SEELEY, E. S. Sorority Sin. Beacon pbo, 1959. scv.
SELA, LORA. (pseud of Carol Hales) I Am a Lesbian. Saber pbo, 1959. Would-be shocker about a poor innocent girl being pushed into love affairs with brutal boys, raped, etc; by cruel relatives and friends, when all that God wants of her, according to the author, is for her to be a Happy Well-Adjusted Noble Lesbian. This isn’t even scv, since the writers of sexy trash usually know something about sex or trash or both. Read it and snicker.
SETON, ANYA. Katherine. Houghton, 1954. (m. minor)
SHAW, WILENE. The Fear and the Guilt. pbo, Ace, 1954. Softball-playing Ruby brings sweet-leech Christy to her Tobacco Road home. There, to disarm suspicion, Christy allows herself to be first seduced, then married, by Ruby’s father. Sympathetic for a shocker, but oh, my!
SIDGWICK, ETHEL. A Lady of Leisure. Boston, Small, 1914. A passionate, But quite innocent, attachment between women in their twenties.
SIMENON, GEORGES. In Case of Emergency. Doubleday 1958, pbr Dell 1959. A common theme—a good man enslaved by a worthless girl—is treated here by a very good European writer. A subplot deals with the attachment between the girl and her maidservant.
SINCLAIR, JO. (pseud. of Ruth Seid) Wasteland. Harper Bros. 1946. This is the excellent and heavily lauded Harper prize novel of that year. Told on the psychiatrist’s couch, it concerns the failure of Jewish Jake Braunowitz to live up to his manhood ... which forces this job onto the shoulders of his sister Debbie, a lesbian. The psychiatrist discovers that he ran from his responsibilities in the first place due to feeling weaker than the masterful intelligent Debbie; then, after forcing her to take a man’s role in the family, he turns around and feels guilt and shame at her adjustment to the situation. Excellently done.
SPEERS, MARY. We Are Fires Unquenchable. Murray and Gee, Hollywood 1946. fco. A badly written, almost illiterate novel, the first few scenes of which are laid in a girl’s college swarming with luridly treated lesbians and in an assortment of Bohemian settings.
+ SMITH, ARTEMIS. Odd Girl. Beacon pbo, 1959. The blurb reads “Life and love among warped women”, but don’t let it scare you. This is one of the better and more serious approaches to the writing of a serious novel of lesbians through the stereotyped pattern of the paperback novel. The basic plot concerns Anne, and her experiences in trying to find out for herself, the hard way, whether she is a lesbian or whether she can successfully adjust to life as a normal woman. The story ends with the surprising, but growingly popular affirmation that “adjustment” is not always to be desired at all costs. The cover also calls this a story of “society’s greatest curse”; meaning homosexuality; but for once it isn’t treated that way.