CHAPTER V

.

CONJECTURAL RETROSPECT

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 appear in this record since Sappho. What accounts for this dearth of feminine authorship? Since the renaissance, many women have been published; factual literature attests that female variance has always existed to a greater or less extent; and surely it is a subject in which, if any, one would expect women to show more interest than men. But thus far, only one literary attitude toward variance has enjoyed freedom from censure: disapproval, whether it was conveyed by satire, exhortation, or tragic example.

To such derogatory expression it is natural enough that few women should contribute. Equally obvious are the factors inhibiting feminine expressions of sympathy. For one thing, women have suffered too many critical handicaps on the score of their sex alone to embark lightly upon a venture which lays men of established repute open to attack. More important, a man writing tolerantly of female variance can be accused of nothing worse than tolerance, but a woman is at once suspected of being variant herself, which to the man-in-the-street is tantamount to being lesbian in the most damning sense of the term. This is not mere armchair theorizing. Havelock Ellis in his volume on sexual inversion observes that women poets of his day who had contributed variant histories to his record regularly changed the gender of pronouns in love lyrics destined for publication, in order to conceal the homosexual inspiration of their verses. And the present writer has amusingly enough been viewed askance by certain librarians after demanding from their “restricted” cases novels no more questionable than those of Radclyffe Hall. If this was the state of affairs well into the twentieth century, a time presently to be shown more tolerant of variance perhaps than any since the classical period, how much more stringent must have been the need for caution when to be suspect incurred moral opprobrium and complete social ostracism?

It seems certain, then, that there have been women of variant inclination through the centuries who also possessed literary gifts, and it is probable that exhaustive research would reveal traces of variance in a surprising number of feminine authors from the renaissance on. The purpose of the following chapter is to consider those few whose lives most readily yield suggestive hints, and to correlate such hints with corresponding traces, however carefully masked, in their writing.

*Louise Labé.* The first promising subject is Louise Labé, lyric poet of the early sixteenth century and one of a group of brilliant young women who brought considerable distinction upon their native city of Lyons. Until the middle of the last century the best biographical encyclopedias stated as fact that in 1542 she took active part in the Dauphin’s siege of Perpignan and acquitted herself so well that she was thereafter nicknamed “le capitaine Loys.”[1] With advances in historical method, the authenticity of this episode has been questioned (though never flatly disproved), the alternate probability being that she took the part of a knight in a tournament celebrating the same victory. In either event, her horsemanship and conduct of arms are described as masterly.

Scholars have expended much effort in attempting to identify the persons to whom her passionate lyrics were addressed. Internal evidence favors the assumption that she had a number of lovers; yet, even the critics who find this idea acceptable have not managed to identify more than one, her fellow poet Olivier de Magny. Several other leading questions also remain unanswered. Why, in view of Labé’s marked poetic gift, does so slim a volume of her verse remain, in comparison to her surviving prose, which is excellent but of lower vitality? And what was the cause of her quarrel with Clémence de Bourges, a younger woman poet to whom she dedicated a volume published in 1555, and, in that dedication, proclaimed as being more gifted and showing brighter promise than herself?

Her biography, like those of many nonpolitical figures so far removed in time, is not rich in documented detail. It is known that she was born about 1520, the daughter of a wealthy cordage merchant. Despite her middle-class status, as a girl she studied music, Greek, Latin and Spanish, and seems also to have known Italian well, especially the work of Ariosto. In 1542—that is, in her twenties, late for those days—she married Ennemond Perrin, another cordage merchant and a friend of her father’s. Her husband was twenty years her senior and the marriage was childless; however, it endured for more than a quarter of a century, and on his death Perrin left her all his property. Both father and husband being men of wealth, Labé had a large house with pleasant gardens which became a rendezvous for poets and artists. Her liaison with de Magny apparently stirred no scandal, but ‘so brilliant a position naturally excited envy,’ and she was rather spitefully nicknamed “La Belle Cordelière.” After her husband’s death in 1565, the noblewoman of Lyons set upon “la petite bourgeoise” for having eclipsed them intellectually and socially, and during the brief year before her own death Labé was accused of being “livrée à toutes sortes de désordres.”[2]

Until the time of her marriage Labé was certainly skilled and active in all the arts of an _homme de guerre_. Even later (about 1547) when Diane de Poitiers accompanied Henry II on a visit to Lyons, Louise seems to have been one of the moving spirits, if not the organizer, of a fête honoring the favorite, in which young women of the town assumed the costume of Diana the Huntress and exhibited their skill with bow and dart. (It is interesting to find Brantôme alluding to this event in passing, though he mentions no names and no precise date.)[3]

In her thirties Labé rebelled against the limitations of feminine education, proclaiming that women should study all the “sciences” pursued by men, and in the letter of dedication to her friend which prefaced her volume in 1555 she begs them to ‘lift their spirits a little above their bobbins and distaffs.’[4] Shortly after the publication of this work she was estranged from Clémence de Bourges by the aforementioned “éclatante” quarrel of uncertain origin, though until then ‘their union was cited as one rare between two women.’[5]

Apparently no one has suggested that she may have been homosexual. But in her “Elégie I,” we find the following:

Encor Phébus, ami des Lauriers vers ... Chanter me fait ... Il m’a donné la lyre, qui les vers Souloit chanter de l’amour Lesbienne ...[6]

If in sixteenth century France the final adjective carried its present meaning, and there seems no evidence to the contrary, this passage is certainly suggestive. In “Elégie III,” a kind of apologia for a life of emotional _Sturm und Drang_, she says she was only sixteen when she first suffered a devastatingly tragic love, but that she had already loved deeply twice before. She implores her townswomen as they read of her ‘amorous pains, regrets and tears’ not to condemn that “erreur de ma folle jeunesse—Si c’est erreur....”[7] This confession has disturbed some critics profoundly because it seems to imply that she must have been a courtesan.

Only a few of her lyrics reveal the sex of the person to whom they were addressed, an evasion more difficult in an inflected language than in English, and among those which do not betray it is the group that is acclaimed by critics as most distinguished by sincerity, frankness, and ‘an amazing freshness compared to her contemporaries.’[8] The descriptive touches in some of these sonnets, moreover, picture a loved one of more delicate beauty and a passion of less harsh and painful violence than the others. The assumption that she was a lesbian would explain her precocious passions and the number, variety, and anonymity of these later flames better than the hotly disputed courtesan theory, although she was undoubtedly bisexual and very ardent—“tous ses gouts furent des passions,” says one biographer. It would also explain the many, although comparatively unimpassioned, tributes written to her by male poets, for artists incline to be more tolerant of sex variance than the public at large, and they may possibly have gone on record in her favor because she suffered from social persecution.

And finally, lesbianism would account for her estrangement from her younger friend, “of noble family and spotless reputation,” as well as any of the other theories advanced to that end. Until late in the nineteenth century a legend persisted that in the same year that Labé’s volume was published Clémence submitted verses of her own to her friend for criticism, but the latter instead of giving it “enleva a Clémence son amant,”[9] and it was suggested that Clémence’s death within the year was chargeable to this blow. This tale was fairly well discredited in 1877 by the Dutch scholar Boy;[10] however, nothing plausible has replaced it.

Let us consider the case if that rare union _was_ a passionate one. With the older woman married and famous, the younger formally engaged (as Clémence was), their friendship would excite little comment. If the married woman had also had as lover the most distinguished poet of the period, and if, as there is reason to believe, Clémence had married at twenty, and lost a husband, they would be even safer from suspicion. Then Labé publishes the volume of poems described above. She dedicates it to Clémence in a letter lauding the girl’s poetic promise to the skies and deploring a married woman’s humdrum life. If, as commonly happens, identities were inferred at the time for the subjects of Labé’s verses, Clémence’s “noble family,” and her fiancé as well, may have frowned on further intimacy between the girl and the devoted friend who seemed so little in favor of her marrying.

Clémence might still, however, submit her own work for a more practiced writer’s criticism. What happened? Despite the fact that scholars have unhappily been unable to trace de Bourges’ volume, several conjectures are legitimate. Did it contain impassioned verses to the fiancé which stirred Labé to reckless jealousy? Were there cryptic love poems to Labé herself which convinced her that marriage would be unhappy for her beloved protégée? In either case she might have enlightened the young man as to the nature of her relation to Clémence. Unhandsome behavior, but no more so than the legendary stealing of the lover for herself (which Boy believes did not occur). There is a kindlier alternative: she merely warned Clémence that certain poems would be identified as written to her; the less experienced girl, suspecting her of literary jealousy, published them anyway; Labé’s apprehensions proved correct, and the result separated the lovers. But such involved psychology belongs more to the twentieth century than to the sixteenth. All this is conjecture, to be sure, but no more implausible than the several conflicting theories already advanced by Labé scholars. Furthermore, it has the advantage, conclusive with experimental scientists, of providing answers to more questions than any other single hypothesis.

*Charlotte Charke.* A sadly different life story is recorded in the autobiography written nearly two centuries later by Charlotte Charke, daughter of the erratic actor and playwright, Colley Cibber. (An account of that irresponsible egomaniac’s family life would shed light on his youngest child’s temperament and fate, but cannot be included here.) Though Havelock Ellis expresses uncertainty that Charlotte was actually homosexual,[1] there are elements in her adventures which more than compare with significant passages in the lives of Mary Frith and Catalina Erauso. Like these two women, Charke was a transvestist, and at several points in her story she mentions connections with women which promise definite significance had they been expanded. But at the time of writing she was forty-five, unable to get work, and more than half-starving in a bare single room near a refuse dump in London. Survival depended on her standing well with her readers—her tale appeared in weekly installments—and on her hope of reconciliation with her father, who had long refused aid. Hence her narrative is so full of discreet elision as to be sometimes incoherent or even contradictory. This is particularly evident in regard to her “wearing breeches,” one of the sorest points between her and her family, and also to all her personal relations except her early and unhappy marriage.

Her history is a veritable psychiatric case study. Born when her mother (the actress Jane Shore) was forty-five, she was the youngest of a dozen children and the object of violent jealousy among her elder siblings because of the mother’s favoritism. Charlotte, on her part, was intensely devoted to her mother as long as the latter lived. Precociously brilliant, she was sent to boarding school at eight and within two or three years was crammed with three languages, music, dancing, and geography, all of which she later pronounced useless in aiding a woman to earn her keep. From the age of five she was given to donning boy’s clothes and engaging in the most daring and original exploits, sometimes to the point of grave danger. These make enthralling reading but are not pertinent here. At sixteen she married a worthless bandleader in her father’s theatre—the Drury Lane—and had a daughter within the year; but even before the child’s birth her husband was “running with a plurality of common wretches [women] that were to be had for half a crown,”[2] and at the end of the year the two separated. Her trenchant comment on her marital relations is that both she and her husband “ought rather have been sent to school than to church, in regard to any qualification on either side towards rendering the marriage state comfortable to one another.”[3]

She made her debut as an actress shortly before her marriage and continued on the London stage for perhaps two years after her separation, taking men’s parts at least half the time. Then apparently she went on the boards in her father’s favorite role and one he had made famous, Lord Foppington in _The Careless Husband_. Perhaps this fact led Cibber to cut off financial support and to spoil her chances with all London producers. More likely it was her travesty of his acting that enraged him, for his vanity was morbid and she inherited his wicked and heartless wit. As long as her mother lived she was sure of some funds, but death soon closed that channel and she was driven to a variety of shifts that would have been tragic had she been capable of taking anything very tragically. These experiences, too, are diverting, but only the most significant can be touched on here. For a time she ran a grocer shop in London, living meanwhile with a young widow who lent her money for her business. Later, when arrested for debt, she was saved by contributions from women, once from a Mrs. Elizabeth Careless whose name suggests her profession, and again from “all the ladies who kept coffee houses in and about Covent Garden ... for the relief of poor Sir Charles, as they were pleased to stile me.”[4] Twice women lost their hearts to her and she was forced to reveal her sex, but her mere word was not sufficient. In the first case we are not told how she managed to be convincing. In the second, she was working as a waiter, and her inamorata came to Charlotte’s room to give her the lie, saying she “could never have made advances to one of her own sect [sic].” When Charlotte asked if she was sure she “understood what she meant,” it led to a physical brawl so violent as to cost Charlotte her position.

Intermittently she acted in the provinces with strolling companies of low calibre and continually bankrupt, and for a long time she and another actress stayed together through thick and thin, the friend caring for her during three years of “nervous fever and lowness of spirits.” At one point she lets slip that this woman passed in a tight place as “Mrs. Brown,” and since “Mr. Brown” was the name Charlotte took whenever she needed an alias, it may be that they lived outside the theatre as man and wife. Finally, they abandoned acting for a time at Chepstow in Wales because Charlotte “met with many friends,”

## particularly another widow who lent her considerable sums of money, and

a younger woman who gave her the use of “a very handsome house with a large garden, near three quarters acre of ground” which had just been inherited. The latter also wrote her “very friendly letters” when she went on short trips. At that time, she attempted to run a bake-shop, still with her faithful friend the actress, who she says now stayed on “only out of sincere friendship and an uncommon easiness of temper,” a suggestion that might well imply a more cogent previous reason. As was said, none of these passages mentions variance, but taken all together and in conjunction with the dark mystery she makes of her first experience in men’s clothes,[5] as well as her family’s relentless disowning of her, they make a picture which seems to justify her inclusion in a conjectural record.

*“The Ladies of Llangollen.”* Charke’s history brings us to the late eighteenth century, a period when the Age of Reason had passed its peak and the deifying of emotion which characterized the Romantic Period was beginning to appear. Blanche Hardy, in a biography of the Princess de Lamballe, says:

It was the age of great friendships: girls and even grown women carried the miniature of another woman about with them in a locket, bracelet or other ornament, would draw it out occasionally when in company, gaze fondly upon it, and press it to their lips; wrote long and loverlike letters to the beloved object, awaited her coming ardently, and wept storms of tears at her departure.[1]

One such passionate friendship was born in Ireland, though the parties to it are universally known as “the Ladies of Llangollen,” the picturesque valley in Wales where they spent the greater part of their lives. The journal kept for forty years by the elder of the two is now all that survives of their writing, though references to them in the work of friends suggest that both wrote some nature essays and verses. The younger was something of an artist as well. Both Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby came of titled families. They met first at a school in Kilkenny, probably when Eleanor was nearing twenty and Sarah entering her teens, for there seems to have been about seven or eight years’ difference in their ages. Their friendship apparently flourished for nearly a decade before Eleanor’s harsh and prudish mother tried to force the boyish young woman into either a distasteful marriage or a convent. Sarah’s mother, a second wife, had died in the girl’s infancy. After a third wife increased the already large family, Sarah lived with a cousin whose husband made advances which were disgusting and gravely disturbing to the adolescent girl. Her older and more independent friend, given to wearing men’s clothes, proposed an “elopement,” but the two were without resources, and after spending several nights in a barn they were apprehended and brought back in disgrace. Sarah at once fell gravely ill. Eleanor was forbidden to see her, and Sarah’s cousin accused Eleanor of having

a debauched mind, with no ingredients for friendship which ought to be founded on virtue, whereas hers every day more and more ... was

## acting in direct opposition to it, as well as to the interest,

happiness and reputation of one she professed to love.[2]

This cousin also attempted to keep Sarah from receiving Eleanor’s long letters, which she said only aggravated the girl’s illness.

The romantic pair had an ally, however, in a servant, Mary Caryll, known as “Molly the Bruiser” because of her marked masculinity. With this girl’s help, Eleanor was hidden in Sarah’s bedroom closet for several days, whereupon the latter promptly recovered, and as soon as she was well enough the pair staged a rebellion—they simply refused to live any longer at home or apart from one another. Both families being by now worn down, the girls were given a small allowance and invited to remove themselves permanently from the neighborhood. They managed to get as far as Wales, and, once established, they sent back for Molly, who remained their servant until her death many years later.

Though “poor as church mice,” the two women were radiantly happy, and “of a personality so powerful” that they were known as the Platonists. “Their retreat became a kind of court at which all the great ones of their time presented themselves. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Mme. de Genlis were among their guests,”[3] and they had a half century of idyllic happiness before they died, Eleanor in 1829 and Sarah in 1831. The journal which Eleanor Butler kept from 1788 until her death records the placid course of their mutual existence, detailing financial stress lightly borne, small village tensions faced with equanimity, and again and again “a day of sweetly enjoyed retirement.”

On the precise nature of the relation between them the journal is naturally reticent. The modern French analyst of all feminine emotions, Colette, devotes better than twenty pages to it in _Ces Plaisirs_, and epitomizes neatly the distinguishing feature of all such attachments.

‘It is not sensuality that ensures the fidelity of two women but a kind of blood kinship.... I have written kinship where I should have said identity. Their close resemblance guarantees similarity in _volupté_. The lover takes courage in her certainty of caressing a body whose secrets she knows, whose preferences her own body has taught her.’[4]

If English readers of Eleanor’s journal want to see in a single mention of “our bed” an impure significance, says Colette, then let them.

‘What is purity? Why is it “pure” to stroke a cheek but not a breast? Yes, yes, the breast responds. But what of it, if above it the lover merely dreams? “It is the victim who is almost always responsible in emotional crimes,” says an old magistrate. How one would like to have the journal of Sarah Ponsonby, the younger girl! Eleanor Butler was the practical one, the possessor, the male. Sarah Ponsonby was the _woman_.’[5]

*Karoline von Günderode.* During the same years that saw these willing exiles living out their rapturous idyll, a very different life was swept along on the tide of romantic _Sturm und Drang_ in Germany. Karoline von Günderode was still unborn when the Ladies of Llangollen settled in their Welsh elysium, and suicide ended her quarter-century of life two decades before their death. Outside her native land this distinguished young romantic poet is most likely to be remembered through her brief connection with Bettina Brentano von Arnim, sister of the poet Clemens Brentano and the “child” of _Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind_. The mercurial and precocious Bettina was undoubtedly a very remarkable young person, but scholarly research has proved her published correspondence with Goethe to be largely spurious, and even the superficial reader can detect signs of _post facto_ interpolation in her letter to Goethe’s mother describing Günderode’s death and the two girls’ previous relationship.[1]

Equally copious expansion is evident in the correspondence with Günderode,[2] a really remarkable volume of philosophy, poetry, and romantic “sensibility” made human, however, by the small ordinary preoccupations of the two very busy young women. Nine-tenths of the volume is occupied by Bettina’s own letters, supposedly written during a number of brief absences when she was a guest at various country estates. Had these voluminous outpourings actually been penned under such circumstances the girl would have had no time for meals or sleep, let alone the normal social exigencies of house-party life.

Karoline von Günderode was one of several daughters of a moderately affluent widow, who spent the latter part of her short life in a “Kloster” (not a religious house but a dignified retreat for well-born spinsters such as has been charmingly pictured by “Isak Dinesen” in _Seven Gothic Tales_). She was, by all accounts, an interesting mixture of emotional mysticism and sceptical “masculine” intellect, and both are reflected in her poems.[3] At least one of these, “Wandel und Treue,” suggests that there is no certainty save that all is uncertain, no ultimate Truth because life and universe alike are in constant flux and inexpressible in terms of any constant pattern. It might almost have been written today rather than a century and a half ago.

The context in which the poem is quoted shows that it grew out of long-sustained discussions between her and Bettina on the nature of love. It is cast in the form of a dialogue between Violetta, who embodies Bettina’s championship of romantic constancy, and Narziss, who represents Günderode’s own viewpoint. The latter holds that love, like all else, is subject to change; therefore, one should not attempt to fix it upon a single person or thing, but should love only Love and follow its dictates wherever it leads. The amount of stress laid upon this composition by Bettina, who compiled and inflated the correspondence for publication, suggests an effort to throw upon the other woman all responsibility for any inconstancy which ensued.

The sixty-page biography of Günderode in Ersch and Gruber’s _Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste_[4] records several variant attachments in her life. Previous to her acquaintance with Bettina she enjoyed a very close friendship with Frau Karoline von Barkhaus, to whom she wrote oftener than weekly in the warmest terms, and in one of the quoted letters she mentions that ‘a room is ready where we will sleep together when you come.’ Another woman, Frau Susanna Maria von Heyden, mentioned as her most intimate friend, fell heir to Günderode’s portrait and two paintings of the scene of the unhappy girl’s death. She ‘never recovered from her grief over her unlucky friend, and lived secluded from the world in joyless solitude.’

As to the relationship with Bettina, their correspondence shows it to have been warmly emotional as well as intellectual. Bettina wrote at length to Madame Goethe of Günderode’s extreme sensitiveness and intensity, describing the latter’s pallor the first time that Bettina kissed her on the mouth, and generally betraying awareness of unpleasant gossip and eagerness to deflect it from herself.[5] The facts of the case seem to be that, like Labé and Clémence de Bourges, the two girls had a serious quarrel, and Günderode’s suicide followed closely enough upon it to create some unpleasantness for the survivor. Here, too, the cause of the quarrel was a man, and editors of Günderode’s poems and letters claim that it was the tragic end of this romance with him which led the poet to take her own life. The man involved had, while fairly young, married a widow thirteen years his senior, who had several children. When he and Günderode found themselves deeply in love, the wife, with “sterbender Güte,” agreed to release him, but under emotional stress the already tubercular young man suffered a serious hemorrhage, and since he was not yet free it was the wife who nursed him back to health. In penitent gratitude he swore that if he lived he would never leave her, and he kept his vow. This version of Günderode’s tragedy is offered by the conventional biographies.[6]

In Bettina’s letters and elsewhere, however, the story survives of the man’s being a fellow guest of hers at one of the house parties which spacious living and difficult travel fostered in the eighteenth century. Full of his love for Günderode, he paid much attention to a child in the house who reminded him of his beloved, and in Bettina’s presence he called the little girl “his Karoline” (her name was Sophie) and caressed and kissed her. The fiery Bettina, furious that he ‘used expressions in speaking of Günderode as if he had a right to her love,’ told him off roundly, and this contretemps apparently led to some difficulty between him and Günderode—the only reasonable explanation being that Bettina must also have talked as if _she_ “had a right to her love.”

The quarrel between the two young women followed, and one summer evening a few weeks later Günderode strolled unobtrusively to the bank of her favorite stream and there shot herself. It is not suggested that any overt scandal occurred, or that the quarrel with Bettina was the immediate cause of this act. Günderode’s poetry is minor-keyed and full of a romantic preoccupation with early death. But certainly something in the relation between the two girls was a contributing factor. And that variant inferences are not far-fetched is evidenced by a German lesbian novel of 1919,[7] in which the memory of Günderode is worshipped with passion by a brilliantly educated lesbian, while Bettina is the object of jealous hatred. The author of this tale (of which more later) is known to have had access to much German material not available to the present writer, which apparently supported the lesbian inference.

* * * * *

Only a few years after Günderode’s death a tragedy in Edinburgh was directly attributed to homosexual scandal. Two mistresses of a private school, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, were accused of tribadism by Dame Helen Cumming Gordon on the evidence of a young relative (or ward) who was a pupil in the school. The young women brought suit for slander and after a long and bitter battle apparently won their case, but their reputations were damaged to the extent of ruining their educational enterprise. It is upon the court record of their trial that Lillian Hellman based her Broadway success of 1934, _The Children’s Hour_, and their story will receive further attention when that drama is considered under twentieth-century literature.

*George Sand.* In France the spectacular figure of George Sand invites attention, both because of her adoption of male costume in the 1830s, and because critics are agreed as to the pronounced masculinity of her always semi-autobiographical heroines. She wrote nothing to be classed as variant, but special note is due her _Gabriel-Gabrielle_,[1] the title an obvious echo of Balzac’s _Seraphitus-Seraphita_, which antedated it by only five years. Sand’s title-character is definitely an intersexual, but the author avoids variant emotion and concentrates upon psychological ambiguity. Gabriel, an orphan, is not only raised as a boy, but by a somewhat strained device is made to believe that she actually is one until she attains her majority. Learning at this point that the deception has been contrived by her grandfather, to secure for his branch of the family a fortune which can be inherited only through the male line, she sets out to find her defrauded male cousin and make restitution. The two fall in love, marry secretly, and live abroad in the hope of avoiding family interference. Their effort is futile, and after much tragic misunderstanding and dangerous intrigue, Gabrielle is finally set upon and killed by her grandfather’s hirelings during one of the periods when she is again, as during her youth, posing as a man.

The most pertinent passage describes a masked ball which Gabrielle attends dressed for the first time as a woman. The cousin, who still believes her a man, speaks recklessly of how easily he could love “her.” Her reply is:

“This sort of entertainment should be morally frowned upon. It all goes to excite impure ideas, the whole purpose is to shake our composure. The joke has gone too far. I am going to take off this costume and never put it on again.”[2]

Later she implores him not to duel with a fellow-reveller who has insulted her, as when it is known that she is “really a man it would be ridiculous. And who knows? Wicked minds could even find in it matter for odious interpretation.” Her cousin replies: “That’s true. May my honor and reputation for courage perish, rather than that flower of innocence which graces your name. I will turn it all off as a jest.”

As it is common knowledge that, though never a compulsive transvestist, George Sand wore men’s clothes as frequently as women’s from her girlhood in Nohant until she approached middle age, her treatment of this incident is rather surprising. But this, and her careful avoidance of so much as the mention of female homosexuality, carry a suggestion of the caution observed by all potentially suspected variants. The circumstances of Aurore Dudevant’s childhood and puberty were enough, in all conscience, to produce any or all of the aberrations in a psychoanalyst’s manual. Her heterosexual affairs were so numerous, open, and dramatic that few students have looked for other emotional incidents in her life. By her own statement, however, she never achieved complete satisfaction with any of the men she loved,[3] and there are a number of suggestive incidents which crop up in one after another of her biographies.

During her last year in a convent school in Paris—at about seventeen, that is—she suffered what in modern parlance would be called a violent “crush” on an Irish schoolmate. In the 1830s she was “for a long time ... fascinated by the great romantic actress of the day, Dorval.... Dumas and Vigny loved her (Dorval), and she had been Musset’s last mistress. George had seen much of her in those years, so much that Vigny had become jealous of their intimacy.”[4] (André Maurois quotes a letter in which Vigny refers to Sand viciously as “that Lesbian.”)[5] Many years later, after Dorval’s death, Sand took over the responsibility for her children. During Sand’s sojourn in Switzerland in the middle 1830s she met Mme. d’Agoult—known to literature as Daniel Stern—and was so strongly attracted that she entertained her new friend at Nohant for several months after their return to France. Subsequently the two lived but a few doors apart in Paris and for some time held a joint salon. Still later she experienced a friendship of similar intensity with Pauline Garcia, Malibran’s sister and a noted singer. Even after Garcia had married Viardot, Sand continued to see so much of her that Mme. Viardot was generally referred to as “Mme. Sand’s friend” first, “the great singer” second.

Given Sand’s passionate temperament and her lack of restraint, it seems reasonable to assume that she had several variant experiences, which were overshadowed in the public eye by her more dramatic heterosexual ones, and about which she preserved discreet silence in her writing. It may be argued that such silence is out of character with her fictional volubility about her other affairs. But the noted men of her day with whom she became involved had little to fear from her advertising their relations with her. For her own reputation she was apparently not much concerned, being a true and courageous child of the period; however, she may well have felt consideration for women whom she loved and who had more to lose. Possibly her variant attachments were _not_ physical liaisons; nevertheless, if she had presented them fictionally in their true intensity, because of her other notorious experiences it is unlikely that they would be credited with innocence.

*Emily Brontë.* In England an even more complete discretion was guarded by the enigmatic Emily Brontë. All four of the Brontës wrote with talent which in Charlotte and Emily approached genius; yet their lives as children of a poor clergyman in a remote country village were almost empty of outward event. Emily’s was barren even of a love affair, a paradox to critics in view of the emotional power in her writing. In the century since their deaths, some hundred critical and biographical studies have attempted to solve the Brontës’ riddle. In Charlotte’s case the task is relatively simple, since her letters reveal without much reticence two passionate attachments, one to Ellen Nussey, an early school friend, and the second to Constantin Héger, master of the school in Brussels where she twice stayed briefly, as student and as teacher. The first love was of such intensity that E. F. Benson, in his biography of Charlotte, frankly pronounces it homosexual, though he is quick to add that considering the frequency of such experience among adolescents of both sexes, it should be regarded as more normal than otherwise.

It is true that this friendship began in the years between fourteen and sixteen when Charlotte and Ellen were together in boarding school, but it seemed to grow rather than diminish over the subsequent decade, until Charlotte was writing to Ellen in her twenties of “trembling all over with excitement after reading your note.” In 1836, when she was twenty-one, Charlotte wrote:

Ellen, I wish I could live with you always, I begin to cling to you more fondly than I ever did. If we had a cottage and a competency of our own I do think we might love until Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness.

And again in the next year:

Why are we so divided? Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well—because of losing sight of the Creator in idolatry of the creature.[1]

From the very openness of these transports it must be obvious that the relationship was an innocent one, and indeed that she herself was ignorant of any other possibility. Moreover, all the fire went out of it as soon as she had met and fallen in love with M. Héger.

Emily’s case is more complex; consequently, all manner of solutions have been advanced for the puzzle she presents, from a most secretly hidden liaison of the ordinary sort to an incestuous relation with her brother Branwell. The most illuminating suggestions from the viewpoint of the present study are found in Romer Wilson’s _All Alone_ and in Virginia Moore’s _The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë_. Miss Wilson analyzes in Emily what she terms the “Dark Hero ideal,” a male alter ego which she very plausibly claims to be the most significant feature of Emily’s personality, and of which she shows Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_ to be a projection. Employing a different approach, Miss Moore assembles objective testimony that from earliest childhood Emily was boyish in appearance, temperament and behavior, and suggests that many of her lyrics were inspired by a person of her own sex.[2] In Emily’s own day, of course, _Wuthering Heights_ was the one novel published by the pseudonymous “Bells” whose feminine authorship critics longest refused to credit, and Moore’s chapter advancing the theory of Emily’s variance is very convincing. Adverse critics have attacked Moore’s soundness on the score of her misreading the title of a poem in the British Museum Brontë manuscript; however, all the Brontë handwriting is virtually illegible, and Moore was the first to study the document. In her zeal to consider all conceivable evidence for a man in Emily’s life, she read as “Louis Parensell” a title shown later to be inserted in Charlotte’s hand and deciphered as “Love’s Farewell,” but at least her exhaustive search for records of Mr. Parensell has reduced the likelihood of any subsequent scholar’s unearthing evidence of a lover.

Surprisingly enough, Moore failed to capitalize on one important episode in Emily’s life—the girl’s reaction at fifteen to her first meeting with Charlotte’s bosom friend, Ellen Nussey. At the time of Ellen’s first house-visit to the Brontë’s she was, on the evidence of a surviving portrait, a bewitchingly pretty and very feminine young woman. Thus the adolescent Emily, who had had opportunity of meeting virtually no one outside her family, was thrown into contact with an older girl of great physical appeal and one patently capable of variant emotion. The house was small, and sleeping arrangements involved Emily’s sharing a bedroom with Charlotte and her guest.

But Emily had sensibilities too delicate to intrude on bosom friends. While Charlotte and Ellen whispered far into the night, she bundled up and went and slept in the little cubby over the peat room with Tabby the servant.[3]

One day Charlotte was ill and unable to entertain her guest.

But to their surprise, Emily, whose dislike of strangers had always been violent, volunteered for that office. On their return from the moors Charlotte was nervous. “How did Emily behave?” she asked eagerly as soon as she could get Ellen aside. “Why, Emily had been very, very nice,” said Ellen in surprise.[3]

Later in her life Ellen described Emily as maddeningly unsociable, but as having “a brilliant and very appealing sudden gaze when she allowed her eyes to be seen.”

Immediately upon Ellen’s departure, Emily suffered an attack of erysipelas so severe that her arm had to be lanced, “accompanied—unromantically—by liver complaint.” The indication that her general health was not good Moore considers puzzling.

Though living next to the pollution of an ancient graveyard and exposed to the unhealthy environment of Cowan’s Bridge [the original of the dreadful boarding school in Charlotte’s _Jane Eyre_] she had remained hale and strong from the age of five to the age of fifteen.[4]

In view of modern psychosomatic theory, this illness is highly revealing, for skin and gall bladder complaints are recognized symptoms of emotional tension or disturbance. It seems fairly evident that Emily was strongly (even if perhaps unconsciously) drawn to Ellen Nussey. Under the circumstances the latter’s visit would have been a period of intense stimulation and strain. At the withdrawal of the exciting presence the nervous reaction was equally intense, and her body registered a deprivation which her proud and independent spirit would not willingly have admitted to consciousness.

There is also internal evidence of variance to be gleaned from Emily’s poetry, despite the angry insistence of one critic that “Emily Brontë’s own voice turns to nonsense the hundreds of pages of biography based on [such] subjective interpretation.”[5] The critic is Fannie Ratchford, whose separate volume, _The Brontës’ Web of Childhood_, skillfully reconstructs the two sequences of remarkable legend composed during adolescence by Charlotte and Branwell, and Emily and Anne respectively. But in her impatience with subjectivity Mrs. Ratchford goes to the other extreme of regarding these creations as spontaneously generated and quite unrelated to the lives of their creators. Thus, her discovery that cryptic initials heading Emily’s most “masculine” poems stand for male characters in the Gondal epic leads her to the outburst quoted above. Yet she herself points out that the poems in question were composed over a period of twelve years, and that “lack of agreement between chronology of composition and story sequence shows that they were not written as progressive plot incidents but were merely the poetic expression of scenes ... and emotions familiar to her inner vision....” Ratchford also admits that “only a small percent of the poems carry headings, and [these] ... raise as many problems as they solve. Varying sets of initials appear for the same character ... G. S. in one poem is a boy, in another a woman.”[6]

Thus it seems probable that Emily’s lyrics sprang from her own experience, and that the confused initials represent an effort to incorporate them into some whole which would not betray their intimacy. (In the end she achieved her catharsis in prose through _Wuthering Heights_.) For lyric poetry is the most personal of all modes of expression, and Emily was morbidly reticent. All Brontë scholars know the story of Charlotte’s “accidental” reading in 1845 of her sister’s jealously guarded manuscript, and of the violent quarrel which followed. In Charlotte’s own moderate words:

My sister Emily was not a person ... on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could with impunity intrude. It took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.[7]

It is certain that many poems, along with many letters, were sacrificed to Emily’s passion for privacy.

The most enigmatic chapter in Emily’s history covers the years from 1835 through 1838. All critics agree on the evidence of her poetry that during this time she underwent the major emotional experience of her life, one which gave rise to poems of nightmare, guilt, tragic separation and desire for death, and one which also contained the seeds of the mutually destructive love of Catherine and Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_, written nearly a decade later. Emily’s correspondence from this period has been lost or destroyed, Charlotte’s few surviving letters have undergone cutting on her part which leaves them barren, and one must infer pointed expurgation. The precise dating of Emily’s poems written before 1839 might help solve the mystery, but for such precision scholars have striven in vain. The latest and best established chronology, that of Hatfield, will be accepted here.

It is known that for three months in late 1835 Emily was a pupil at Roe Head, a boarding school where Charlotte was engaged as teacher. Her speedy withdrawal was laid to Charlotte’s concern for her health; and as her poems before that date indicate that she could not be happy away from the moors and could not endure any sort of constraint, she may well have been literally sick for the freedom of home. Upon her return there, Anne went to Roe Head in her place, and Emily was left in Haworth with Branwell, who must have been sad enough company. He had just failed neurotically in his intention to study at the Royal Academy and was spending his time as a drunken idler at the village tavern. It is because so few poems and so few letters to or from her absent sisters remain from this interim that the hypothesis of a questionable relationship between brother and sister has grown up, and of course, Emily’s rapid decline and death within a year of Branwell’s in 1847 lends some support to the theory. But her poetry bearing the date of 1836 is emotionally thin and immature, and critics are agreed that the major change in it dates from the following year.

The single external event in her life at that time was a teaching engagement at Law Hill, of which all that is known certainly is that it continued for at least six months during 1837. Some scholars hold that it began in the fall of 1836, others that it continued well into 1838. There are traces of evidence to support both contentions, but whether it lasted six months or sixteen, it was, beyond question, Emily’s longest absence from Haworth till then. Following Hatfield’s dating of her poems, one can trace first the impact of new scenes (February 1837), nostalgia for the moors, and a wish to “be healthful still and turn away from passion’s call.” Then in sequence (how rapid one cannot say) come abysmal self-distrust; nightmare; melancholy; the agony of separation (November, 1837); more desperate melancholy (through 1838); and finally in late October and early November, 1838, two poems of passionate and bitter reproach to a faithless feminine love: “I knew not ’twas so dire a crime To say the word adieu,” and “Light up thy halls—and think not of me!” Whatever experience produced these intense, immediate and certainly autobiographical outcries must have occurred during a period when, as a letter to Charlotte testifies, her boarding-school responsibilities absorbed her from six in the morning until sometimes eleven at night, and where supervision would have made association with a man impossible. In view of her earlier quick withdrawal from Roe Head, the fact that she endured such conditions for even six months is remarkable.

It is reasonable to imagine that at Law Hill she met and fell ardently in love with another woman—whether teaching colleague or senior student—and that the emotion was sufficiently mutual for Emily to envision some such lasting companionship as Charlotte dreamed of with Ellen Nussey. (Indeed, Moore’s emphasis upon the beauty, intellectual and social capacities, and personal charm of Miss Elizabeth Patchett, the school’s forty-four-year-old headmistress, suggests the possibility of Emily’s superior having lit the flame reflected in her verse.) The pattern of such dormitory dramas, whoever the actors, is fairly constant. One young woman is aglow with excitement and an often illusory sense of complete rapport; the other is flattered and genuinely responsive until the emotional voltage runs too high. Then withdrawal follows on the one side, hurt and misunderstanding on the other. Whether Emily encountered Victorian admonition from a colleague, or the news from some charming young creature (as she toyed with her new ring) that _she_ was about to enter love’s _real_ province, it is certain that Emily felt herself “betrayed.” Actually, this proud woman of twenty or twenty-one, in the grip of authentic passion, must have been brought to see her feeling through other eyes as something between a juvenile _Schwarm_ and that horror the very name of which Saint Paul forbade to be uttered. It is probable that she became at once either physically or nervously ill and perhaps left the school (inexplicable in the middle of a term), hiding jealously the reason for her going, and blotting it from all records. (Interestingly enough Moore tells us that Miss Patchett married a local vicar “shortly after Emily’s departure from Law Hill.” Was it her halls that were lit, and for her wedding, in November 1838?)[8]

A blow like this—the realization that the only love of which she seemed capable was regarded by the world as either frivolous or sinful—would explain her subsequent melancholy and her stubborn refusal to enter again into any personal relationship. It also colored her memories of Law Hill so that a decade later she used details of the buildings and environs to describe Wuthering Heights farm, the setting in which, as the dark-spirited Heathcliff, she finally wrought vicarious revenge upon a vain and inconstant Cathy.

*George Eliot.* The eye in search of variance inevitably turns next to the George in England who had not yet assumed her masculine cognomen—Mary Ann Evans. This novelist was undoubtedly masculine in many ways, both physically and psychologically; which of these traits were inborn and which bred of the childhood adoration of father and brother so vividly reflected in _Mill on the Floss_, it is impossible to say. But George Eliot’s masculinity does not seem to have affected her emotional life. There are, to be sure, a handful of very close women friends cited in the Hansons’ recent biography:[1] Sara Hennell, near her own age and, like her, rather masculine; Mary Sibree, the first young girl she tutored; and later Bessie Parkes and Barbara Leigh Taylor, young feminists a half dozen years or more her junior. All of these are mentioned as parties to friendships which were briefly more or less emotional on one side or both. But even so, two considerations exclude their subject from a list of variant women until more evidence is at hand. The concern felt by two of the girls’ families about Mary Ann Evans’s influence was caused not at all by her emotional temperament but by her religious unorthodoxy. Furthermore, nothing in George Eliot’s work reflects any interest in emotional connections between women or even an awareness of them. Her life, as soon as she was freed from enslavement to her invalid father, was a succession of excitements involving men, men who captivated her emotions regardless of whether they were married or (like Herbert Spencer) incapable of passion. She was that case so disheartening to the hereditary theorist—an extremely mannish woman not obsessed with women but with men.

*Margaret Fuller.* The life of an American contemporary of George Sand and Emily Brontë offers similar suggestions of variance, while her surviving work is almost equally empty of it. Margaret Fuller, New England transcendentalist, feminist, and journalist, is remembered for her _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, which played a part in this country comparable to Wollstonecraft’s _Vindication_ in England; for her editing of the short-lived _Dial_, and for her work at home and abroad on the staff of Horace Greeley’s _New York Tribune_. She is also remembered for her friendships with Emerson and Carlyle and her efforts to familiarize her countrymen with Italian and German literature, especially the work of Goethe. She is thought to have been the model for Holmes’ Lurida Vincent and for the Zenobia of Hawthorne’s _Blythedale Romance_. Catherine Anthony, in one of the first “psychoanalytic” biographies of this century,[1] reveals the rigorous asceticism and intellectual forcing imposed upon her during childhood by that puritan idealist, Timothy Fuller, and argues for a father fixation as the key to her later emotional life.

It was not until the age of thirty-four that she experienced her first romantic love for a man, the German Jew James Nathan, whom she met during her first year in New York. When he expressed passion for her, she was deeply disturbed, even shocked, and he soon returned to Europe,

## partly, it is thought, to escape from her stubbornly “platonic” hold

upon him. Four years later in Italy she lived for a season with the Marchesa d’Ossoli, whom she married secretly after discovering that she was pregnant, as Wollstonecraft had done in the case of Godwin. Versions of both these heterosexual experiences were permitted to survive by Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, who edited her _Memoirs_, but, says Mason Wade in a later biography, “These friends of Margaret, in their regard for her memory, inked out, scissored or pasted over a third of the never-to-be-duplicated mass of material they had before them.”[2]

The first thirty-four of her fifty years were not, however, emotionally empty. At the age of thirteen she fell deeply in love with an Englishwoman visiting in Cambridge, the first member of a more cosmopolitan society than she had before encountered. When after a few months her adored departed she fell into melancholy, was unable to eat, and declined so much in health that her father packed her off to a boarding school to find companionship of her own age. She was far too precocious and self-absorbed to be popular with the girls, and her chief interest was in a sympathetic teacher with whom, as with her English idol, she afterwards corresponded for years. Family cares and financial stress after her father’s death apparently filled her late teens and early twenties to the exclusion of personal contacts, and no emotional record survives from the year when she taught in Bronson Alcott’s school. At the end of a succeeding period as headmistress of a school in Providence, however, she parted from the boys without emotion, but the girls, whose adoration had been precious to her, all wept at losing her and she wept with them. (Most of these incidents were not expurgated from her _Memoirs_.)

Her next five years, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four, were devoted to her famous “Conversations,” hybrids between a French salon and a modern seminar. For a course of these two-hour sessions held in the homes of the participants her fee was twenty dollars, in a day when tickets to as many lyceum lectures cost only two; still her group never numbered less than thirty. Her intellectual brilliance and the magnetism she exerted upon her exclusively feminine audiences have become legendary, and it is quite evident from the various accounts of them that a strong emotional rapport with women contributed to her success. It is notable that the evening course given one winter to a mixed group which included many distinguished intellectual men was a comparative failure.

Considering her emotional inhibitions as shown in her affair with Nathan, and, more particularly, in view of the rigorous prudery of Boston at the time, it is unlikely that any of her numerous feminine attachments reached the point of overt expression. But the student of variance must forever regret the loss of those confessional passages obliterated by the three moral vigilantes who edited them.

The only other episode of possible variant significance in her life (aside from her translating a part of the work of Günderode) was the effort she made to meet George Sand when she reached Europe in 1846. The famous woman was for a month or so away from Paris, and after her return she failed to answer Margaret’s note begging an interview. After a week of silence Margaret “took her courage into her hands” and risked a call. A servant’s error in reporting her name might even then have sent her away disappointed, but she persisted, and finally reached Sand in person. Writing to a friend about the encounter, she says:

Our eyes met. I shall never forget her look at that moment.... Her face is very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least coarse.... What fixed my attention was the expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power that pervaded the whole.... As our eyes met she said, “C’est vous,” and held out her hand. I took it and went into her little study.... I loved, shall always love her.[3]

Though pressed for time, Sand kept her for the greater part of the day and talked freely to her. Afterwards Margaret decided that despite her hostess’s constant smoking, and the fact that she had undoubtedly had “something of the bacchante in her life,” she had never liked any woman better than she liked George Sand.

*Adah Isaacs Menken.* The difference in emotional climate between puritan Boston and exotic New Orleans could not be better illustrated than by setting against Margaret Fuller’s life that of the actress, dancer, poet and adventuress who attained fame as Adah Isaacs Menken. Encyclopedias are monotonously insistent that she was born Dolores Adios Fuertes, daughter of a Spanish Jew. Various other sources, among them the preface to an 1890 edition of her poems,[1] claim that she was Adelaide McCord, daughter of a storekeeper in a small Louisiana town. The truth is perhaps obscured forever by what another authority describes as “her own habit of romancing about herself and her origin.”[2] Thus some of the following picturesque details offered by Clement Wood should doubtless be liberally salted, but many are demonstrably true.

Although, like Margaret Fuller, Menken was precocious enough to be translating the _Iliad_ at twelve, she was also dancing in the New Orleans Opera House, and by the age of fourteen “she was a woman, whose sensitive beauty was the pride of the town.” By the time she was twenty she had the following adventures to her credit: marriage at sixteen to “a nobody whose very name has vanished,” who abused and abandoned her; a season of dancing which made her the darling of the Tacón Theatre in Havana; a tour with an amateur theatrical company in Texas, followed by her founding a newspaper in the town of Liberty; being captured by Indians, and rescued by white rangers. A year after the first publication of Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_ she brought out a volume, _Memoirs_ (or _Memories_ [?] now lost) which is said to have “received the placid fervor it deserved.”[3]

A few months before she was twenty-one she married a musician in Galveston, Alexander Isaacs Menken, adopted his faith and his name, and retained both to the end of her short but crowded career, though this included several later marriages. She subsequently returned to the stage and toured the south, part of the time in Edwin Booth’s company. In Cincinnati she paused long enough to study sculpture, and became the leading contributor to the _Cincinnati Israelite_. Her article on Baron Rothschild’s admission to parliament won her his epithet of “inspired Deborah of her adopted race.” Moving north to Dayton, she took up military drill and was elected captain in the Life Guards. Here she met a pugilist, John Heenan, known as the Benicia Boy, whom she married a year later in New York, but, like her first unlucky choice, he was brutal, and she subsequently tried matrimony with the humorist known as Orpheus C. Kerr, and again with “one John Barclay.” Menken died, Kerr she divorced, but in what manner she freed herself of her other mates is uncertain.

Her success as an actress seems to have been moderate until in New York in 1861 she accepted the part of Mazeppa in a dramatization of Byron’s melodramatic poem. This male part involved being bound to the back of a fiery Arab steed, feet in his mane, head hanging from his crupper, and “she glittered in this role from Albany to London, Paris and Vienna.” In Europe she enjoyed social and literary, as well as dramatic, success. “Nobility and royalty paid court to her; the aristocracy of art thronged to her salon.” She was the intimate friend of Gautier, Dumas, Charles Reade, Swinburne, and Dickens, and in 1868 dedicated to the last of these her second volume of poems, _Infelicia_.[4] Within a few months of its publication she fell ill and died at the age of thirty-three.

Menken’s place in the present study is due to James Gibbons Huneker’s comment in _Steeplejack_:

The grave of Ida [sic] Isaacs Menken, poet, actress ... greatest of Mazeppas, is there [Père La Chaise cemetery in Paris].... Her letters to Hattie Tyng Griswold, published after the death of the notorious and unhappy woman, revealed another side of her temperament. Extracts were printed in the newspapers. She was a Mazeppa doubled by a Sappho. Her slender volume of verse entitled “Infelice” was credited to Swinburne, but that is nonsense. The poet of Anactoria, while he sympathized with Lesbian ladies, never wrote bad poetry.... A strikingly handsome woman according to the report of her day, her figure being the “envy of sculptors.” ... A tormented, morbid soul, a virile soul in a feminine body....[5]

Upon examination, the volume _Infelicia_ reveals no more obvious lesbianism than do the poems of Brontë or Labé. Its impersonal poems, pleas for the Jews or for industrially exploited women, explain the interest of Dickens and Reade, champions of social reform. The tragic desperation in most of the love lyrics suggests, along with her twice marrying sadistic men and her success as the victimized Mazeppa, a strain of masochism which may account for her appeal for Swinburne (who was not, craving Huneker’s pardon, too sympathetic to lesbian ladies, but who was obsessed by pain). Three poems, however, are obviously addressed to women. “Dying” and “Answer Me” allude to soft and tender hands, warm bosoms. “A Memory; To a Dead Woman” says:

Too late we met. The burning brain, The aching heart alone can tell How filled our souls with death and pain When came the last sad word, Farewell![6]

In “The Release,” a subjective autobiographical fragment, she says:

Wherefore was that poor soul of all the host so wounded? It struggled bravely ... Can it be this captive soul was a changeling, and battled ... in a body not its own?[7]

These poems to, or about, women come nearest to serenity and peace of any in the volume. The rest reproach men for their cruelty to the women who bear their children, or, like “Resurgam,” they represent the author as dead though still beautiful, crowned with flowers, and fêted—her spirit murdered by the man she loved.[8]

As to the Hattie Tyng Griswold mentioned by Huneker, she is listed in Frances Willard’s _Woman of the Century_[9] as a successful Wisconsin journalist and a friend of Violet Paget, the British art critic and philosopher, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. No record seems to exist of her connection with Menken outside the newspaper articles mentioned by Huneker, which have not been consulted here. As in the case of Sand and Wollstonecraft, interest in Menken’s spectacular career has diverted attention from possible variant experience, but it appears to be precisely such stormy and passionate spirits who turn to women for the happiness they are unable to find with any number of men. It is interesting that Clement Wood should say, in contradiction to Huneker, that she deserved as much poetic acclaim as Whitman, but “was a woman, with a softer voice.”[10] The volume alluded to, _Memoirs_, has not been seen by the present writer, but honest critical judgment compels some qualification of Wood’s praise in view of the known _Infelicia_, though there are many pages in the latter which are not “bad” poetry.

*“Michael Field.”* Another “poet” in the present group is Michael Field, pseudonym of two late-Victorian Englishwomen, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. They were aunt and niece, but actually they were much closer than this relationship indicates, for when Edith’s mother was left an invalid after the birth of a second child, Katherine and her mother moved in to care for the family, and Katherine assumed complete responsibility for the three-year-old Edith. Katherine was then seventeen and had studied at Newnham and in Paris, where she had been in love with the older brother of a French friend. This man died, and the loss is reflected faintly in her first published poetry a decade later. There is no indication of any other heterosexual interest on either woman’s part throughout their lives.

By the time Edith had reached late adolescence and Katherine was approaching thirty, their relation had become one of adult equality, and they were active together in university life in Bristol, though apparently more in debating, woman’s suffrage, and anti-vivesection societies than in formal university courses. In 1881, when one was thirty-three and the other nineteen, they published jointly a first book of verse, “by Arrand and Isla Leigh,” which received little critical comment. It was two years later that they hit upon the pseudonym of Michael Field, and when _Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund_ appeared in 1883 it was hailed as the work of a new and promising talent. They published, in all, eleven volumes of verse and nineteen or twenty poetic dramas, mostly on classical or historical themes; but, as Sturge Moore says in the introduction to their joint memoirs, _Works and Days_:

“After the first flush of acclamation their work was treated with ever-increasing coldness by the literary world, and there is no doubt that the discovery that Michael Field was no avatar ... but two women, was partly responsible.”[1]

The handful of volumes which have been available for inspection seem far from works of genius; nevertheless, the poems have as much freshness and lyric charm as those of many other minor writers who are repeatedly included in anthologies. The plays, though they exhibit careful historical scholarship, are weighted with moral or feministic message and seem artificial and heavy. The one that reached the stage in their own day was an immediate failure.

There is evidence in the luxurious format of their privately printed volumes, and in the description of the house in Richmond where they lived after Mr. Cooper’s death, that they were blessed with ample means, and beyond doubt their thirty-five years of adult life together were happier than the lives of most Victorian spinsters. They cultivated the acquaintance of all the surviving nineteenth-century poets, and derived much excitement from moderate friendships with the aging Browning and Meredith. But the Victorian era as a whole was disinclined to honor two “Platonists” as the previous century had done, and their closest friends were a pair of Royal Academy artists, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who lived together near them in a relationship evidently comparable to their own. That they did not escape disapprobation is indicated indirectly in several of the entries in _Works and Days_. When they first recognized Ricketts and Shannon at an art exhibition they hesitated long before speaking, uncertain how such a gesture might be received, even though Ricketts had designed the cover for one of their recent volumes. After attending another “private view” one Sunday afternoon in 1889, Katherine made much in their journal of being greeted by Fairfax Murray. “We recognized that he was proud to manifest to the world that we were his friends.”[2] And in connection with one of their volumes of verse, _Long Ago_ (1889), based on fragments from Sappho, Katherine told Browning that “we meant to do no more harm than George Herbert, when he took a text from Holy Writ and wrote a hymn thereon.” The harm they were accused of having done is not mentioned.

The relation between the two women is more difficult to analyze than any so far encountered. Some time before the publication of their first volume of poems they were moved to a step best described in a later poem of Katherine’s:

It was deep April, and the morn Shakespeare was born. My love and I took hands and swore Against the world, to be Poets and lovers evermore. To laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore, To sing to Charon in his boat, Heartening the timid souls afloat; Of judgment never to take heed, But to those fast-locked souls to speed Who never from Apollo fled, Who spent no hours with the dead; Continually With them to dwell, Indifferent to heaven and hell.[3]

This, along with certain other poems (notably the “Third Book of Songs” in _Underneath the Bough_), leaves no possible doubt about the intensity or the variance of their mutual emotion. Not even Colette, however, could assign a masculine or a feminine role to one or the other. Sir William Rothenstein, in his preface to _Works and Days_, describes “Michael” (Katherine) as “stout, emphatic, splendid and adventurous in talk;” “Field” (Edith) as “wan and wistful, gentler in manner, but equally eminent in the quick give and take of ideas.”[4] A good photograph of the two women shows Edith’s features to be of a decidedly boyish cast and her hair short. In the memoirs the two use a wealth of nicknames, masculine, feminine or neuter, and either may refer to the other by the male pronoun. It seems as though they tried to think of themselves as a single bisexual personality, and in one place Katherine says of the Brownings: “These two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each wrote, but did not bless and quicken one another at their work; _we are closer married_ [italics hers].”[5]

They exhibit consciousness of the physical possibilities between women more frankly than any other writers except for the portrayal of fictional characters. This is particularly striking in Edith’s account of an attack of scarlet fever she suffered while they were travelling in Germany. Katherine fought an entire hospital staff in order to occupy a room with her, and Edith writes later: “I have my love close to me.... Looking across at Sim’s little bed I realize she is a goddess, hidden in her hair—Venus. Yet I cannot reach her.... I grow wilder for pleasure and madder against the ugly Mädchen”[6] (the nurse who kept her in bed). Yet when another nurse, middle-aged, becomes infatuated and annoys her with constant caresses, she says:

My experiences with Nurse are painful—she is under the possession of terrible fleshly love she does not conceive as such, and as such I will not receive it. Oh, why will Anteros make one cynical by always peering over the beauty of every love—why must his fatality haunt us?[7]

Much later in their lives, Edith, whose health was never robust, failed steadily, learned she had cancer, and turned to the Church of Rome. Katherine followed her into that church more slowly and, one infers,

## partly to reassure the younger convert that they would never be

separated here or hereafter, just as she concealed the fact that she also was suffering from the same dread ailment as long as Edith lived, in order to spare her added vicarious pain. This religious move resulted from the influence of a brilliant Jesuit, who had made their acquaintance through enthusiasm for the mystic exaltation of their verse. There is no hint of struggle, change of habit or attitude, or anything resembling “repentance” in either woman, and this fact, along with the “Anteros” allusion above, suggests that the two had achieved some sort of limitation upon expressing their love which satisfied their stringent Victorian consciences.

Probably the complete manuscript of _Works and Days_ included other psychological and philosophical discussion of such relationships, and perhaps also more details of the poets themselves, for Sturge Moore mentions having reduced the text considerably in the interests of good taste, and of omitting matter likely to be of little interest to later students of literature. Unfortunately, biographers and literary historians often prune material of foremost interest to students of emotional psychology.

*Emily Dickinson.* If Emily Brontë was for a century a British enigma, Emily Dickinson has for almost as long been New England’s “little sphinx.” Many who do not know her poems will have heard of her self-cloistration at thirty in the family house in Amherst, her wearing only white thereafter, and her habit of communicating even with old friends through the open door of a room in which she remained stubbornly invisible. Favoring the growth of such legends are a life as empty of outward event as the earlier Emily’s, poems with a higher emotional charge and no fictional disguises, and a history of publication mysteriously complicated by family feud. Some critics have observed that in nineteenth century New England recluses and eccentrics were not uncommon, particularly among old maids and old bachelors who sometimes worked at becoming “characters.” Some have elucidated in detail the family quarrel between surviving sister and sister-in-law which blocked publication. But none have dared to pretend that Emily’s life was absolutely normal.

A tragic love affair has been the natural hypothesis, and search for clues has produced an embarrassment of possible candidates. All Emily’s letters resemble her poems enough in economy and intensity so that despite her own elision and the subsequent editing many still approach love letters in effect. On their internal and some external evidence, she seems to have felt real warmth for a number of men with whom she enjoyed intellectual communion, from her near-contemporary George Gould in the late 1840s to Judge Otis Lord, her father’s friend, eighteen years her senior, in her later life. To each of a half-dozen potential candidates, one biographer or another has assigned responsibility for the heartbreak in her poetry and her willful seclusion. But in every case, objective support is meager, and the necessary assumptions have reflected the theorist’s predilections quite as much as his subject’s.

As the quantity of poetry and correspondence in print has increased, however, the different editors’ versions of some duplicate material have invited comparison, and from this and much peripheral research Rebecca Patterson has suggested in _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ (1951) a pattern of departure from the norm which brings its subject within the range of the present study. Mrs. Patterson presents the integrated results of three separate investigations. First, she has studied Emily’s life story exhaustively: the puritan background in Amherst; emotional tensions in the family circle (Emily’s father, whom she both loved and inwardly defied, forbade at least one marriage and tried to prevent her writing); Emily’s feelings, convincingly diagnosed as ambivalent, toward the men who captured her interest; and her sometimes more absorbing attachments to certain women. Second, Mrs. Patterson has compiled the objective and emotional biography of Kate Scott Anthon of Cooperstown, New York. This tall, striking, and passionate woman she shows to have been the product of a relatively cosmopolitan milieu, to have been emotionally attracted to women from adolescence in boarding school to ripe old age on the continent (despite a couple of satisfying if short-lived marriages), and to have met and violently loved Emily Dickinson when both young women were about twenty-nine. Third, she has collated all available versions of Emily’s poems and letters (in some of which the sex and number of pronouns were altered or lines omitted by the poet herself or censoring editors), and has re-established chronology which was either deliberately falsified or wishfully confused by the editors to support the legend of a male lover. However unpopular Mrs. Patterson’s hypothesis of a variant passion for Kate Anthon may be, it partly explains the erratic behavior of both the poet herself and her surviving relatives as motivated by fear of scandal. (Sue Gilbert Dickinson in particular, whom Emily’s sister Lavinia branded a procrastinator and obstructionist in the matter of publication, had her reasons.)

From minutely assembled external evidence as well as careful interpretation of poems and letters, Mrs. Patterson reconstructs the following emotional history. During late adolescence Emily was passionately attached to Sue Gilbert, afterward her sister-in-law, a girl who had similarly attracted Kate Scott during their boarding school days. But Sue herself was cold in both relationships, and left Emily wholly unaware of the true nature of her emotion. A decade later, Kate Scott Anthon appeared, the widow of a loved first husband who had died after only two years of married life. Kate was beautiful, socially and emotionally mature, hungry for love, and much taken with Emily at sight. The two women’s association was not protracted, probably amounting in all to less than two months; however, it was highly concentrated during Kate’s semi-annual visits over a period of two years to Sue Gilbert Dickinson who lived next door to Emily.

The contact begun in March 1859 flowered then and during August of that year into an intense mutual absorption. Emily even showed Kate the poetry of which her own family still knew nothing. This flowering included some demonstrativeness, apparently Emily’s first congenial experience of caresses, and therefore an electrifying revelation. In March 1860, during Kate’s third visit to Sue, Emily’s sister Lavinia was absent from home, and the two young women spent a night together. This experience enlightened Emily as to at least the nature of passion (a lesson of which many Victorian spinsters died ignorant), but to Kate’s desire for complete intimacy, Emily reacted with shock and withdrawal. Kate knew herself well enough to be aware that she could not continue a close association on Emily’s puritanic terms, and she avoided visiting Sue again for more than a year, though for a time she continued to correspond with Emily. The latter was too inexperienced to understand quite what had happened, and for six months she continued to be—as she had been since first meeting Kate—happier and more out-going in her personal relationships and correspondence than ever before or after.

Then, at the beginning of 1861, Kate ceased to reply to Emily’s letters, of which only three have been published and probably few more survived. Kate was not silent from indifference; Mrs. Patterson assembles sound evidence that she too suffered bitterly. But she was apparently convinced that their relation had reached an impasse, and by April 1861 Emily’s pain and veiled reproach so troubled her that she wrote terminating their connection. This month marked the beginning of Emily’s withdrawal from social contacts. She refused particularly to see anyone who might mention Kate’s name, for fear of her own reaction if she heard it spoken. Meanwhile, Kate had turned for comfort to her friend, Gertrude Vanderbilt, wife of a New York judge and some six years her senior, on whom she evidently could depend for complete understanding. Mrs. Vanderbilt seems to have offered sane advice—which may even have preceded Kate’s final letter to Emily—and some religious consolation. When in the fall of 1861 Kate felt constrained to visit Sue Dickinson, knowing that to sever the connection without reason would arouse awkward conjecture, she played safe by bringing Mrs. Vanderbilt with her. To the still uncomprehending Emily, this effective preclusion of private interviews was a bitter final blow.

All this, it must be admitted, is a fairly detailed reconstruction of events for which proof positive can never be produced. But it did not deserve the wholesale damnation which critics accorded Mrs. Patterson’s volume when it appeared. Other biographers had noted the meticulous omission of any descriptive detail in Emily’s love poems which could give a clue to the beloved’s identity or personality. The present writer, still little acquainted with Dickinson (to her shame be it said) when _Bolts of Melody_ appeared in 1945, was assured by several lovers of Emily’s poetry, on the internal evidence in that volume, that the poet belonged in this study. Let us grant, then, that Emily may in her early life have felt “idealistically amorous” (as one critic phrases it) toward certain young men, notably Gould and Newton, with whom her associations came to nothing. (Both died quite young, which might

## partially account for Emily’s concern with death.) She also probably

fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth whom she met in Philadelphia in 1854. (This has the vote of Mark Van Doren, specialist in historical research.) But she saw Wadsworth no more than three times again, probably only twice, and then only for a few hours. In her late twenties—a dangerous age for emotional spinsters—she met the first woman whose mind matched her own. She was off guard precisely because her new friend was a woman; but Kate Anthon had virtually a man’s emotional approach. An explosive result was almost inevitable. Mrs. Patterson’s demonstration of how closely a new out-going happiness in poems and letters paralleled Emily’s meeting with Kate Anthon, how exactly the beginning of her period of “agony” coincided with Kate’s withdrawal, is too apt to be dismissed as absurdly biased special pleading.

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