Waverley Root

"Emily Dickinson never married and the one love of her life seems to have been exclusively cerebral. Amy Lowell smoked large black cigars. George Sand and George Eliot took masculine pseudonyms. Rosa Bonheur and George Sand liked to wear male attire. Jane Austen remained unmarried, and, of the three Brontë sisters, only Charlotte married, at the age of 38, and died a year later. And Sappho of Lesbos gave her name to female homosexuality. These facts are not cited with the intention of fixing upon these women the stigma, in many cases unjustified, of that complete homosexuality which present-day public opinion regards unfavorably, but simply because they suggest that in those rare individual cases where women approach genius they also approach masculinity."