Irene Gammel is a Canadian literary historian and is the author of Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic, and the editor of Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Cultural Biographer. 
 

"The realm of the personal and sexual has always been literary for men (Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Michel Leiris, Henry Miller) and confessional for women (Colette, Erica Jong, Anais Nin editing out the references to sex in her Journal). Women attempting to write honestly about their sexuality, as they have begun to do only fairly recently, have had a difficult time of it. Despite patterns developed (not without struggle) by male writers, there has been no space and no language for women to write about sexuality. Even today, it remains more problematic for a woman to explore these issues than for a man, if only because readers tend to assume that the sexual experiences she describes necessarily happened to her."

— Irene Gammel, Confessional Politics: Women's Sexual Self- Representations in Life Writing