Willa Cather dramatized her problematic relation to the heterosexual plot inO Pioneers! (1913), her second novel but the one in which she first essayed her characteristic methods and subjects.¹ Sharon O’Brien has traced Cather’s rejection of “the ‘one string’ of female narrative—the often-repeated tale of ‘women and love’ she disliked in nineteenth-century women’s writing.” InO Pioneers!, O’Brien observes, Cather “Refus[es] to give” her protagonist Alexandra Bergson “the conventional romantic story that ends in marriage,” and “also declines to punish her with death.”² Alexandra, whose world is the land she farms rather than the home that is supposed...

Mary Renault did not begin to publish until the late 1930s, afterThe Well of Lonelinessand its trial had established the parameters of the “lesbian novel” and the understanding of the relation between lesbianism and literature that the lesbian novel represents.¹ She was dismissive of Hall’s work.² Nevertheless, she was as committed as the lesbian novel was to the conventions of realist fiction and to love and sexuality as subjects. However, Renault not only occupied the lesbian writer’s problematic narrative position, but she was interested in representations of relationship as well as romance. Consequently, she needed to write beyond...

Gertrude Stein liked to talk about modern art—her own writings and the paintings of others—by talking about camouflaged annon and trucks. She returned again and again, for example, to a memory of World War I. InThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas(1932), it was

The first year of the war, [when] Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening. There is nothing in the world colder than the Raspail on a cold winter evening, we used to call it the retreat from...

“Looking at her,” Djuna Barnes began her description ofNightwood’sNora Flood, “foreigners remembered stories they had heard of covered wagons.”¹ Of the salon Nora presided over before the action of the novel has begun, Barnes wrote,

At these incredible meetings one felt that early American history was being re-enacted. The Drummer Boy, Fort Sumter, Lincoln, Booth, all somehow came to mind; Whigs and Tories were in the air; bunting and its stripes and stars, the swarm increasing slowly and accurately on the hive of blue; Boston tea tragedies, carbines, and the sound of a boy’s wild calling; Puritan feet,...

Gertrude Stein invokes Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in her anecdotes about cannon, history, and representation. Virginia Woolf invokes “the retreat from Moscow” at a paradigmatic moment inMrs. Dalloway(1925), when this history is offered as an alternative to heterosexuality.¹ After Clarissa Dalloway returns from her June morning walk through London’s West End, observing the city, ordering the flowers for her party that evening, “Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs” to “the heart of life; an attic room” where “The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to...