(From the recent sympathetic biography of Mansfield by her fellow New Zealander, Antony Alpers, several supplementary impressions emerge: 1) Ida Baker (“L.M.”) was never abject, but rather a dedicated priestess most happy to be elected and given a direction in life. 2) It was not her shadow which fell between Mansfield and Murry so much as the former’s compulsion to write. Katherine repeatedly blamed Murry’s self-absorption for the difficulties in their relations (Nelia Gardner White takes the same view in her novelized biography _Daughter of Time_, 1941) but surely her own was quite as marked. 3) While she was in Queen’s College, London, between fourteen and seventeen, there seems to have been some talk of her “unwholesome” friendships. Alpers uses the plural, but discusses only her domination of Ida Baker, unless her wooing of her feminine cousin Sidney Payne for a couple of years was also suspect. According to Alpers this courtship proceeded largely by letter, one of which he quotes to refute the charge. 4) From the picture of her two unhappy marriages (the first almost farcical) and her obviously ambivalent feeling for Ida Baker, it seems that she was a person unable to give herself completely to either man or woman. Was this because of her obsession with writing, or was that relentless creative urge the result rather than the cause of some deeper emotional block?) The most notable feature of all these twentieth century lyrics is the women’s relatively articulate confession of variant interests. Before 1900 only “Michael Field” and Matilda Betham-Edwards (to be mentioned later) admitted inclination toward their own sex. Now the Catholic O’Neill, the New England Lowell and Millay, the British Sackville-West reveal it without apology. Schwabe and Madeleine offer their testimony still more openly, and Barney and Vivien, with the independence of expatriates and women of fortune able to create their own milieu, proclaim it not only in writing but in their lives. Indeed Vivien at least promises in any long view of western literature to figure as a minor Sappho, the greater part of her work dedicated to this limited but seemingly imperishable theme. CHAPTER VII. FICTION IN FRANCE Before 1914