Rachilde continued for several decades to produce novels, in some of which lesbian women made brief appearances too slight to consider here. Her one later sustained treatment of homosexuality, (which ran serially in the _Mercure de France_ as _Les Factices_ and was published in book form as _Les Hors Natures_) dealt with men. In the reviews of fiction which she contributed to her husband’s periodical from 1896 to the 1930s, she maintained the same attitude of superiority to female variance expressed by her own Raoule de Vénérande, but she regularly included lesbian novels in her review list and seldom failed to indicate their theme. Thus she provided an index of sorts to such fiction over a period of nearly forty years. When, during the 1890s, criticism was leveled at the _Mercure_ for its consistent noting of fictional “decadence,” Vallette replied in a sharp editorial that theirs was the only periodical whose reviews gave anything resembling an honest picture of contemporary writing.[12] The Shadow of Feminism In Rachilde’s two novels just considered, women’s deliberate adoption of male attire and outlook figures for the first time in half a century; that is, since the appearance of _Fragoletta_ and _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. No significant rebellion against the feminine role is evident in Zola’s or even Maupassant’s references to transvestism among prostitutes nor in other variant French fiction before 1890. In other countries, however, what is now termed the masculine protest was receiving considerable attention. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James in America, Olive Schreiner in South Africa, and August Strindberg in Sweden all contributed observations, even though the phenomenon appears in their work under widely differing guises and sometimes is only tenuously related to variance. Dr. Holmes, versatile contributor to both medicine and letters, would today undoubtedly have been a psychiatrist. Throughout his life he was preoccupied with intersexual personality in women, and he explored it at least tentatively in each of his three novels: _Elsie Venner_ (1859), _The Guardian Angel_ (1867), and _A Mortal Antipathy_ (1885). Of these a modern psychiatrist, Dr. Clarence Oberndorf, has observed: The theory of bisexuality and the importance of bisexual components in influencing the character of individuals is more than implied in each one of his abnormal personalities. The masculine traits in childhood of both Elsie Venner and Myrtle Hazard [in _The Guardian Angel_], something of a tomboy, are unmistakable. The bisexual theme becomes even clearer in _A Mortal Antipathy_, where Holmes repeatedly contrasts the femininity of Euthemia Tower with the masculinity of Lurida Vincent, and it is apparent that he has but little sympathy with the latter.[13]