Louisa May Alcott said in an interview once, "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body … because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man." It's not at all clear whether that was the only way she had to express being lesbian, or if she really felt herself to be a man. I assumed the former for years, and only much later did it occur to me that it could have been the latter.