*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.