FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTERS

Writers reimagine Mary Shelley and the monster she created.

- RUTH FRANKLIN

"Chloe liked Olivia." When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in "A Room of One's Own," her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future that of queer literary criticism. "Do not start. Do not blush,"Woolf cautioned her audience. (The published text of "A Room of One's Own" is framed as a lecture and based on a pair of talks that she gave at two Cambridge women's colleges in October, 1928.) "Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."

Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness," a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be a boy and has romantic feelings for women. The novel had been published earlier that year, and the trial, which Woolf would attend, took place a couple of weeks after the Cambridge lectures. What's more, Woolf had just published her novel "Orlando," a fictional biography of a man who transforms into a woman. The inspiration for the book was her lover Vita Sackville-West, who accompanied Woolf on at least one of her trips to Cambridge. The implications of Biron's crusade would not have been lost on either of them.