1800s. Bates' adult diaries and surviving letters confirm Bates's warm friendships with several female peers, as well as her intense emotional involvement with, and delight in the companionship of, two men: Oscar Triggs (whom she met while at Oxford) and subsequently Theophilus Huntington Root (the brother of one of her Wellesley classmates). But Bates never married. Had she done so, she would have lost her hard-won tenure-track Wellesley faculty position and, of course, at least some of the independence that her childhood in a woman-led household and subsequent life-course had, to one degree or another, accustomed her. That said, the end of her courtship with Theophilus Root precipitated in Bates a period of suicidal depression. Still, Bates destroyed most of the letters she and Coman had written to each other. One of the few to survive was written by Bates to Coman in 1893, just before she left Oxford to return to Wellesley: "You are always in my heart and in my longings... It was the living away from you that made, at first, the prospect of leaving Wellesley so heartachy ... and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desire way to your dearest heart." Ponder stresses Coman's importance to Bates in showing her how college professors like themselves could "challenge accepted attitudes towards women's social, economic, cultural, and gender roles". In her virtuosic corona of sonnets "In Bohemia," Bates celebrates the "vitality, adventurous spirit, and abiding spiritual presence of their love". In earlier commentary, Judith Schwarz interpreted Bates's letters and poems to Coman as evidence of a lesbian relationship, citing as an example Bates's 1891 letter to Coman: "It was never very possible to leave Wellesley [for good], because so many love-anchors held me there, and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desired way to your dearest heart... Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven." And in 1999, historian Lillian Faderman also concluded that the relationship between Bates and Coman was a "lesbian arrangement," including them among the other women faculty at Wellesley who paired off with each other. Other scholars contest the use of the term lesbian to describe what was characterized at the time as a "Boston marriage". Writes one: "We cannot say with certainty what sexual connotations these relationships conveyed. We do know that