"Chloe liked Olivia"

On 24 October 1929, a slim book was published in London that would become a key work of literary feminism: Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own". In it, Woolf asks why so few women are known as great writers. Her answer could hardly be more practical: to write, a woman needs financial independence and a room with a door that locks.

Into these reflections she slips a provocation as small as it is pointed. The narrator is reading the novel of an invented young author and suddenly stops. Before she goes on, she wants to be sure that there is no man in the room and that Sir Chartres Biron is not hiding behind the red curtain. Then she quotes the sentence that has caught her attention: "Chloe liked Olivia." Perhaps, Woolf remarks, this was happening in literature for the first time.

Contemporary readers could hardly miss the allusion. Biron was the London magistrate who in the autumn of 1928 had judged Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness" obscene and ordered copies to be destroyed. Yet Hall had depicted the relationship with great restraint. What really offended the court was that the novel did not condemn love between women.

Woolf was aware of the risk. In her diary she recorded her worry that she would be attacked as a feminist and suspected of being a Sapphist. Her relationship with the writer Vita Sackville-West was known in literary circles. Only a year earlier she had created a playful literary monument to her with "Orlando".

A scandal like the one surrounding Radclyffe Hall never came. Woolf relied on wit, allusion and the complicity of her women readers. The unassuming sentence nevertheless had a lasting impact: "Chloe liked Olivia" became a byword in lesbian literary criticism – and a quiet sign of recognition for stories about women who love women.