes a woman, but Mrs. Woolf lays stress on the fact that the change is merely one of physical sex and not at all of temperament.

With the gypsies (not apparently Pepita’s clan) to whom Orlando escapes, she still lives a man’s life, for among nomads, temperament and daily duties are much the same in both sexes. After some seasons of successful adaptation to this barbaric simplicity, nostalgia for England and for literary pursuits turns Orlando toward home. And now she faces the difficult business of learning to act the lady. High comedy attends her efforts, particularly in connection with a renewed pursuit by her former bête noire, the bluestocking, who now through a transformation corresponding to her own is an absurd and lachrymose Roumanian nobleman. Amid the relaxed proprieties of the eighteenth century, Orlando often roams London in man’s dress, more at home in the honest company of daughters of joy than in the artificial salons of her peers.

The neatness with which fantasy here dodges any scandalous implications may well account for the difficult tour de force which the whole volume is.

With the advent of Queen Victoria, a depressing social change occurs: humankind is rigorously divided into Men, whose role is to lead, protect, support; and Women, who must submit, be timorous, and cling. The results, both personal and literary, Mrs. Woolf plainly considers lamentable. Orlando’s history turns emotionally barren and housewifely, and neither reading nor writing afford her any relief. Though she suffers from personal loneliness and social disapprobation, she refuses to consider marriage under such a regime. She waits instead for the twentieth century:

In this century she meets a man with the spirit of a poet—he knows Shelley by heart—but who has also been “a soldier and a sailor and ... explored the east.” Mutual love is instantaneous, and complete union follows swiftly upon the intuitive moment when both cry out together: “You’re a woman, Shel!” “You’re a man, Orlando!”

The natural and happy results are marriage and a son, but not a Victorian ménage. “Shel” is gone the greater part of the time on his adventurous voyages, and Orlando is free to “write and write and write” and win literary prizes.

Clearly Mrs. Woolf felt that to be an integrated, and above all, a creative personality, one needs freedom from the Procrustes’ bed of sex. She was not preaching license in the name of some bohemian deity of Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village. She was begging psychological Lebensraum for the creative artist. Nevertheless, the total sum of Orlando’s experience is, beyond question, bisexual.

Among these four novels of 1928, Mackenzie’s satire was mild rather than sharp; Miss Bowen pictured variance as an unhappy state but treated her variant girl with entire sympathy; and Mrs. Woolf pled as it were in the abstract, Miss Hall in passionate particular, for the variant, even the lesbian woman of personal integrity. The annual balance was, therefore, on the whole positive, and it is clear that the verdict early in the year against Well of Loneliness restrained British publishers only from issuing lesbian propaganda.