In Part One of this book, which focused on agency, I discussed the relationship between rescuer and rescued in ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) in terms of Elaine Marks's ‘Sappho model.’ The tensions between Alyx and Edarra develop from the antagonistic through the maternal to the sexual, at which point they are diverted through a mysterious appearance of two malesexual partners. From this perspective, I would argue that Russ's rescue stories, which affect all of her intimate relations between women, are closely affiliated with the ‘Sappho model’—at least in the subtext. In these rescue stories the maternal, the erotic and the ‘autoerotic’ between two women of different generations emerge as reassuring yet unstable female spaces. The ‘mother’ easily shifts to becoming the lover (as Alyx becomes Edarra's lover—if only in the subtext); the daughter becomes the former self (as in ‘The Little Dirty Girl’); the mother or the great-grandmother become daughters (as in ‘Autobiography of My Mother’ and ‘The Second Inquisition’ respectively). At the same time, Sappho always also stands for women's power to write, which is probably the strongest red thread which runs through Russ's fiction as well as her criticism. Kathleen Spencer has also positioned the ‘rescue of the female child’ motif in the larger context of feminist writing: ‘Tracing this motif through Russ's writing not only reveals the development of the pattern in one writer's works, but helps illuminate what can be seen as the central issue for many feminist writers and theorists, and not just within SF’ (167).