There are more lesbians in fiction than you could shake a stick at, of course. Graham Robb, writing about late 19th-century fict- ional lesbians, has observed that
the fin-de-siècle lesbian was educated at a boarding school or a convent. She was frighteningly self-possessed, wore dark colours, read novels, smoked cigars, injected morphine or inhaled ether, suffered from excess hair except on the head, spent too much time in conditions suitable for tropical plants, and was prone to horrible diseases.
She was such a common figure that historians are able to make generalisations about the usual descriptors.
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Still, when Sarah Waters started her delectable career with three novels about lesbians in the belle époque, one had the sense of a gap being filled. These novels told of an aspect of 19th-century human behaviour which the 19th-century novel never found a way fully to encompass.
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