Publisher's Synopsis
This is study of lesbianism as a social phenomenon and as a symptom of social malaise and fantasy at the end of the nineteenth century, in that extraordinary creative period known as the Belle Époque. This English-language translation vastly expands access to the work's groundbreaking scholarship, which contrasts historical depictions of the lesbian mystique against moralists' condemnations of 'the lesbian vice' and the emerging psychiatric establishment's obsession with cataloguing and classifying symptoms of 'inversion' and 'perversion' to cure these 'unbalanced creatures of love.'
