Comparative sapphism

The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 251-281

  Marcus, Sharon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84891035672     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (174)

1. For an overview of the British response to Zola, see William C. Frierson, "The English Controversy over Realism in Fiction, 1885-1895," PMLA 43, no.
2. (1928): 533-50. On the reception of Baudelaire in England, see Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
3. For example, an 1873 article in Cornhill magazine called Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin "so unashamed and profligate as to be to English ideas utterly intolerable" (Sidney Colvin, "Théophile Gautier," Cornhill 27 [February 1873]: 162-63).
4. See Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (New York: Routledge, 1993), 143-56, 184-195;
5. William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 75, 90-93.
6. D. A. Miller, "Anal Rope," in Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 132, 125, 124;
7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990);
8. idem, "Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot's The Nun," in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 23-51.
9. See also Jeff Nunokawa, "The Disappearance of the Homosexual in The Picture of Dorian Gray," in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 183-90;
10. Patricia White, UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
11. For more on these critics, see Harold Orel, Victorian Literary Critics: George Henry Lewes, Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton, Leslie Stephen, Andrew Lang, George Saintsbury, and Edmund Gosse (London: Macmillan, 1984);
12. Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984). On English literary criticism during this period.
13. see Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 1865-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).
14. On the Victorian periodical press, see Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The "Edinburgh" and the "Quarterly" in the Early Victorian Age (London: Leicester University Press, 1989);
15. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982). On book reviewing in the periodical press.
16. see David Skilton, ed., The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel (New York: Routledge, 1993);
17. J. D. Jump, "Weekly Reviewing in the Eighteen-Sixties," Review of English Studies 3 (July 1952): 244-62;
18. Laurel Brake, "Literary Criticism and the Victorian Periodicals," Yearbook of English Studies 16 (1986): 92-116;
19. Oscar Maurer, " 'My Squeamish Public': Some Problems of Victorian Magazine Publishers and Editors," Studies in Bibliography 12 (1955): 21-40.
20. Havelock Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," Alienist and Neurologist 16 (1895): 141.
21. For a reading of Miss Wade in relation to the category of the lesbian, see Annamarie Jagose, "Remembering Miss Wade: Little Dorrit and the Historicizing of Female Perversity," GLQ 4, no. 3 (1998): 423-52;
22. on Villette, see Ann Weinstone, "The Queerness of Lucy Snowe," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1995): 367-84.
23. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 159, 107-49, 66. France also resurfaces as a site for the production of Anglo-American lesbianism in Castle's chapter on Janet Flanner, 186-99.
24. Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust's Lesbianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 33.
25. Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," 141, 142.
26. See also Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 156;
27. Jeannette Howard Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956; reprint, Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1985), 60-72, 76-78, 91-90;
28. Henri Peyre, "On the Sapphic Motif in Modern French Literature," Dalhousie French Studies 1 (October 1979): 3-33;
29. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 254-94.
30. Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (Paris: Dentu, 1870), 143.
31. For a discussion of this rhetoric in legal discourse, see Martha Vicinus, "Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: The 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial," Journal of British Studies 36 (January 1997): 70-98.
32. Charles Baudelaire, "Lesbos," Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Laffont, 1980), 102;
33. George Saintsbury, "Charles Baudelaire," Fortnightly Review 24 (1875): 503, 501-502.
34. George Saintsbury, preface to The Thirteen, trans. Ellen Marriage (London: J. M. Dent; Philadelphia: Gebbie, 1898), ix.
35. For examples of articles that name Histoire des treize, the Duchesse de Langeais, and Ferragus but not La Fille aux yeux d'or, see [Henry Sutherl and Edwards], "Balzac and His Writings," Westminster Review 60 (July 1853): 199-200;
36. [Alexander Innes Shand], "Balzac," Blackwood's 121 (March 1877): 302;
37. John Walter Sherer, "Balzac's Dreams," Belgravia 54 (1884): 439. Among the earliest articles I have found to cite La Fille aux yeux d'or by title are [T. E. Child], "Balzac," Cornhill 53 (May 1886): 476; and an American article by George Frederic Parsons, "Honoré de Balzac," Atlantic Monthly 57 (June 1886): 845.
38. Leslie Stephen, "Balzac's Novels," Fortnightly Review 15 (1871), 24.
39. Even in cases where critics eventually gave a sapphic text's title, they often began by establishing it as unfit to be spoken. For critics who did this with Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, see W. S. Lilly, "The Age of Balzac," Contemporary Review 37 (1880): 1009;
40. George Saintsbury, "Théophile Gautier," Fortnightly Review 29 (March 1878): 429, 431-433;
41. and Colvin, "Théophile Gautier," 162-63.
42. "Mr. Swinburne's New Poems," Saturday Review, 4 August 1866, 145.
43. Arthur Waugh similarly asserted that Swinburne "scrupled not to revel in sensations which for years had remained unmentioned upon the printed page," but as though to undo Swinburne's work of mentioning, he refused to specify what those sensations were ("Reticence in Literature," Yellow Book 1 [1894]: 213).
44. George Moore, "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces," Fortnightly Review, n.s., 46 (October 1889): 498-99.
45. [Eliza Lynn Linton], "The Novels of Balzac, III," Temple Bar 78 (December 1886): 498.
46. [Eliza Lynn Linton], "The Novels of Balzac, II" Temple Bar 78 (November 1886): 389.
47. [Eliza Lynn Linton], "The Novels of Balzac, I" Temple Bar 78 (September 1886): 198-199.
48. [Linton], "Novels of Balzac, II," 388.
49. On Linton's engagement throughout her career with infractions of sex and gender norms, often in order to attack them, see Deborah T. Meem, "Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness," Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 4 (1997): 537-60.
50. Meem insists somewhat anachronistically on reading Linton as a repressed lesbian suffering from "internalized homophobia" (559). "Officially Linton abhorred homosexuality, both female and male. . . . Only by tortured indirection can Linton own her desire" (558-59).
51. It would be more accurate to say that during the nineteenth century, to speak negatively of homosexuality was almost the only way to speak of it, and therefore homophobic remarks can prove little about their speakers' sexuality.
52. For examples of references to Sodom and Gomorrah, the Cities of the Plain, see William Barry, "Realism and Decadence in French Fiction," Quarterly Review 171 (July 1890): 83;
53. and Lilly, "Age of Balzac," 1024, 1016, 1017.
54. "Mr. Swinburne's New Poems," 145.
55. Waugh, "Reticence in Literature," 213.
56. On Juvenal and allusions to sex between women, see Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 102-3, 256 n. 9;
57. and Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 44, 52, 212-14, 257.
58. For the comparison between Baudelaire and Juvenal, see "Baudelaire," Belgravia 15 (October 1871): 450;
59. for the comparison between Gautier and Plato as author of Phaedrus, see Andrew Lang, "Théophile Gautier," Dark Blue 1 (March 1871): 31;
60. Swinburne himself both deployed and shrewdly exposed antonomasia when he said of Simeon Solomon, after the artist's arrest for having sexual contact with another man in public, that Solomon was "a Platonist, the term is at once accurate as a definition and unobjectionable as a euphemism" (H. Mongtomery Hyde, citing the second volume of Swinburne's letters, in The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid History of Homosexuality in Britain [Boston: Little, Brown, 1970], 115).
61. Vernon Lee, "The Moral Teaching of Zola," Contemporary Review 63 (1893): 209, emphases in the original.
62. Emile Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (New York: Penguin, 1972), 329;
63. for the phrase "dames du monde" in the original French, see Emile Zola, Nana, ed. Colette Becker (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994), 266.
64. See Kathy Psomiades, " 'Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace': Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics," in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21-42.
65. Moore, "Some of Balzac's Minor Pieces," 499, 498.
66. Moore signaled his debt to Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal when early in his literary career he published collections called Flowers of Passion (London: Provost, 1878) and Pagan Poems (London: Newman, 1881).
67. "Parisian Pagan," 82, 84.
68. Thomas Spencer Baynes, "Swinburne's Poems," Edinburgh Review 134 (July 1871): 82, 91;
69. Arthur Symons, review of Bonheur, by Verlaine, The Academy, 18 April 1891, 362.
70. Henry Spencer Ashbee defined "perversity" more precisely when he cited a description of Verlaine's Les Amies, included in Parallèlement, as six sonnets "en rimes feminines sur l'amour sapphique" (Pisanus Fraxi [Henry Spencer Ashbee], Index librorum prohibitorum: bio-biblio-icono-graphical and critical notes on curious, uncommon and erotic books, vol. 1 [1877; reprint, New York: Jack Brussel, 1962], 42.
71. Arthur Symons was well versed in French literature and a frequent contributor to the Fortnightly Review, the Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review.
72. White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, 20, 22, 32-39, 42, 47, 48, 53, 60, 64, 73, 82, 85, 133, 213.
73. Ellis, "Sexual Inversion in Women," 142, 144, 158.
74. On Lucy Snowe as "morbid," quot;diseased," "eccentric," and "perverse," see the reviews in the Nonconformist, 16 March 1853, 224;
75. Littell's Living Age 36 (1853): 589;
76. and [Stopford Brooke], "Recent Novels," Dublin University Magazine, November 1853, 613.
77. [Margaret Oliphant], "Novels," in Blackwood's 102 (September 1867): 258, 260.
78. "French Literature-Recent Novelists," Edinburgh Review 57 (July 1833): 330, 337; the author is thought to be Thomas Moore.
79. [William Rathbone Greg], "Modern French Literature," Edinburgh Review 101 (January 1855): 115-16.
80. For some of the numerous other instances in which French literature was qualified as "obscene," "perverted," and "morbid," see also [John Wilson Croker], "French Novels," Quarterly Review 56 (April 1836).
81. which uses the term "pervert" to describe Raymond's seduction of Indiana in George Sand's Indiana (101) and calls the prostitutes in Lélia "monsters" (105);
82. Croker, an expert on the French Revolution, contributed frequently to the Quarterly Review, including a notorious review of Keats's "Endymion" in 1818. See also
83. [George Moir], "The Hundred and One," Foreign Quarterly 9 (May 1832): 349;
84. and "Novels," Monthly Review 166 (December 1844), which argues that the distinctly French contribution to the novel is "the inclination towards obscene scenes, the amalgamation of voluptuousness and cruelty," often in the form of "adulteries," "incest" (549, 550)
85. and other "wanton freaks of an overstrained imagination" (555). In his notorious article "French Fiction: The Lowest Deep," W. R. Greg saw French fiction as a symptom of "the hunger after the most diseased, unholy, and extravagant excitement," steeped in "the voluptuous, the morbid, or the monstrous," catering to "the jaded appetite and the perverted taste" (National Review 11 [1860]: 401, 405).
86. [G. H. Lewes], "Balzac and George Sand," Foreign Quarterly Review 33 (July 1844): 289;
87. Lionel Strachey, "The Books of Emile Zola," The Lamp 26 (1903): 411.
88. Stephen, "Balzac's Novels," 17, 39.
89. Hannah Lynch, " 'Fécondité' versus the 'Kreutzner [sic] Sonata,' or, Zola versus Tolstoi," Fortnightly Review 73 (January 1900): 69, 75.
90. "French Novels and Novelists," Dublin University Magazine 36 (September 1850): 353.
91. Greg, "French Fiction: The Lowest Deep," 403.
92. Barry, "Realism and Decadence in French Fiction," 81.
93. [Linton], "Novels of Balzac, II," 385;
94. Parsons, "Honoré de Balzac," 843.
95. On the association of sapphism with national otherness in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 12, 81.
96. Emily Crawford, "Emile Zola," Contemporary Review 55 (January 1889): 95, 97-99.
97. Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), notes how often British critics deemed French fiction unfit for young readers but does not convey how often female readers were singled out during the decades he considers (215-17).
98. Only in the 1880s did the child replace the woman reader as the focus of campaigns against obscenity. On the female reader in nineteenth-century Britain, see Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993);
99. and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, "Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel," Critical Inquiry 9 (December 1982): 339-40, 355.
100. [Caroline Peyronnet], "French Novels and French Life," Macmillan's 35 [March 1877]: 389;
101. see also Crawford, "Emile Zola," 103).
102. For the notion that Frenchwomen required passion in novels because they lacked it in marriage, see Lagardie, "French Novels and French Life," 393.
103. For an account of the relationship between the different contents of the French and British novel and the different marital status women had in each country, and the accompanying notion that French literature should be prohibited to British girls, see "French Novels," Belgravia 3 (October 1867): 78-81.
104. Lagardie, "French Novels and French Life," 389.
105. In addition to the work on the female reader cited above, see Cohen, Sex Scandal, 26-72;
106. Thomas Laqueur, "The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice, and Pouring Tea," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, pt. 3, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Nadaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 334-43;
107. and Philip Stewart, Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 94-101.
108. On the frequently positive reception of Sand in England, see Patricia Thomson, George Sand and the Victorians: Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977);
109. and Paul Blount, George Sand and the Victorian World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979).
110. "French Literature-Recent Novelists," 357.
111. Review of The Modern Literature of France, by George Reynolds, Monthly Review 149 (August 1839): 463, 462;
112. [Lewes], "Balzac and George Sand," 266.
113. [Greg], "Modern French Literature," 115.
114. Nina H. Kennard, "Gustave Flaubert and George Sand," Nineteenth Century 20 (November 1886): 704, 708.
115. Kennard was a novelist and biographer who wrote many articles on Sand and on the French actress Rachel.
116. William Barry, "The French Decadence," Quarterly Review 174 (April 1892): 482.
117. In George Sand and the Victorian World, Blount recognizes that the preference for Sand was a rejection of realism when he writes that "[i]n contrasting Balzac and Sand, Lewes revealed a dominant Victorian preference for romanticism over realism" (71)
118. however, when discussing Sand and novels, critics used the term romanticism far less frequently than they did idealism.
119. See Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
120. and Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
121. On idealism and utopianism, see Schor, George Sand and Idealism, 15, 21.
122. On sentimental fiction's investment in the tragic collision of principles, see Cohen, Sentimental Education of the Novel, 89.
123. J. D. Jump uses the phrase to refer to the Athenaeum's two most important criteria for reviewing literary works ("Weekly Reviewing in the Eighteen-Sixties," 247).
124. Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1841), 52-53, quoted in Stang, Theory of the Novel in England, 153.
125. Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 77.
126. [Oliphant], "Novels," 261.
127. See also Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 78.
128. My reading of Balzac's reception challenges that of Walter Kendrick, who argues that while reviewers objected to the content of Balzac's plots, they could not resist his realism ("Balzac and British Realism," 10).
129. Wilkie Collins, "Letter of Dedication," Basil (1862; reprint, New York: Dover, 1980), iii-iv.
130. George Lewes, "Realism in Art," Westminster Review 70 (October 1858): 493-96;
131. the citation appears in an excerpt from the article, reprinted in Skilton, Early and Mid-Victorian Novel, 102.
132. [Alfred Austin], "Our Novels: I," Temple Bar 29 (May 1870): 183-84, emphasis mine.
133. Lilly, "Age of Balzac," 1006.
134. For a similar defense of Balzac as idealist, see "French Novelists," London Society 21 (1872): 308-17.
135. The "Ideal" to which the author refers is Jesus Christ as a principle of the world's transcendence of the material into the spirit. The author notes that British novelists "are yet, as a body, faithful to this, the only beautiful realism," and regrets that materialism has "even tainted the genius of George Eliott [sic]" ("French Fiction-Its Better Aspects," British Quarterly Review 33 [January 1861]: 110).
136. Lee, "Moral Teaching of Zola," 197.
137. See also J. A. Symonds, "La Bête Humaine: A Study in Zola's Idealism," In the Key of Blue and Other Prose Essays (London: Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1892), 111, 112;
138. and Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 57, 61.
139. Edouard Rod, "Emile Zola as Moralist," Living Age 222 (July 1899): 137, 143.
140. Other examples abound: Joseph Forster wrote that "[o]ne touch of Zola degrades love, debases friendship, and robs the human heart of its one priceless solace-belief in the perfectibility of human nature" ("Eugene Sue and Emile Zola," Bel-gravia 71 [February 1890]: 135).
141. Hannah Lynch took issue with "Zola's strictly material conception of virtue," asserting, "We cannot accept that man was only born for physical sensation"; this anti-idealism is precisely what she associates with Zola's morbidness and perversion (" 'Fécondité' versus the 'Kreutzner Sonata,' " 74, 76).
142. Review of The Modern Literature of France, 458-59, emphasis mine.
143. The article "Balzac and His Writings," in the Westminster Review 60 (1853).
144. "Balzac," Gentleman's Magazine 21 (December 1878): 617;
145. Symonds, "La Bête Humaine: A Study in Zola's Idealism," 131.
146. See also "Honoré de Balzac," Temple Bar 54 (1878): 547.
147. Review of The Modern Literature of France, 460;
148. the author is quoting, approvingly, from an article by "Mr. Keratry, a French critic of a very high order of talent in the Livre des Cent et Un, and entitled 'The Men of Letters of the present Day (1831-2)' " (459).
149. [Shand], "Balzac," 319.
150. Barry, "Realism and Decadence in French Fiction," 58, 63.
151. [Linton], "Novels of Balzac, III," 499
152. and "Novels of Balzac, II," 391. This aspect of Balzac's work also linked him to orientalism for British critics who criticized Eastern societies for failing to idealize women's souls and instead treating them as pure flesh subjugated to men's physical desires.
153. As late as 1920 Arthur Symons, whose critical career peaked in the 1890s, wrote apropos of Baudelaire's "Femmes damnées" that lesbians "live only with a life of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times almost insane." Symons blends the older lingo of idealism with the more recent one of sexology (Charles Baudelaire: A Study (New York: Dutton, 1920], 33).
154. Less frequently, realism and sapphism were also both associated with money, the medium of material interests (see Barry, "Realism and Decadence in French Fiction," 62).
155. On the belief that homosexuality and idealized sentiments were incompatible, see the courtroom speech cited in Cohen, Sex Scandal, 113-14;
156. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men; Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);
157. and Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1912; reprint, New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921): "to confuse Uranians (as is so often done) with libertines having no law but curiosity in self-indulgence is to do them a great wrong" (25).
158. [Henry Buxton Forman], "Algernon Charles Swinburne-Poet and Critic," London Quarterly Review 31 (January 1869): 371-374, 373. Forman was a post office employee and literary critic who edited Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Morris and contributed frequently to Tinsley's and the London Quarterly Review.
159. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Under the Microscope (1872), quoted in Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition, 73.
160. See Castle, Apparitional Lesbian; Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 81;
161. and Valerie Rohy, Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
162. [William Leonard Courtney], "Mr. Swinburne's Poetry," Fortnightly Review, n.s., 37 (May 1885): 601.
163. "Mr. Swinburne's New Poems," 145.
164. Baynes, "Swinburne's Poems," 77, 82, 89.
165. The reviewer links Swinburne's poetry to the sensation novel: "As the object of the sensational writer is to produce the strongest effect, he naturally tends not only towards the physical, but towards what is extreme, revolting, and even horrible in our physical experience" (94).
166. See Marilyn Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996);
167. Castle, Apparitional Lesbian; Moore, Dangerous Intimacies; Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994);
168. and White, UnInvited. This argument has also been made about queer representation in general (see, e.g., D. A. Miller, Bringing out Roland Barthes [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992], 45).
169. Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 156.
170. "Swinburne's Poems," Edinburgh Review 134 (1871): 73.
171. On the association of lesbianism with cloisters and harems, see [Ashbee], Index librorum prohibitorum, xxxiv-xxxv. On Balzac's exclusion of female readers.
172. see Cohen, Sentimental Education of the Novel, 112-18.
173. In his defense of the "realistic novelist" George Moore wrote, "Let us renounce the effort to reconcile these two irreconcilable things-literature and young girls" (Literature at Nurse [1885], quoted in Frierson, "English Controversy over Realism in Fiction," 535).
174. Ernest Dowson, "Translator's Preface," in Honoré de Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d'or, trans. Ernest Dowson (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896), vii.