When it is noted in conclusion that the proportion of male to female authors is even larger than that of French to English, one cannot avoid inferring some causal relation between the fact and the statistics above. This impression is confirmed by noting that the four feminine writers, Wollstonecraft, Schreiner, Rossetti and Rachilde, pictured no successful heterosexual relations. “Mary” refuses to consummate her marriage; Lyndall commits slow suicide to escape hers; Raoule achieves a fantastic evasion, and Mme. Adonis takes the man of the couple she captivates in a spirit of vindictive sadism. The hypothesis of a very natural sex bias with regard to feminine variance will be amply supported in studying twentieth-century authors. 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?