"The Book Of Shadows," By James Reese...

... A positively delicious read!!!... >>>

Alone among the young girls taught by nuns at a convent school in nineteenth-century France, orphaned Herculine has neither wealth nor social connections. When she's accused of being a witch, the shy student is locked up with no hope of escape ... until her rescue by a real witch, the beautiful, mysterious Sebastiana. Swept away to the witch's manor, Herculine will enter a fantastic, erotic world to discover her true nature -- and her destiny -- in this breathtaking, darkly sensual first novel. ~ From The Library Thing. >>> Who was Herculine Barbin?...

>>> From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Herculine Adélaïde Barbin Born November 8, 1838 Saint-Jean-d'Angély, France Died February, 1868 (aged 29) Paris, France Cause of death Suicide (gas asphyxiation) Other names AbelCamille >>> Notable work Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite Herculine Adélaïde Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin (November 8, 1838 – February 1868), was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, after an affair and physical examination. She is known for her memoir, Herculine Barbin, which was studied by Michel Foucault. Her birthday is marked as Intersex Day of Remembrance. >>> Early life Most of what is known about Barbin comes from her later memoirs. Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. She was assigned as female and raised as a girl; her family named her Alexina. Her family was poor but she gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent. >>> According to her account, she was enamoured of an aristocratic female friend in school. She regarded herself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into her friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for it. Her studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of 17, she was sent to Le Château to study to become a teacher. There, she fell in love with one of her teachers. >>> Puberty Although Barbin was in puberty, she had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. The hairs on her cheeks and upper lip were noticeable. In 1857, Barbin received a position as an assistant teacher in a girls' school. She fell in love with another teacher named Sara. Sara's ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually, rumors about their affair began to circulate. Although in poor health her whole life, Barbin began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined her, he was shocked and asked that she should be sent away from the school, but she stayed. Eventually, the devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. He asked Barbin's permission to break the confessional silence in order to send for a doctor to examine her. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that although Barbin had a small vagina, she had a masculine body type, a very small penis, and testicles inside her body. In 20th-century medical terms, she had male pseudohermaphroditism. >>> Reassignment as male A later legal decision declared officially that Barbin was male. She left her lover and her job, changed her name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. She moved to Paris where she lived in poverty and wrote her memoirs, reputedly as a part of therapy. In these memoirs, Barbin would use female pronouns when writing about her life prior to sexual redesignation and male pronouns following the declaration. Nevertheless, Barbin clearly regarded herself as punished, and "disinherited", subject to a "ridiculous inquisition". In his commentary to Barbin's memoirs, Michel Foucault presented Barbin as an example of the "happy limbo of a non-identity", but whose masculinity marked her from her contemporaries. Morgan Holmes states that Barbin's own writings showed that she saw herself as an "exceptional female", but female nonetheless. >>> Death In February 1868, the concierge of Barbin's house in rue de l'École-de-Médecine found her dead in her home. She had died by suicide by inhaling gas from her coal gas stove. The memoirs were found beside her bed.