“I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me.” ... He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained in the presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not flick her jealousies.[22] There is no suggestion that Ottalie reciprocated Agatha’s love, nor any implication of lesbian intimacy. Ottalie’s brother, however, tells the hero that although she loved him she thought him “too ready to surrender to immediate and perhaps wayward emotion”—an obvious hint at the heroine’s physical coldness or Victorian repression in the heterosexual field. Two years later and half a world away the Australian woman known to letters as Henry Handel Richardson recorded the emotional development of an adolescent girl in _The Getting of Wisdom_ (1910). At fourteen Laura is already too hard and independent to feel close to her emotional widowed mother, and at boarding school she is subjected to refined cruelty by her mates because she is so “different”—partly in her precocious literary interests but most of all in her dislike of boys. To gain face among them she invents a romance with a curate; the exposure of this fiction brings more ridicule which hardens her further. Her inner withdrawal becomes complete after the expulsion of an adoring younger girl who stole in order to buy her a keepsake. In the midst of her bitter isolation she is chosen as roommate by a popular girl a few years her senior, and at once succumbs emotionally to the first kindness and championship she has ever known. It is clear, however, that no physical intimacy ensues—Laura kisses Evelyn only once, and then impulsively when the latter, in a fit of pique, remarks that all men are fools. The friendship is slowly blighted by Laura’s passionate jealousy if the older girl goes out with men or shows attention to other girls, a “tyranny” to which the senior will not submit. The school gossips about this conspicuous attachment, but without censure or apparent awareness of questionable possibilities even on the part of the mistresses. After a brief and abortive religious “conversion” Laura sets herself to cultivate her literary talent by way of emotional outlet, for there are hints that she will never feel attracted to men. The wisdom gained during this difficult adolescence is summarized at the end by the author, who says that though the girl returned home feeling that she “fitted no hole,” she could not yet know that just those mortals who feel cramped and unsure in the conduct of everyday life will find themselves ... in that freer world where no practical considerations hamper, and where the creatures that inhabit dance to their tune.[23] That is, in the somewhat narcissistic world which they, as writers, create. This is a penetrating recognition of authorship as sublimation, written as it was several decades before psychiatrists began to take the writing fraternity apart.