WINTER LOVE

Decades after a collegiate romance, a woman looks back at the pivotal Sapphic encounter of her youth.

It's winter 1944 in London, and Bettina, known as Red—thanks to her fiery hair color—has a crush on Mara. Newly enrolled at the Horsham Science College, where Red studies zoology, the elegant, married Mara easily accepts Red’s invitation to partner in a cat dissection. An infatuation grows, Mara invites Red to her impressive flat to bathe, leading to Red’s first run-in with Mara’s gruff husband, Karl. Similarly to many casually coupled-up women they observe at the height of World War II, neither Mara nor Red sees any appeal in the opposite sex, longing only for each other. When Karl departs to Europe for business, the two women are free to explore their enchantment with each other, immediately becoming domestic partners and, as they both recognize out loud, lesbians. Since the story is presented as a reminiscence of “Mara's winter” by an older, married Red, who remembers this season, “its substance, the wrench of its happiness like a pain, an ecstasy,” the reader knows the couple is doomed early on. Still, the progression of their intimate connection, interwoven with Red’s coming-of-age, is entertaining. When Red visits her single Aunt Muriel for Christmas, Red’s ex-lover, Rhoda, is also invited, since she was included in past celebrations as a dear friend and roommate. The faux-friend trope rings true, as do, perhaps sadly, several others, as Red’s story offers peeks into several versions of not-so-covert lesbian life in the 1940s. “We agreed that each human being was both male and female, and anyone who denied both sides in themselves was lying,” Red and Mara conclude at the height of their romance. For the contemporary reader, this novel, originally published in 1962, feels like an astute observation on how compulsory heterosexuality has impacted and stifled society for generations.

A rumination on a life that could have been, this novel encapsulates queer history often left untold.