The Superior in this last house is an overt lesbian, and her efforts to seduce the girl occupy nearly a third of Diderot’s whole volume. The young nun, steadfast in her desire for freedom—and marriage, though she has not yet known love—remains almost wholly blind to the meaning of the other’s blandishments and of her own partial response to them. The Superior is described as vain, frivolous, flighty, and wholly without religious feeling. The scenes in her quarters where her favorites gossip, fawn on her, and compete for her favors are more in the spirit of _galant_ eighteenth century canvases than that of a religious house. Ellis says that for the Superior “Diderot found a model in the Abbess of Chelles, a daughter of the Regent (Philippe of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV) and thus a member of a family which for several generations showed a marked tendency to inversion.”[7] Wherever Diderot gathered his material, his picture of fevered intrigue, jealousy, skilled seduction, and finally of the frustrated Superior’s decline into acute neurosis, is unparalleled in fiction before the present century. Indeed, for clinical accuracy of detail it had no equal until Westphal’s scientific case study of a homosexual woman was published in 1870. Thus it stands as a landmark in the literature of female sex variance. Equally a landmark, though of a very different sort, is Mary Wollstonecraft’s _Mary, a Fiction_, which since it appeared in 1788, actually antedated Diderot’s from the viewpoint of open publication. It is the first novel on female variance to be written by a woman, and its significance is augmented by its being an English work, written before its author’s lengthy sojourn in France at the beginning of the Revolution. The writer of this now forgotten volume (only a handful of copies are extant here or abroad) is more generally remembered for her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (1798), for her liaison in Paris during the Revolution with Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier of fortune, and for her later and comparatively unromantic marriage to William Godwin. In their recent _Modern Woman, the Lost Sex_.[8] Lundberg and Farnham devote much space to establishing the _Vindication_ as the germ of all subsequent rebellion of women against their normal social and biological roles. But though Wollstonecraft strongly defended the right of women to the individual liberty which was being generally claimed for all men, an impartial review of feminism hardly appears to justify so complete an assignment of responsibility to this single work.