20 Sunday

August

In Massachusetts, James Snow sleeps with Willard A. Smith, setting in motion a long trial and eventual conviction

in spite of the consensual privacy of the act, 1871.

21 Monday

Minor English writer Edith Simcox, whose passionate love for Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) was sympathetically accepted, but wholly unrequited, born in London, 1844.

22 Tuesday

Her birth and death dates undisclosed in any source, Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey's sister and the pseudonymous author of Olivia, an autobiographical lesbian novel, deserves this day for herself.

23 Wednesday

Standard Oil heiress, yachtsman, and motorcyclist Jo Carstairs, living as lord of the manor on Whale Cay, her private island in the Bahamas, rescues several torpedoed merchant seamen during World War II, 1942.

24 Thursday

Theodor Baron Neuhof, a German adventurer who persuaded Corsicans that he could deliver them from Genoese tyranny if they made him king and hence became gay "Theodore I of Corsica," a fascinating subject yet to be treated by Hollywood, born in Cologne, 1694.

25 Friday

Christopher Isherwood:

A life of quiet rage against "the Others."

Mad King Ludwig II, who addressed Richard Wagner as "my innermost beloved," born in Nymphenburg, Bavaria, 1845.

26 Saturday

Christopher Isherwood, whose discussion of W. H. Auden's embarrassingly troublesome medical problem in Christopher and His Friends does little to enhance the reputation of either writer, born near Stockport, Cheshire, England, 1904.