Erotic writing did not, of course, cease with the end of the eighteenth century. But what may be called the _galant_ way of life suffered a sharp check with the French Revolution. Not only the divine right of kings but the allied privilege of court circles to be a law unto themselves was eclipsed for a number of decades. In all countries and at all times the possessors of enormous wealth have enjoyed considerable independence of public opinion, but literature celebrating such independence in the sexual sphere tended to bifurcate after 1800 into problem novels whose tone was condemnatory, and an underground stream of pornography unacceptable for open publication. However unavailable the latter material may have been to the growing number of middle-class readers, rumors of its existence doubtless filtered into the general consciousness. Bisexual pornography continued to be written throughout the nineteenth century, some of it fairly high in quality and attributed to authors of renown, and the recurrence of lesbian activity in this subterranean stream may well have contributed to the disrepute of variance of all sorts during that century and the first years of the present one. CHAPTER III. FROM THE ROMANTICS TO THE MODERNS Introduction Imaginative works featuring variant women have thus far been few, widely separated in time, and for the most part written with literary intent only. Thus, it has sufficed to present them with slight orientation in literary history. During the nineteenth century such items averaged better than three per decade and the majority were novels, a form particularly apt to reflect drifts of contemporary thought and even to be written for ulterior ends. If even tenuous patterns are to be traced in this mass of material it will be necessary to sketch as background the general trends of interest from which the novels grew. Probably the most significant feature of the decades just following the French Revolution was the rapid spread of democratic efforts toward political, economic and educational betterment of the common man. This was reflected slowly in variant literature, and then only indirectly as it multiplied readers, writers, and subjects of relatively modest social status. Outside the field of social reform the same revolutionary sentiment appeared under such different guises as the Romantic Movement in literature and a scientific rather than a philosophic attack upon the problems of human personality.