This essay will focus on sexual representation in the work of Anne Bannerman (1780?-1829), a virtually unknown Scottish poet.' Her poetry is challenging because most theoretical models dominating recent work on the relation of sexuality to literature are of surprisingly little help in interpreting her. Since nothing is known about her personal life, sexual representation in her works cannot be seen as an expression of her sexuality unless the critic is willing to invent a psychobiography for her. Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has generally inspired alternatives to psychobiographical readings; such alternatives situate a literary work in a wider set of literary, medical, or legal representations to describe how it was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the discursive construction of sexuality.2 Yet since journals or newspapers reprinted few of Bannerman's poems and none of her books reached a second edition, her poetry had no substantial effects on how anyone in the nineteenth century would have represented or understood his or her sexuality. In terms of the possible effects of extraliterary discourses on her poems, her work gives little evidence of them beyond what could be found in any poet of her day. I write about Bannerman because contemporary attention to issues of sexuality has made her work interesting in ways that may not have been available before. Sexual representation in Bannerman's work departs strikingly from that found in much Romantic poetry by men and by women.3 I will describe how these departures can be understood as lesbian writing despite the absence of information about Bannerman's personal life, the theoretical complexity of describing the history of lesbianism, and the lack in her writing of overt expressions of desire between women. Developments in literary history not obviously connected to the history of sexuality may nevertheless authorize striking departures from heterosexual norms of representation. For Bannerman, such a development was the eighteenth-century exploration of genius. If female authors were expected to be proper ladies, geniuses were not.4 Readings of pre-nineteenth-century literature that interpret representations of homosexuality often address the frustrations of anach-