Though the autobiography would seem to provide clues about the writer's life, the book was published in France in 1946 under the title Diana; roman, which translates as Diana; a novel. Thus, not only is the author's identity a mystery, but the authenticity of her "autobiography" is even more uncertain than that of other autobiographies.

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Diana went out of print in the 1940s, and was reprinted in the 1975 Arno Series on Homosexuality. Few historians or literary critics have paid Diana any attention, notable exceptions being Jeannette Foster and Lillian Faderman.

Although the printing history of Diana is relatively inconsistent, and it has received little attention by scholars of gay and lesbian studies, it seems to have had a rather international appeal. In addition to the French edition of 1946, there was an edition published under the English title in India in 1939.

Diana: A Strange Autobiography is the story of a young woman who, after reading a medical text on sexuality, begins to suspect that she is a lesbian. She decides to put aside this new information until she is strong enough to deal with it and, while at college, avoids intimate contact with those women to whom she is attracted. She lives in a "trial marriage" with a young man until she decides that she has been living a lie.

The narrative follows her involvement in several relationships with women. In the concluding chapter, entitled "Fulfillment," Diana and her lover Leslie decide to stay together, remarking that "there's such a thing as vows meaning more just because they are secret."

The book is significant for several reasons. Diana is a self-identified lesbian who, though initially ashamed, develops into a politically aware and self-validated woman who is happy and fulfilled at the end of the book.

Written in the late 1930s, a period often considered a "wasteland" for lesbian literature, Diana is, as Lillian Faderman suggests, an "oasis."

But Diana is also significant because of the complicated issues it raises about the relationship of autobiography to truth, and the relationship between lesbian writers and the male-dominated medical profession, especially sexology.

The book contains an introduction by Victor Robinson, a prominent sexologist, and the autobiographical narrator also uses sexological language. Despite this medical context for the book, the narrator uses sexological language and the case history model in complicated ways that occasionally serve to validate lesbian self-representation over medical representation and to naturalize lesbianism as one possibility along a spectrum of equally valid identities.

Of course, the mystery of the real identity--and especially the gender and sexual identity--of the author complicates readings of the text. Is "Diana Frederics" a lesbian writer who appropriates medical language for her own validation and self-representation? Or is "she" really a male physician, well-versed in sexological theory, validating lesbian identity while also maintaining the control of the male physician over what gets said about lesbians?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, Diana is an interesting book that chronicles the relationship between lesbians and the larger culture, and between lesbians and the medical profession, in a narrative many will find far more satisfying than Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

In the first century of its existence, lesbian autobiography has moved from being coded to being outspoken, and it is both wide ranging and contradictory in the stories that it tells.

The coming out experience is so important to gay men and lesbians that it is a primary focus of much of their literature.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.