Challenged by her cousin Basil Ransome for control of Verena, Olive, who believes in the power of free choice and is portrayed as a latter-day Transcendentalist, abandons her principles to fight for the young woman. Verena eventually chooses romantic love and domesticity as offered by Basil, leaving Olive alone to face the crowd of activists.

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Although the novel ends in marriage, James ironically undercuts the ending by commenting that Verena's tears "were not the last she was destined to shed." Some of the impetus for the book came from James's observation of his sister Alice and her friend Katharine Loring, who shared a life from 1879 until Alice's death from cancer in 1892.

James's circle included more open homosexuals, such as Howard Overing Sturgis, American expatriate, who wrote Tim (1891), a school novel about the love of a frail boy for an unfeeling older boy. The two are united only at the moment of death, when the extent of Tim's love can be acknowledged. Sturgis's cousin was George Santayana, poet and philosopher, who wrote a series of sonnets celebrating his love for Warwick Potter, a friend who died young. Like his contemporary in England, A. E. Housman, Santayana celebrated the purity of the dead, who are preserved from time and loss.

Male Romantic Friendsip

Male friendships of the period were nurtured in schools and universities. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, later Emily Dickinson's mentor, remembered his love for William Henry Hurlbut whom he had known as a student at Harvard in the 1840s. As Higginson put it, "for him my love had no bounds."

Hurlbut was apparently also the model for Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme (1862), in which the eponymous hero is revealed at the end to be a woman dressed as a man. Although this sudden revelation enables a "happy ending" in heterosexual terms, it is hardly greeted with enthusiasm in the text. Byng's love for Dreeme is clearly located in a homosexual tradition by his comment that "him I love with a love passing the love of women."

In another novel, John Brent (1862), Winthrop uses a Western setting for a text that celebrates the joining of nature and culture, the softness of youth with the hardness of masculinity. As in Cecil Dreeme, male friendship is the privileged site of affection: "I have known no more perfect union than that one friendship."

Female Romantic Friendship

As women's lives were largely confined to the home, so their affections developed in a domestic setting. Emily Dickinson's intense romantic friendships for Kate Anthon and Sue Gilbert existed alongside her heterosexual desires, with no apparent sense of conflict. In 1852, Dickinson wrote to Sue Gilbert, "will you be my own again and kiss me as you used to? . . . I feel that now I must have you----that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast."

Recent studies of Dickinson have stressed the role of the poems as tokens of love and desire, and have called attention to the concern with detail and small objects as a sign of clitoral imagery. Even a well-known poem such as "I taste a liquor never brewed" yields a very different meaning, and a very different poet, if read in terms of sexuality.

In public, at least, American women did not express sexual desires directly but through passionate long-lasting friendships, often called . Since such friendships were imagined to be lacking in sexuality, emotional expression knew no limits. Many women shared lives over many years and were widely accepted in the community. One of the most striking of such relationships was that between Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Fields's husband died in 1881, after which Fields and Jewett lived together most of the year except for a few months when Jewett retired to Maine to write.

Jewett's work, although probably written without any awareness of a category such as "lesbian," celebrates female community and women's friendships. Her story, "Martha's Lady" (1895) concerns a brief but intense friendship between a young woman and a young maidservant. The woman marries and leaves Martha behind, waiting faithfully for her return. When that return takes place, both the women are old, but their affection is restored, as Helena realizes what her friendship has meant to Martha. The need to accept the marriage of one of the partners was a repeated theme of Jewett's stories of female friendship, but she constantly sought ways to preserve that friendship, so much more powerful for her than the marriage tie.

Jewett's great admirer and literary follower was Willa Cather, although Cather did not feel free to be as open in her treatment of same-sex relations as Jewett had been. In fact, Jewett wrote to Cather in 1908 gently chastising Cather for writing in "masquerade," when, according to Jewett, "a woman could love her in the same way." Jewett's response is now usually attributed to her innocence of later models of homosexuality that made Cather so cagey; whatever the validity of that, it testifies also to her commitment to love between women, regardless of what it is called.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

Critics use the term male romantic friendship to describe strong attachments between men in works ranging from ancient epics and medieval romances to Renaissance plays, Gothic novels, westerns, and war movies.

The author of triumphant rags-to-riches stories of young men who succeed financially by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, Horatio Alger, Jr. created an enduring American myth that his actual life belied.

One of the most gifted critics of American literature of the mid-twentieth century, Newton Arvin is today most remembered as a lover and mentor of Truman Capote and as the central figure in a 1960 scandal at Smith College.

One of America's premier literary artists in the earlier twentieth century, Willa Cather reflected her own lesbianism in the creation of strong women characters and in the exploration of male homosexuality.

Emily Dickinson's poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.

A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

Sarah Orne Jewett is a major figure in the literature of female romantic friendship, the precursor of modern lesbian literature.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.

Although late in fully understanding his sexual preference, George Santayana wrote a series of sonnets celebrating his love for a friend who died young and described his male friendships in rhapsodic terms in his autobiography.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

A pioneering California writer, Charles Warren Stoddard is best known for his homoerotic tales collected as South-Sea Idyls and The Island of Tranquil Delights.

Howard Overing Sturgis is best known for two homosexual novels, Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.

In essays, journals, and poems, Henry David Thoreau recorded impassioned expressions of the beauty and the agony of love between men.

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Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

The works of nineteenth-century American realist writer Constance Fenimore Woolson display a startlingly modern self-consciousness about lesbian desire and its effects on the female artist.