Jewett was a crucial precursor and role model, but the feelings she explores in stories like "Martha's Lady" (1897), in which the protagonist harbors a love for another woman that is "half a pain and half a golden joy," signified something different to the readers of Cather's generation.

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Thus, she clung to her "masquerade" as a historical and occupational necessity, feeling forced to conceal what her literary foremother openly celebrated. Jewett's serene insistence that "a woman could love her in that same protecting way" poignantly yet clearly marks the cultural gulf that fell between these two prominent American women writers.

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.

Although sometimes coded as romantic friendship, both gay male and lesbian attractions are reflected in nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction, including works by such major figures as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

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

Boston marriages--romantic unions between women that were usually monogamous but not necessarily sexual--flourished in the late nineteenth-century between women who tended to be college-educated, feminist, financially independent, and career-minded.

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.

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

Rudyard Kipling, England's "Laureate of Empire," fashioned himself as the conscience of the English-speaking world, but the great love of his life was a young man who spurned him and whose sister he married after his friend's sudden death.

Her sexuality repressed by religion, Christina Rossetti wrote poetry that included highly-charged erotic female-to-female affection.

Although he was sexually attracted to women, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote poetry suffused with homoeroticism, including the most beautiful homoerotic elegy in the English language.