Female-Authored Lesbian Pulp Archive Including Ann Aldrich and Françoise Mallet-Joris, 1953-1958

Ann Aldrich Francoise Lilar

Collection

Lesbian pulp novels archive written by women, issued between 1953 and 1958, documenting a portion of midcentury queer paperback culture from the perspective of female authors rather than the more common male pseudonymous trade. The grouping centers works that place lesbian desire, confession, and intimacy at the center of the narrative, including titles by Marijane Meaker under her Ann Aldrich pseudonym and Françoise Mallet-Joris, whose fiction brought European literary treatments of female same-sex desire into mass-market circulation. Within 1950s paperback publishing, where lesbian themes were often framed through voyeurism, punishment, or male fantasy, these books preserve a different authorial position: women writing women, in several cases from openly queer or self-consciously exploratory ground.

Archive of 4 books published between 1953 and 1958, each approximately 160 pages and measuring about 4.25 x 7 inches, with vintage paperback covers that frequently depict two women in romantic or emotionally charged poses. Several titles in the group are noted in Grier at the "A*" tier, identifying works in which lesbian characters and relationships are central rather than incidental. The archive consists of the following titles, listed chronologically:

[1] Hales, Carol. Such Is My Beloved. New York: Berkley Publishing Corp, 1953. Originally published as Wind Woman. The cover features a photograph of two women sharing a martini, with the tagline, "Laurel was different"; the plot follows a woman dissatisfied by heterosexual relationships who turns to a female psychoanalyst in an effort to understand her lesbian desires.

[2] Craigin, Elisabeth. Either is Love. New York: Lion Books, 1956. Second printing. The cover art shows a dark-haired woman seated in thought beside a reclining woman, and the memoir presents lesbian experience with an unusual degree of sympathy for the period; the back cover states, "Out of the well of human loneliness springs this haunting, intimate confession of one woman's thirst for another, and of the extraordinary, feverish beauty of that passion's fulfillment."

[3] Mallet-Joris, Françoise. Into the Labyrinth. London: Ace Books, 1958. First Ace Books edition. Translated from the French Le Rempart des Béguines by Herma Briffault, the novel traces an illicit relationship between a teenager and an older divorcée who later becomes her stepmother, bringing a controversial European treatment of female desire into English-language paperback form.

[4] Aldrich, Ann [Marijane Meaker]. We, Too, Must Love. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1958. First printing. Written as a candid account of lesbian life in New York, the book was framed as a response to letters Meaker received from young women, parents, and doctors asking for material that addressed lesbian experience directly, and it incorporates selections from that correspondence.

The archive follows lesbian paperback fiction across the middle years of the 1950s, from psychological explanation and confessional framing to more self-possessed first-person testimony and fiction that grants lesbian characters greater interiority. Meaker's place in the group is especially strong, since her writing pushed against the punitive structure common in the genre and gave lesbian characters more durable emotional lives, while Mallet-Joris extends the archive beyond American pulp formula into translated literary fiction marketed through paperback channels. Covers and pages clean and clear; textblocks tight; light general handling wear; overall good to very good condition. A compact, sharply focused grouping of female-authored lesbian paperbacks from a decade when such authorship remained notably uncommon in the genre.

Item #20991

Price: $685.00