SOURCE: "From the Romantics to the Moderns," in Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey, Vantage Press, 1956, pp. 60-80.

In 1956, Foster published the first exhaustive study of lesbian content in literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature. The following excerpt presents some of her findings on the nineteenth century, demonstrating the ways in which authors—most of them French men—presented lesbian characters and encounters.

The Novel Before 1870

For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century variant fiction was so nearly an exclusive product of France that traces appearing elsewhere may be left for separate consideration. The first pertinent French item was a typical Romantic Period novel of indifferent literary quality, Philip Cuisin's Clémentine, Orpheline et Androgyne (1819). As its title indicates, intersexual anatomy is responsible for the heroine's variant personality, which is used merely as mainspring for a plot of the wildest extravagance. Clémentine...