This republished classic captures the intensity of young love

A reissued novel set in the 1950s reminds the reader how hard it was to be queer in Australia then, and enables us to reflect on not only how writing has changed, but how the world has changed.first novel six years after her death.

The poignancy of the emotional experience lets it stand as a meaningful dissent to the idea that homosexuality was criminal or an illness, interpretations that were current when Farmer wrote the novel. Instead,functions as a critique of societies that would isolate queer people and pathologise selective sexual impulse.

A touching conversation between the two lovers, where they vow they would get married if it were legal, acts as a rebuke to anachronistic social conventions that oppress and occlude. The novel asks us, why is paying for sex regarded as more acceptable than being forced to hide love? The novel’s most arresting moment comes when the protagonist carves the world “LOVE” into her chest, and its representation in the text as an illustration, along with reproductions of copperplate, stands out as ahead of its time when fiction didn’t integrate graphics along with text.is an important historical document, showing the changes in 20th century society and art. Like all novels, though, it stands or falls as a representation of a particular kind of consciousness.

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