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Originally Posted by crich70
Makes sense that her writing would change I imagine. Before she may have been trying to deny (even to herself) who she was inside and so her writing reflected that. I've often heard it said that writing is autobiographical in nature. The writing reflects the writer.
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I've often read about coming out and what it means to the person, but rarely to the writing. There ought to be a book (which I've occasionally considered writing) about the many literary innovations that have come from the need for earlier writers to encode their sexuality -- how, in order not to be pilloried, so many gay writers have had to learn to confect literary ciphers. Famous examples of technical innovation arguably wrought from secrecy: The novels of Raymond Roussell and Marcel Proust; dual-purpose female characters in plays by Tennessee Williams; the use of artifice in Yukio Mishima; the use of obscurity and adoption of multiple voices obscuring the individual author's in John Ashbery, etc., etc. Ashbery has said that classical music (and by extension, his own writing) is like "a philosophical argument in which the terms are not known."
Some have said that Christina Rossetti's "The Goblin Market" is a veiled expression of same-sex desire, but I wonder whether she'd have been mortified by that interpretation.