A further possible reason for the relaxing of at least the American attitude toward variance is the publication of the Kinsey reports on sexual behavior.[2] The appearance of the male volume in 1948 encouraged the production of several serious novels featuring male homosexuality, a subject hitherto stringently banned from English fiction. It is not safe to say that this lifting of taboo significantly affected the feminine picture, since female variance was never so rigorously outlawed, and the count of pertinent titles was as large in 1943 and 1944, for instance, as in 1949 and 1950. For this same reason Kinsey’s second volume on the female (1953) seems unlikely to produce an effect comparable to his first. But one fact is certain—the inclusion of incidental variant and even lesbian episodes and characters is on the increase in popular current fiction. This statement leads to consideration of a third and purely practical reason for the increase—post-war innovations in the publishing business. Before 1941 experiments in producing books of high readability and low cost had not achieved financial success, but four years of government subsidy to the end of providing the armed forces with reading matter put the venture on a paying basis. At present, fiction available at magazine cost and from all magazine outlets has become a commonplace of daily life. While these paper-covered novels were at first reprints of titles notably successful in other editions, since 1950 a number of companies have issued originals in the same format. Quite naturally one sure-fire selling feature on the newsstands is frankness with regard to sex, and the multiplication of both reprints and originals dealing with female variance provides objective evidence of interest in that subject. Another requisite for fast sales is a not-too-exalted literary level, and the combination of sex latitude and popular quality has alerted would-be censors. For some years these self-appointed groups have sought to control the paper-backed market and have here and there succeeded. Variant titles have been conspicuous in all lists under fire from moral vigilantes, and the current question is whether censoring agencies will succeed in once again checking quantity circulation of such material. The Age of Innocence The last mentioned variant narrative in English was Henry James’s novelette _The Turn of the Screw_ (1898). Treating as it did the seduction of a girl of eight by a depraved governess, it was considered along with French titles of its decade which it resembled more closely than did any of the novels soon to appear in English. Of these last, none offered more contrast to French sophistication or could more fittingly have ushered in twentieth-century fiction in our own tongue than the innocuous tale published in 1900 by a now-forgotten British novelist, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.