Women's Barracks
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
This novel—based on the author's real-life experiences—is credited as the first candidly lesbian novel, originally published in 1950, that “scandalized mid-century America” (The New York Times).
As the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop, and hearts are won and lost.
This account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II sold four million copies in the United States alone and many more worldwide. Women’s Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states and denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was “promoting moral degeneracy.” In spite of such efforts—or perhaps, in part, because of them—the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.
Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the Feminist Press's 'Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp' series comes this reissue of a long out-of-print 1950 classic, the "first lesbian-themed pulp" novel. Translated from the French (though never published in France), this heavily autobiographical tale of life in the Free French Army women's barracks in WWII London is a delicious blend of sex and melodrama that manages to be sentimental without ever becoming mawkish or campy. It is, in fact, a moving and bittersweet tale of a tight-knit community of women, their loves and losses, hopes and despairs, with a charmingly modest salaciousness that runs through to justify its "pulp" marketing. Truly, it is a more literary novel than the lurid original cover would have one believe-its many sexual encounters invariably veer from the promise of pornography to the achingly real, and often painful, emotional excavations of these women's lives. The edition includes an illuminating interview with the author and an afterword by Judith Mayne that nicely contextualizes the narrative as well as the book's curious publishing history. Kudos to the editors for bringing this lost classic back into print-it never should have left us in the first place.
