The last novel dealing with feminism, violent in its condemnation of the Movement and also of female variance, is Strindberg’s _Confession of a Fool_. This story is now known to be a thinly veiled report of the author’s relations with his first wife, Siri von Essen, Baroness Wrangel, whom he married in 1877. It was written in 1887-1888 as an _apologia pro vita sua_ intended for publication after his projected suicide. When he decided instead to live and divorce his wife, he kept the manuscript sealed for five years, until public sentiment aroused by the circumstances of the divorce led him to publish it “in self defense.” In view of the fact that his second marriage in 1893 was followed a year later by his second divorce and a third matrimonial venture in 1901 came to a similar end in 1904, the _Confession_ provides a valuable document on the psychology of the unhappy misogynist, but scarcely an unbiased portrait of the wife. The hero of the story, Axel, is a bookish introvert with what today would be termed an obvious mother fixation. He falls in love with the wife of an officer, his friend, partly from pity because her husband is involved in a flirtation with her sophisticated young cousin; the Baroness Marie, however, is rather less concerned about the affair than Axel. “I’m in love with the little cat myself,” she says early in their acquaintance. Like Belot’s Adrien, Axel is not warned. In the idealism of first love he searches the art books in his library for a likeness of his beloved. She is a goddess—not Venus, definitely not Juno, not even Minerva, but Diana, “more boy than girl,” who never forgave Actaeon for seeing her nude. Axel is naïvely enraptured by this seeming evidence of his love’s purity. Presently Marie leaves her husband for a stage career, living with Axel rather incidentally and marrying him only upon discovery that she is pregnant. It appears later, however, that the child is the Baron’s, conceived after their formal divorce. After a masquerade for which she has dressed as a man, Marie is caught fondling a servant girl. To Axel’s reproaches she retorts that his suspicions are groundless and vile, as are police reports and medical treatises which term “vicious” all caresses of any warmth. The birth of a second child—Axel’s, this time—briefly relaxes domestic tension; however, Marie soon farms the child out to a nurse, installs an actress friend in a neighboring apartment, and creates a scandal by caressing her new love in public, though still protesting innocence.