“Anactoria” is a ten-page plaint from Sappho to a girl who no longer reciprocates her love, but it differs little from Swinburne’s many laments celebrating all love as pain. The “Sapphics” describe life on Mitylene, “place whence all gods fled ... full of fruitless women and music only.” A half dozen stanzas scattered through other poems—notably “Dolores,” “Faustine,” and “Masque of Queen Bersabe”—echo the same note. Swinburne’s attitude is unsympathetic, colder even than Baudelaire’s and more scornful, with emphasis always upon the barrenness of lesbian love, as might be expected from a poet who occasionally made almost a fetish of baby-worship. All of the longer biographies of Swinburne give some account of a projected narrative in mixed prose and verse upon which he worked intermittently between 1864 and 1867 but never finished. What remains of manuscript and galley proof is now in the British Museum, after a half-century in the possession of the notorious rare-book dealer and literary forger, Thomas Wise. It was finally edited and given private publication in 1952 by Langdon Hughes, an idolatrous admirer of Swinburne, for whom it held the promise of becoming, if completed, one of the greater English novels. Unhappily, neither the scant surviving text nor Mr. Hughes’s overwhelming volume of annotation and championship convey to the reader much of that promise or of the author’s projected intent. As Swinburne himself gave it no title it is generally known by the suggestive name of its central figure: _Lesbia Brandon_. Georges Lafourcade, in his scholarly two-volume study of Swinburne, suggests that this character was drawn from Jane Faulkner,[48] daughter of one of the poet’s friends, who also inspired “The Triumph of Time” (fifteen pages of bitter reproach for failure to love him and save him from other fateful loves). For this dark, spirited young girl he seems to have nursed briefly his only “normal” passion; she responded to his half-hysterical romantic proposal with a helpless burst of laughter, and it needed but the one touch of ridicule to snuff out the hardly lighted spark.[49] Lafourcade believes that Jane herself “avait quelque chose d’anormal,” and certainly the description of Lesbia is suggestive: dark, heavy-lidded, taciturn, Byronically proud, with a pathological hatred of men. When, on her deathbed, she is tenderly embraced by the man who adores her she shows only “mad repugnance, blind absolute horror.” In her youth she had loved a governess and threatened suicide when the woman talked of marrying. Later she was an enthusiastic student of Sappho and wrote many love poems from the masculine viewpoint.