Left to Themselves

Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson's classic adventure story of Philip Touchstone and Gerald Saxton, who befriend each other and share adventures of traveling by steamboat, shipwreck, illness, and more. More famous for his later work, Edward Irenæus Prime-Stevenson (also known as Edward Irenaeus Stevenson) was a writer and journalist famous for his exploration of homosexuality. His 1906 novel "Imre: A Memorandum" is known for its gay themes, and he later published a 1908 sexology study entitled "The Intersexes". Left to Themselves has come to be viewed as a gay novel, perhaps the earliest published. Prime-Stevenson himself remarked that his young adult novels were "homosexual in essence".