Show on pre-Victorian feminists

'"I am...going to be the first of a new genus. I am not born to tread in the beaten track - the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on." This is Mary Wollstonecraft writing to her sister Everina in 1787, two years before the French Revolution and five years before she published "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," the book in which she called upon women to effect a different kind of revolution by reforming themselves, as she put it, in order to reform the world. This intersection of the personal and the public - the peculiar bent of a woman's nature and the quest for women to become educated, vocal and active members of a society that went to great lengths to restrict and confine them - is the juicy terrain covered by "Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era," an exhibition that opens today at the New York Public Library.' More here. 'Some women opted out of marriage altogether by taking up with "female husbands" or placing a romantic friendship with a woman at the center of their lives. It's not easy to read the era's take on lesbianism from the documents that have survived, since they range from the satirical (a reprint of Henry Fielding's "Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband") to the implausibly innocent (an 1829 pamphlet maintaining that "James" Allen avoided physical contact with "his" wife Abigail for 21 years).'