Women's Barracks

May 2, 2005
From the Feminist Press's 'Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp' series comes this reissue of a long out-of-print 1950 classic, the "first lesbian-themed pulp" novel. Translated from the French (though never published in France), this heavily autobiographical tale of life in the Free French Army women's barracks in WWII London is a delicious blend of sex and melodrama that manages to be sentimental without ever becoming mawkish or campy. It is, in fact, a moving and bittersweet tale of a tight-knit community of women, their loves and losses, hopes and despairs, with a charmingly modest salaciousness that runs through to justify its "pulp" marketing. Truly, it is a more literary novel than the lurid original cover would have one believe-its many sexual encounters invariably veer from the promise of pornography to the achingly real, and often painful, emotional excavations of these women's lives. The edition includes an illuminating interview with the author and an afterword by Judith Mayne that nicely contextualizes the narrative as well as the book's curious publishing history. Kudos to the editors for bringing this lost classic back into print-it never should have left us in the first place.

June 13, 2005
From the Feminist Press's 'Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp' series comes this reissue of a long out-of-print 1950 classic, the "first lesbian-themed pulp" novel. Translated from the French (though never published in France), this heavily autobiographical tale of life in the Free French Army women's barracks in WWII London is a delicious blend of sex and melodrama that manages to be sentimental without ever becoming mawkish or campy. It is, in fact, a moving and bittersweet tale of a tight-knit community of women, their loves and losses, hopes and despairs, with a charmingly modest salaciousness that runs through to justify its "pulp" marketing. Truly, it is a more literary novel than the lurid original cover would have one believe-its many sexual encounters invariably veer from the promise of pornography to the achingly real, and often painful, emotional excavations of these women's lives. The edition includes an illuminating interview with the author and an afterword by Judith Mayne that nicely contextualizes the narrative as well as the book's curious publishing history. Kudos to the editors for bringing this lost classic back into print-it never should have left us in the first place.

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