Inhabitants of the late twentieth century can be almost guaranteed not to like Coleridge better, I fear, when they find ou about his views on the subject of women. We have been able to overlook them so far because they used to be scattered in inaccessible and what were consid ered insignificant places?in letters, table-talk, marginalia, notebooks, and the like. But now that Princeton's editions of the notebooks and collected works are approaching completion in an age that is obsessed with what we call "gender issues," those views are much more clearly visible. Some work has already been done on the representation of women in Coleridge's plays and poems and on what his elaborately metaphorical language reveals about his unconscious sexual attitudes.1 At a more abstract level, Anthony Harding has written authoritatively about Coleridge's views on relationship in general, the relationship be tween human beings and between human beings and God.2 What I aim to do here is something altogether simpler: I shall concentrate on explicit statements that Coleridge made about women and sexual difference; summarize his position insofar as it appears to be intellectually coherent; suggest ways in which it was conventional for the period, and ways in which it was not; and finally consider the concept of androgyny, which seems to have been Coleridge's one contribution to twentieth-century feminist theory.