Women's Barracks - Paperback

by Tereska Torres (Author), Judith Mayne (Afterword by)

This novel--based on the author's real-life experiences--is credited as the first candidly lesbian novel, originally published in 1950, that "scandalized mid-century America" (The New York Times).

As the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop, and hearts are won and lost.

This account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II sold four million copies in the United States alone and many more worldwide. Women's Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states and denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was "promoting moral degeneracy." In spite of such efforts--or perhaps, in part, because of them--the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women's writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

Author Biography

Tereska Torres (1923-2012) escaped Nazi-occupied France in 1940 and became a secretary to Free French leader Charles DeGaulle in London. Over her long career, she wrote some 20 books (novels and memoirs), with translations published here by Knopf, Dell, Simon and Schuster. Torres married the American literary figure Meyer Levin during the war; he would later translate many of her novels. Torres continued to live and write in France until her death at age 92.