One feature of these foreign twentieth-century novels which must strike even a casual observer is the high incidence of suicide among variant women. Physical or mental illness is also often attributed to lesbian practices. Both reflect the extent to which variant fiction was based on clinical reading. Both, too, are facile means of producing dramatic effect, and tend to placate the strait-laced by suggesting that, though man may tolerate aberration, nature will not. Such devices are avoided by writers of first rank—Colette, Rolland, Proust, Lacretelle and Mann—while in Wedekind the melodramatic is seasoned by satire. A second conspicuous motif is the struggle for personal independence which leads women to eschew marriage and motherhood or to achieve self-realization at the expense of family responsibilities. This reflects the progress of the women’s movement and the influence of Ibsen, Ellen Key and others. Discernible also is a slight decrease in the proportion of bisexual experience, due undoubtedly to the prevalence of hereditary theory. And last, there appears in more than a few novels a background of shifting homosexual groups, far above the underworld level, such as Peladan alone pictured earlier and then only as small private closed circles. It will be interesting to see how many of these continental features appear in English and American fiction. CHAPTER IX. FICTION IN ENGLISH Introduction The variant novels still to be surveyed in English number well over a hundred. In part this surprising count reflects the general growth of interest in sexual psychology and the increase in the number of feminine authors, both of which trends developed slightly later in the English-speaking countries than elsewhere. But beyond doubt it is also due in some measure simply to the greater accessibility of material in our own language. Book reviews in English and the indexes locating them have multiplied enormously since 1900, and, non-committal though reviews may be with regard to variance, a practiced reader grows sensitive to significant evasion. Even more fruitful, of course, is the wide, if superficial, skimming of each year’s output, a habit which nets not only unreviewed trivia but minor variant incidents in better novels as well. Had titles in French and German been equally ready to hand, the score here would certainly be more equitable.