Stories of 1950s lesbians with happy endings are not exactly easy to come by, so rest assured that this is one of the few. There was a recent movie of the same title; I haven’t seen it but I know that others have said the movie has a completely different ending, so don’t let that deter you from picking up the book it’s based on. Lydia is an outsider in the small English town that her husband grew up in, especially now that her marriage of a decade is quickly dissolving. While Lydia’s husband is spending fewer nights at home, her ten-year-old son is making a friend in the local doctor, a woman with few friends but a lot of bees. Lydia already has the enmity of her sister-in-law and it doesn’t take long for rumors about her growing closeness with Jean to spread around their small factory town. If you were disappointed with the ending to Carol/ The Price of Salt, you should definitely check this book out. It has similar themes around vacant husbands and struggles for child custody with a much more satisfying end (which isn’t a knock on The Price of Salt at all - I still loved the book and it’s amazing that it got published with its lesbians together in that time period). This book does start off a bit slow, it takes quite a while for Lydia and Jean to even become friends, let alone begin their relationship, but once they do it’s quite the testament to the lengths that lesbians of earlier times went to to express their love for one another. Read for happy lesbian endings and for a low-income mother getting a second chance at love after divorce in a time when both were disturbingly difficult.
Dearest Saints Carol and Therese of vintage 1952 lesbians, if one of you could just hear me through muffled thighs; see me plainly through those gritty New York City windows; smell the delightful honeysuckle overpowering the never-ending stream of unfiltered, “healthful” cigarettes…
