Born August 7: Anna Weirauch

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction (Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack), Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume Mette has an affair with Olga, who breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including  drug abuse, alcoholism,  and  rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged translation, titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933. A facsimile edition is available from Ayer Company, a reprint publisher of rare titles.