Frances V. Rummell

Frances V. Rummell (c. 1907 - 1969) was an educator and columnist who is known posthumously as the author and publisher of the first explicitly lesbian autobiography in the United States.

Rummell attended the University of Missouri. Her master's thesis was "The status of women in the plays of Molière.” Rummell then studied at the Sorbonne and was a teacher of French at Stephens College in the 1930s. While working as an educator, Rummell met Eleanor Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 in New York City, and Roosevelt wrote of their meeting in her "My Day" column.

In 1939, she published an autobiography under the title Diana: A Strange Autobiography using the pseudonym Diana Fredericks; it was a lesbian autobiography in which two women end up happily together. This autobiography was published with a note saying, "The publishers wish it expressly understood that this is a true story, the first of its kind ever offered to the general reading public". Rummell's niece Jo Markwyn, interviewed about her for a 2010 documentary that revealed her authorship of the book for the first time, said she believes that it is not purely autobiographical: "The general family background is similar, but rather than having three brothers, she had two brothers and a younger sister...I don’t think it’s an autobiography. I think it is a novel based upon her life."

Rummell later worked as a non-fiction writer under her own name and moved to Beverly Hills, California. She was a contributor to The Rotarian, Good Housekeeping, and The Saturday Evening Post; according to an author biography in The Rotarian she gave up teaching in 1940. She later wrote an illustrated novel, Aunt Jane McPhipps And Her Baby Blue Chips and died in California in 1969.