May

7 Sunday

Thomas Sergeant Perry, a close friend of Henry James and one of the outstanding literary historians of the nineteenth century, whose correspondence with John Addington Symonds reveals his familiarity in theory and practice with "Greek love," born in Newport, Rhode Island, 1845.

8 Monday

English composer Dame Ethel Smyth, who was once described by Harold Nicholson as "having the profile of Wagner and Frederick the Great at the same time," and who spent a lifetime eluding the advances of men with whose wives she was sleeping, dies at eighty-six, 1944.

9 Tuesday

Mercedes de Acosta, who listed among her intimates Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, Marlene Dietrich, Poppy Kirk, Claire Charles-Roux, Marie Laurencin, Malvina Hoffman, Alice B. Toklas, and Greta Garbo-and published kiss-and-tell stories about most of them-dies in New York City, 1968.

10 Wednesday

Mary Quant cosmetics introduces a line of make-up for men, 1974.

11 Thursday

Juliette Récamier, the most celebrated French beauty of her day, whose lover was novelist Germaine Necker (Madame de Stäel); dies in Paris, 1849.

12 Friday

Emma Lyon Hamilton, who schemed her way to the bed of Queen Maria Caroline of Naples by way of the queen's lesbian sister, Marie Antoinette, before switch-hitting as Lord Nelson's mistress, born at Great Neston, Cheshire, England, 1765.

13 Saturday

T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) who was raped by a Turkish officer in 1917 and nicknamed "El-Orens, destroyer of engines," killed on a motorcycle given him as a gift by George Bernard Shaw, 1935.

Dame Ethel Smyth:

Unrequited love for Virginia Woolf.