sapphist

The term invert came into public awareness along with other such 'Sapphist', 'lesbian' and 'homosexual'.

A French citizen by birth, Albertine is a hybrid creature raised in Austria and infused with its culture, which renders her sexually suspect precisely because of her connections to Germanic culture and to a "professional Sapphist."33 She admits that she spent the happiest days of her life with her "big sister" Mile Vinteuil's lover, in Trieste where she will now travel to spend her Christmas holidays.

If you have a weak heart or just a short attention span, keep your distance from Emma Donoghue's intricately woven and luxuriously paced fourth novel, Life Mask, the story of the 12th Earl of Derby's 16-year courtship of the comedic actress Eliza Farren and of Eliza's ambiguous and socially dangerous friendship with the sculptor Anne Damer, rumored to be a sapphist. These are real figures from the London beau monde of the 18th century.

For instance, Woolf was so anxious about the reception of A Room that she fretted in her diary: "I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a sapphist" (Diary, 23 Oct.

Soon after meeting Vita, Woolf was intrigued by this leggy aristocrat who, she had heard, was a pronounced Sapphist and who wanted to seduce her.

Oxindine points out that as late as 1930 Woolf felt that she must "slip in" what she wants to say in her own novel ("Sapphist" 4-5, citing Woolf, Diary 3:298).

The Sapphist overtones of the location are scarcely concealed.