In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's lovers—Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée—and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in "Epistemology of the Closet" (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and in "Proust's Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson. Feminized forms of masculine names were and are commonplace in French.