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]