+ HUTCHINS, MAUDE PHELPS McVEIGH. A Diary of Love. New Directions, 1950, pbr Pyramid 1952, 1960. Weird stuff, written with a detachment and delicacy reminiscent of the Colette novels. A teen-age girl, Noel, goes through a bizarre series of experiences in a strange household where her grandfather seduces his (male) music pupils and a nymphomanic, neurotic housemaid, Freida, successively seduces everyone from Grandpa down to Noel. Beautifully done.
Georgiana. New Directions, 1948. The second section of a sensitive, well-written novel is laid in a girl’s school; there are three important variant attachments, and as a result one of Georgiana’s classmates is expelled. In later life Georgiana blames her failure to find happiness on a “lesbian complex.”
My Hero. New Directions, 1953, (m).
ILTON, PAUL. The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah. pbo, Signet, 1956, 1957, (m). Historical, Biblical setting.
JACKSON, CHARLES. The Fall of Valor. Rinehart & Co, 1946, pbr Signet, 1950, (m).
The Lost Weekend. Farrar & Rinehart 1944, pbr Berkley 1955 and others.
"Palm Sunday" ss in collection The Sunnier Side, pbr Berkley nd and others, also in Cory, 21 Variations.
+ JACKSON, SHIRLEY. Hangsaman. Farrar, 1951. Frightening, macabre story of a lonely girl who conjures up a thrilling companion—who looks and acts like a boy but is clearly a girl. They meet secretly and engage in wild conversation and loveplay, and only slowly, with dawning horror, does the reader realize that the child is a split personality and the two girls are one and the same.
The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, 1959. During the investigation of a reputed “haunted house”, two of the investigating party—Theo, an admitted lesbian, and Eleanor, a lonely, inhibited spinster—go through a curious, subtly delineated relationship wavering, with the intensity of the “haunting” of the house, from attraction to intense love to unexplained revulsion. Macabre; good of its kind.