consideration with twentieth-century material from which they are indistinguishable. Summary Before leaving the nineteenth century a brief summary of its variant writing will be illuminating. That a preponderance of the material was in French will not surprise English readers, who have long recognized the comparative frankness of France in matters of sex, at least until our own last decade or so. In view of the quantity and variety of attention devoted to the subject, however, the proportion of sympathetic treatment is low. Of the more than a dozen authors who took overt lesbianism as a major theme, seven—Coleridge, Baudelaire, Belot, Mendès, Peladan, Strindberg, and Gourmont—condemned it explicitly, though with differing degrees of severity. Seven others—Latouche, Balzac in _The Girl with the Golden Eyes_, Rossetti, Swinburne in _Lesbia Brandon_, Maupassant, Rachilde in _Mme. Adonis_, and James in _The Turn of the Screw_—made lesbian affairs responsible for murder, suicide and ruin, and so implied equally strong condemnation. Only three were tolerant, and of these Louÿs, for all his championing of sexual freedom generally, hurried Aline in _King Pausole_ into a heterosexual match at fifteen, and depicted Bilitis as promiscuous from puberty to death save for her lesbian interlude. Gautier was sympathetic to a single lesbian experience but predicted an unhappy future for Maupin. Verlaine alone, himself homosexual, let his portraits stand without comment. The several authors who included minor lesbian episodes pictured them as involving gravely maladjusted women or as the pastime of prostitutes and other questionable characters. Of the four novelists who used variance as a major theme but avoided or denied lesbian implications, James in _The Bostonians_ considered it a menace to society, Lamartine showed it as contributing to failure in heterosexual adjustment, Balzac in _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ made it a mystic apprenticeship for marriage, and only Wollstonecraft exalted it above experience with men. Quite as notable as this limited sympathy for variance is the frequency of heterosexual action. Some eighty primary and as many or more secondary characters are involved in the total of variant scenes, and of these only half a dozen indubitably never knew men. (For a number of the minor figures definite evidence is lacking, but indications are that they belonged in the bisexual group.) To be sure, several women had involuntary and/or distasteful experience with men, but the majority eventually found such experience preferable to variant relations.