Unsympathetic college novel of a girl suffering through a lesbian affair while all around her the other girls suffer through rape, incest and abortion. Over-written.
_Girls in 3-B._ Crest pbo 1959. One of three young girls who come to the city to find jobs or careers, Barby drifts into a lesbian relationship, mostly out of revulsion against two unfortunate experiences with men. Excellent, sympathetic.
+ _Stranger on Lesbos._ Crest pbo 1959. A married woman with a grown son and indifferent husband, returning to college for work on a college degree, is ripe for an affair with "Bake", a confirmed lesbian. The affair is told with sufficient skill and restraint to make it believable; even Frankie"s eventual return to her old life is not a cliche "happy ending" but well prepared and well characterized. Remarkably good; the degree of progress from the first to the third of these novels makes your editors anxious to see where Miss Taylor goes from here.
TELLIER, ANDRe. _Twilight Men._ Greenberg 1931, pbr Lion 1950, 52, 56, Pyramid 1959, (m). Well known.
+ TEY, JOSEPHINE. (pseud. of Elizabeth MacKintosh.) _Miss Pym Disposes._ Macmillan 1948; also in _Three by Tey_, Macmillan 1954.
Slowly built-up, excellently constructed mystery of a girl"s school, where a close attachment between two seniors provides solution and motivation for a murder. The level of mystification is so high that even on the last page the reader is gasping with the final, shocking surprise.
_To Love and be Wise._ Macmillan 1951. Another well done mystery, with a variant attachment also providing motive and solution and a high level of suspense and surprise.
TESCH, GERALD. _Never The Same Again._ G P Putnam"s Sons 1956, pbr Pyramid 1958, (m). Not for the squeamish, but a well-done novel of an affair between a teen age boy and an older man.
+ TIMPERLEY, ROSEMARY. _Child in the Dark._ Crowell 1956. Two of the three stories in this book involve intense attachments, variant but not explicitly lesbian, between an English schoolmistress and a young girl.
THAYER, TIFFANY. _Thirteen Women._ Claude Kendall, 1932. Mildly nasty shock-story of a murder, involving thirteen women, one mixed up with a lesbian; she eventually commits suicide.
_Thirteen Men._ Claude Kendall 1930, (m). Much the same stuff as above only masculine in emphasis. Thayer is a good writer, but not everyone"s choice.
THOMPSON, JOHN B. _Girls of the French Quarter._ Beacon pbo 1954.
_Frenzy of Desire._ Encore Press 1957. Evening wasters.
THOMPSON, MORTON. _Not as a Stranger._ Chas. Scribner"s Sons, 1954 pbr Pocket Books 1955. fco, very minor episodes.
+ THORNE, ANTHONY. _Delay in the Sun._ Literary Guild, 1934. A "heartening idyll" of two friends who, during a long stopover in Spain, resolve their relationship.
+ TORRES, TERESKA. _Woman"s Barracks._ Gold Medal pbo 1950, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and probably every year from now on, for a while anyhow. Gold Medal"s most popular t.i.tle so far is the story of a group of women with the Free French women"s army, at loose ends and disa.s.sociated from family, friends and personal attachments. Among the many threads of the plot is the story of naive young Ursula, who, through her relationship with warm, tough, friendly Claude is helped to maturity and eventually to readjustment to normal life.
_Dangerous Games._ Dial 1957, pbr Crest 1958. A married woman, discovering her husband is having an affair with her closest friend, briefly becomes infatuated with her too.
_Not Yet._ Crown 1957, pbr Crest 1958. The story of four young girls in a French school; not children but "not yet" women, and their adjustment to life and love. The narrator, the least mature, is as yet infatuated only with Mother Nathalie, her teacher; no overt behavior is implied except kisses, but the nun"s reaction when the heroine begins to be interested in boys brings this under the scope of the study.
_The Golden Cage._ Dial 1959. (trans. from French by Meyer Levin).
A group of refugees in wartime, waiting for visas in Portugal, undergo various transient attachments. Among the group are several lesbians, treated with sympathy and sensitivity.
TRAVIS, BEN. _The Strange Ones._ Beacon pbo 1959, (m). Evening waster about a young no-good who earns his living as a paid escort/gigolo and relaxes with boy friends but still loudly insists he is normal. Your editor enjoyed this out of sheer perversity; usually novels treating of male h.o.m.os.e.xuality engage the subject with deadly seriousness, while the paperback originals reek with drooling voyeuristic strip-teases about lesbians, for the sake of men who like to enjoy pipe-dreams about lesbians making love, and about some Big Handsome Hero who eventually converts the girls to "normality" with some secret formula of caresses. So it is a nice change to see the gay BOYS getting the in-and-out-of-the-sheets treatment for once.
TRYON, MARK. _The Fire that Burns._ Berkley pbo 1959 scv.
_Take it Off._ Vixen Press 1953, Modern Press 1956, scv.
UNTERMEYER, LOUIS. (Editor). _The Treasury of Ribaldry._ Doubleday 1956, pbr Popular Library 1959 (v. 1). This contains Lucian"s "Dialogues of Courtesans", ent.i.tled in this translation "The Lesbian" and "A Curious Deception". The hardcover edition also contains some of the Songs of Bilitis.
VAIL, AMANDA (pseud. of Warren Miller). _The Bright Young Things._ Little, Brown, 1958. pbr Crest 1960.
In a story of two worldly young college girls experimenting with life and love, a subplot involves two of their friends, lesbians.
Minor but fun.
VANEER, WILLIAM. _Love Starved Wife._ Bedside Books Inc, 1959.
scv.
VAN h.e.l.lER, MARCUS. _The House of Borgia_, Paris, Olympia Press, 1957. Volume #16 in The Traveler"s Companion, straight scv.
VAN ROYEN, ASTRID. _Awake, Monique._ Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1957, pbr Crest 1958. Astrid, an orphaned child in some unnamed European country (Holland, Belgium, Sweden?) is sent to live with her uncle Rainier; she lives upstairs with Rainier (eventually with a Lolita-like intimacy) while Rainier"s wife lives downstairs with a lesbian friend, Dini. Despite a "broadminded" plea for understanding, Rainier strictly forbids Astrid to have anything to do with the girls. The book is well-written, tasteful, and certainly candid.
VAUGHAN, HILDA. _The Curtain Rises._ N. Y., Chas Scribner 1935. A young girl, Nest, in London, falls in with a fiftyish spinster with a reputation for aiding young and pretty girls who also have talent. Miss Fremlyn invites Nest to live with her as her companion, showering her with education, attention and restrictions; Nest is naive, Miss Fremlyn unaware, at least consciously, of her own emotions. They travel and live together for some time, but the affair breaks up when Nest, who has always kept in touch with her boy friend, is discovered with him and Miss Fremlyn, considering this a betrayal, dismisses her. Explicit, well done.
VERNE, CHARLES. _The Wheel of Pa.s.sion._ N. Y., Key 1957. scv.
VIDAL, GORE. _The City and the Pillar._ E P Dutton 1948, pbr Signet ca. 1950, (m).
_The Season of Comfort._ E P Dutton 1949, (m).
WAHL, LOREN. _The Invisible Gla.s.s._ Greenberg, 1950, pbr tct _If This be Sin_, Avon 1952, pbr tct _Take Me as I Am_, Berkley 1959, (m).
WALFORD, FRANK. _Twisted Clay._ Claude Kendall, 1934. fco. A young girl, a psychotic s.a.d.i.s.t ... is bis.e.xual and has one big affair with an older woman. It must be marked for people with very complete collections only; it is depressing, inaccurate, etc. "The writing, etc, are excellent, but oh my, what a plot!"
+ WARD, ERIC. _Uncharted Seas._ Paris, Obelisk Press 1937. (Fairly easy to obtain second hand, and not at all like most of the s.e.xy trash tagged Paris elsewhere in this list.) An excellent, perceptive and controlled story of Diana Bellew, a young married woman with children, a childish husband and too much money and time on her hands, and her successive affairs with three women.
The writing is unusually good for male authorship.
WEBB, JON EDGAR. _Four Steps to the Wall._ Dial 1948, pbr Bantam 1953, (m). Prison novel.
+ WEIRAUGH, ANNA ELISABET. _The Scorpion._ Greenberg 1932, Willey Book co, 1948, pbr Avon Books 1957, complete; pbr tct _Of Love Forbidden_, greatly abridged, 1958. Well-known novel of well-bred German girl, Metta (in some translations, Myra) who, in her late teens, falls in love with a worldly lesbian, Olga, who does much to free her from her stuffy background, but repudiates her painfully in a family crisis. After Olga"s suicide Metta seeks for her real self and real destiny, first in the Bohemian drink-drugs-s.e.x merrygoround of Berlin between the wars, then hides from life in a stuffy middle-cla.s.s setting; when even here she finds herself pursued by a lesbian tease, Gwen, who flirts with Metta to inveigle her into a sordid party _a trois_, Metta resolves to go away and come to terms with her own soul.
_The Outcast._ Greenberg 1933, Willey Book Co 1948. The sequel to the above, this finds the heroine of _The Scorpion_ living quietly in the country. She undergoes a painful and unsatisfactory affair with Fiametta, a dancer, but when this proves unsatisfactory settles down sadly but peacefully with a couple of s.e.xless men friends.
WEISS, JOE, and Ralph Dean. _Anything Goes._ Bedside Books pbo, 1959. Fast-moving evening waster with a minor lesbian angle.
WELCH, DENTON. _Maiden Voyage._ L. B. Fischer 1945, (m) minor.
_In Youth is Pleasure._ L. B. Fischer 1946, (m) minor.
+ WELLS, CATHERINE. "The Beautiful House" Harpers, March 1912. An idyll of two women ends tragically with the marriage of the younger.
WELLS, KERMIT. _Reformatory Women._ Bedside Books pbo 1959.
Surprisingly good for this publisher of rubbish. After escaping from a s.a.d.i.s.tic lesbian matron in the reformatory, Noreen works as a fake butch in a Greenwich Village Gay bar and tourist trap; later goes to work for gangsters in a roadhouse, falls for a nice boy and goes back to serve her reformatory sentence and marry him when she gets out. Pleasant evening waster.
WETHERELL, ELIZABETH (pseud of Susan Warner). _The Wide Wide World._ Many editions, very easily obtained, a well-known girls story of the 1880s or thereabout, dealing with Ellen, an orphan of twelve. Much of the first half of the novel is devoted to a very innocent, but exceptionally intense, close relationship between Ellen and her beloved "Miss Alice", daughter of the local minister. Good of kind, and distinctly relevant on an adolescent level.
WHEELER, HUGH. _The Crippled Muse._ Rinehart, 1952. A "sparkling comedy" of Capri contains the story of two women who have lived together for ten years; the younger girl is tired of the arrangement, and the older uses her feelings of guilt and shame to hold her captive. In the course of the novel she manages to free herself.
WHITE, PATRICK. _The Aunt"s Story._ Viking Press 1948. fco.
WIMBERLEY, GWYNNE. _One Touch of Ecstasy._ Frederick Fell, 1959. A lesbian affair gives "one touch of ecstasy" to a woman"s inhibited, unhappy life, allowing her to return to her husband with wakened perceptions.
WILDER, ROBERT. _Wait for Tomorrow._ Putnam 1950, Bantam 1953. A girl"s unwilling entanglement with a predatory lesbian, in a romance of an imaginary Balkan country, leads to all sorts of violence and cloak-and-dagger stuff. Good.