VAN ROYEN, ASTRID. Awake, Monique. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1957, pbr Crest 1958. Astrid, an orphaned child in some unnamed European country (Holland, Belgium, Sweden?) is sent to live with her uncle Rainier; she lives upstairs with Rainier (eventually with a Lolita-like intimacy) while Rainier’s wife lives downstairs with a lesbian friend, Dini. Despite a “broadminded” plea for understanding, Rainier strictly forbids Astrid to have anything to do with the girls. The book is well-written, tasteful, and certainly candid.
VAUGHAN, HILDA. The Curtain Rises. N. Y. Chas Scribner 1935. A young girl, Nest, in London, falls in with a fiftyish spinster with a reputation for aiding young and pretty girls who also have talent. Miss Fremlyn invites Nest to live with her as her companion, showering her with education, attention and restrictions; Nest is naive, Miss Fremlyn unaware, at least consciously, of her own emotions. They travel and live together for some time, but the affair breaks up when Nest, who has always kept in touch with her boy friend, is discovered with him and Miss Fremlyn, considering this a betrayal, dismisses her. Explicit, well done.
VERNE, CHARLES. The Wheel of Passion. N. Y. Key 1957. scv.
VIDAL, GORE. The City and the Pillar. E P Dutton 1948, pbr Signet ca. 1950, (m).
The Season of Comfort. E P Dutton 1949, (m).
WAHL, LOREN. The Invisible Glass. Greenberg, 1950, pbr tct If This be Sin, Avon 1952, pbr tct Take Me as I Am, Berkley 1959, (m).
WALFORD, FRANK. Twisted Clay. Claude Kendall, 1934. fco. A young girl, a psychotic sadist ... is bisexual and has one big affair with an older woman. It must be marked for people with very complete collections only; it is depressing, inaccurate, etc. “The writing, etc, are excellent, but oh my, what a plot!”
+ WARD, ERIC. Uncharted Seas. Paris, Obelisk Press 1937, (Fairly easy to obtain second hand, and not at all like most of the sexy trash tagged Paris elsewhere in this list.) An excellent, perceptive and controlled story of Diana Bellew, a young married woman with children, a childish husband and too much money and time on her hands, and her successive[54] affairs with three women. The writing is unusually good for male authorship.
WEBB, JON EDGAR. Four Steps to the Wall. Dial 1948, pbr Bantam 1953, (m). Prison novel.
+ WEIRAUGH, ANNA ELISABET. The Scorpion. Greenberg 1932, Willey Book co, 1948, pbr Avon Books 1957, complete; pbr tct Of Love Forbidden, greatly abridged, 1958. Well-known novel of well-bred German girl, Metta (in some translations, Myra) who, in her late teens, falls in love with a worldly lesbian, Olga, who does much to free her from her stuffy background, but repudiates her painfully in a family crisis. After Olga’s suicide Metta seeks for her real self and real destiny, first in the Bohemian drink-drugs-sex merrygoround of Berlin between the wars, then hides from life in a stuffy middle-class setting; when even here she finds herself pursued by a lesbian tease, Gwen, who flirts with Metta to inveigle her into a sordid party a trois, Metta resolves to go away and come to terms with her own soul.