“... in the city’s Education Department denounces a reading-skills exam that used an extract from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence; the passage in question begins, ‘It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had “lost her looks”’; the complaint is that ‘any girl taking the exam’ will experience the mention of losing your looks ...”

“... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...”

“... the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the notorious lesbian tear-jerker The Well of Loneliness (1928). But even she makes oblique appearances. De Acosta was wont to describe Garland’s stone-butch girlfriend of the 1920s, the hatchet-faced Dorothy (‘Dody’) Todd, pioneering editor ...”