Sapphism was discussed in medical texts primarily as a social problem up until the late nineteenth century when a more scientific outlook emerged and the theory of homosexuality – or sexual inversion – as congenital began to develop in Europe. However, these medical experts could not have foreseen that fin-de-siècle writers would become so fascinated with homosexuality, fetishism, and other sexual deviations that they would exploit such sensational themes in their works.

The lesbian actually made her entrance on the literary stage in a shocking way in 1870 with the help of Adolphe Belot, the author of the popular Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme. Fearing the temptations that young girls face in modern schools for girls, Belot decided to root out this evil by denouncing its primary cause, the convent school, with its passionate friendships and its homosexual relations, and by showing how it could destroy a married couple.

The same year that Belot published his novel, Carl Westphal, a German psychiatrist, described the case of Fraulein N. She would incarnate the lesbian, now consistently defined as someone with a man’s mind inside a woman’s body, in clinicians’ as well as novelists’ writings.