Bedelia (32 page)

VALERIE TAYLOR
is the pen name of Velma Young (1913-1997), prolific author of best-selling pulp fiction novels, poetry, and romances, including
Whisper Their Love, The Girls in 3-B
,
World Without Women
,
Journey to Fulfillment, Stranger on Lesbos,
and
Ripening.
A longtime activist for gay and lesbian rights, she was a co-founder of Mattachine Midwest and the Lesbian Writers Conference in Chicago.

BY CECILE

Tereska Torres

eISBN: 9781558618060 | ISBN: 9781558618053

In Paris, a young woman with the spirit of an artist finds refuge with an older man just after WWII. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, and non-monogamy. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt all make an appearance. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about . . . but only under the pseudonym of her husband.
By Cecile
is a sensational story of modern love and personal transformation.

“Madame Torres has reimagined a youthful Colette (here called Cecile) in the infinitely seductive post-World War II period in Paris, where she moves like a sleeping princess through the perverse fairy tales of man-made cafe society.
By Cecile
is a sharply perceptive novel.”

—Joan Schenkar, author of
The Talented Miss Highsmith

WOMEN'S BARRACKS

Tereska Torres

Afterword by Judith Mayne

Interview with the author by Joan Schenkar

eISBN: 9781558617148 | ISBN: 9781558614949

The grim setting of an urban military barracks—with its freezing dorms, rationed food, and unbecoming regulation under-wear—became the setting for one of the steamiest novels of its time and the first-ever lesbian pulp. Written from the point of view of one of the younger and more innocent girl soldiers,
Women's Barracks
reflects Tereska Torres's experiences in the Free French forces assembled under General Charles de Gaulle. Condemned in 1952 for its “artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy” by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, this novel became an underground phenomenon, selling four million copies in the US and many more abroad.

“As a lesbian historian, as a citizen of a war-torn world, simply as a reader, I found this 1950 novel, considered obscene in its own time, moving, arousing, and deeply interesting.”

—Joan Nestle, author of
A Restricted Country

“
Women's Barracks
stands not only as a classic in our literary heritage, but as a fascinating view of the intensity and resilience of the lesbian spirit.”

—Radclyffe, author of
Sheltering Dunes

TERESKA TORRES
's
Women's Barracks
is widely considered to be the first lesbian pulp novel. It is based on her own experiences as a young woman in the Free French forces during WWII. Condemned in 1952, the novel became an underground phenomenon, selling over four million copies. Torres went on to write many more bestselling novels in France, which were often brought to an American audience by her husband, the author Meyer Levin. Torres lives in Paris, where she is completing her memoirs.

VERA CASPARY
is the author of twenty-one books. Her early novels drew on her experience growing up a conservative Jewish family in Chicago. Later works focused on career women who balance work, a love life, and even marriage, with a desire for independence. Caspary is best known for her skillfully-crafted and psychologically-complex murder mysteries. Several of her books were made into films, including both
Bedelia
and
Laura
. Enormously popular in her time, she was also a playwright and screenwriter, with such classics as Fritz Lang's
The Blue Gardenia
and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's
Letter to Three Wives
having been adapted from her screen stories. Reviewing her autobiography,
The Secrets of Grown-Ups
,
The Washington Post
called Caspary's life "a Baedeker of the 20th century. An independent woman in an unliberated era, she collided with or was touched by many of its major historical and cultural events: wars, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War . . . Hollywood in its romantic heyday, Hollywood in the grip of McCarthyism, the footloose of the artistic rich, publishing, Broadway."