Part 12 (2/2)

VANEER, WILLIAM. _Love Starved Wife._ Bedside Books Inc, 1959.

scv.

VAN h.e.l.lER, MARCUS. _The House of Borgia_, Paris, Olympia Press, 1957. Volume #16 in The Traveler's Companion, straight scv.

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 Pa.s.sion._ 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 Gla.s.s._ 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 s.a.d.i.s.t ... is bis.e.xual 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 s.e.xy 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 affairs with three women.

The writing is unusually good for male authors.h.i.+p.

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-s.e.x merrygoround of Berlin between the wars, then hides from life in a stuffy middle-cla.s.s 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.

_The Outcast._ Greenberg 1933, Willey Book Co 1948. The sequel to the above, this finds the heroine of _The Scorpion_ living quietly in the country. She undergoes a painful and unsatisfactory affair with Fiametta, a dancer, but when this proves unsatisfactory settles down sadly but peacefully with a couple of s.e.xless men friends.

WEISS, JOE, and Ralph Dean. _Anything Goes._ Bedside Books pbo, 1959. Fast-moving evening waster with a minor lesbian angle.

WELCH, DENTON. _Maiden Voyage._ L. B. Fischer 1945, (m) minor.

_In Youth is Pleasure._ L. B. Fischer 1946, (m) minor.

+ WELLS, CATHERINE. ”The Beautiful House” Harpers, March 1912. An idyll of two women ends tragically with the marriage of the younger.

WELLS, KERMIT. _Reformatory Women._ Bedside Books pbo 1959.

Surprisingly good for this publisher of rubbish. After escaping from a s.a.d.i.s.tic lesbian matron in the reformatory, Noreen works as a fake butch in a Greenwich Village Gay bar and tourist trap; later goes to work for gangsters in a roadhouse, falls for a nice boy and goes back to serve her reformatory sentence and marry him when she gets out. Pleasant evening waster.

WETHERELL, ELIZABETH (pseud of Susan Warner). _The Wide Wide World._ Many editions, very easily obtained, a well-known girls story of the 1880s or thereabout, dealing with Ellen, an orphan of twelve. Much of the first half of the novel is devoted to a very innocent, but exceptionally intense, close relations.h.i.+p between Ellen and her beloved ”Miss Alice”, daughter of the local minister. Good of kind, and distinctly relevant on an adolescent level.

WHEELER, HUGH. _The Crippled Muse._ Rinehart, 1952. A ”sparkling comedy” of Capri contains the story of two women who have lived together for ten years; the younger girl is tired of the arrangement, and the older uses her feelings of guilt and shame to hold her captive. In the course of the novel she manages to free herself.

WHITE, PATRICK. _The Aunt's Story._ Viking Press 1948. fco.

WIMBERLEY, GWYNNE. _One Touch of Ecstasy._ Frederick Fell, 1959. A lesbian affair gives ”one touch of ecstasy” to a woman's inhibited, unhappy life, allowing her to return to her husband with wakened perceptions.

WILDER, ROBERT. _Wait for Tomorrow._ Putnam 1950, Bantam 1953. A girl's unwilling entanglement with a predatory lesbian, in a romance of an imaginary Balkan country, leads to all sorts of violence and cloak-and-dagger stuff. Good.

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