The mounting stress upon an objective approach to psychological phenomena had its effect on alert literary minds. (It was not restricted, of course, to sex or variance). Balzac was the first to embark deliberately upon a “naturalistic” study of human experience, and although literary critics observe that his plots are often based on more or less abstract concepts, none deny that his individual characters show the fruit of minute observation. By 1857 Flaubert also was maintaining that “it is time to give it (literary art) the precision of the sciences by means of a pitiless method,”[4] and later in the century Zola pointed out that his own practice, as well as his theories set forth in _Le Roman Experimental_, were “based upon the application of experimental science to physiology as developed in the writings of Dr. Claude Bernard.”[5] Each of these three major novelists contributed to the understanding of female variance, and the same spirit can be detected in the fiction of several lesser writers who attacked the subject. Even in the many cases where direct connection cannot be demonstrated between scientific thought and the imaginative writing under consideration, there is a perceptible correlation from decade to decade between quantitative developments in both fields. Precursors of Modern Fiction The transition from _galant_ writing of the eighteenth century to modern fiction with its psychological preoccupation and its elevation of women’s roles to a position of romantic importance could hardly be better exemplified than by Diderot’s _La Religieuse_. Superficially, this novel appears to be a typical pre-revolutionary anti-clerical effort. As it was undertaken in 1760, only a year after the second suppression of its author’s major project, _L’Encyclopédie_, it is tempting to imagine that the Jesuits’ share in that act of censorship may have been the immediate spur to its inception. Actually _La Religieuse_ broke new ground, for Diderot’s preoccupation was not so much the religious shortcomings of the convents depicted, as the morbid physical and psychological effects of celibacy upon women, especially when this way of life was not freely elected but enforced by church and family.