Women in literature
It is natural to begin a study of sex variant women with Sappho, Greek lyric poet of the early sixth century B.C., whose name and that of her native island, Lesbos, have supplied our popular vocabulary with its terms for female homosexuality. Plato, who lived only two centurie...
It is natural to begin a study of sex variant women with Sappho, Greek lyric poet of the early sixth century B.C., whose name and that of her native island, Lesbos, have supplie...
2. CHAPTER II.That no variant material remains from the ten centuries following Alciphron is hardly surprising, since so little record of any sort has survived. An oral literature of heroic t...
3. CHAPTER III.Imaginative works featuring variant women have thus far been few, widely separated in time, and for the most part written with literary intent only. Thus, it has sufficed to pre...
4. CHAPTER IV.The sultry uneasiness in French society recorded by Feydeau in 1867 soon broke in the storm of the Franco-Prussian war, which ended monarchy in France. As is usual in time of wa...
5. Part II, “The Boyhood of Lilly Travers,” recounts the hilarious andsalacious adventures of the two ‘trans-sexists,’ to coin the only appropriate term. Lilly’s young cousin Bessie falls in love with her, as does also the widow hitherto involved...
6. Part III, “The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Lawrence Talbot,” presentsLilly’s life after she has managed to assume male garb and name. The former fiancé suspects Lawrence of having murdered his cousin Lilly for her fortune, and challenges him to a...
7. CHAPTER V.Four women among thirty-odd nineteenth-century authors dealing with variance may seem a meager fraction until one recalls that Mary Wollstonecraft was the first of her sex to ap...
8. CHAPTER VI.The early twentieth century has already been cited as relatively tolerant of homosexuality. To the extent that it prevailed, this tolerance was due to popular acceptance of here...
9. CHAPTER VII.If variant poetry burgeoned suddenly with the turn of the present century, new developments in fiction were equally apparent. Between 1900 and 1950, novels with female variance...
10. CHAPTER VIII.Insofar as secondhand information is to be trusted, it appears that female variance figured but twice in German fiction before the late 1890s. Lewandowski’s _Das Sexualproblem i...
11. CHAPTER IX.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...
12. CHAPTER X.Just how specifically the skirmish of censorship and its attendant publicity affected subsequent work is difficult to say. The next few years saw in print nothing more outspoken...