*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]