The Price of Salt
1952
- collectionid:sleazy_pulp
- fiction
- lesbians
- lesbian romance novel
- lesbian love story
- divorce
- child custody
- road trip
- fiction, action & adventure
- social conditions
The story
THE PRICE OF SALT is the famous lesbian love story by Patricia Highsmith, written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The author became notorious due to the story's latent lesbian content and happy ending, the latter having been unprecedented in homosexual fiction. Highsmith recalled that the novel was inspired by a mysterious woman she happened across in a shop and briefly stalked. Because of the happy ending (or at least an ending with the possibility of happiness) which defied the lesbian pulp formula and because of the unconventional characters that defied stereotypes about homosexuality, THE PRICE OF SALT was popular among lesbians in the 1950s. The book fell out of print but was re-issued and lives on today as a pioneering work of lesbian romance.
What it’s like
Cool grey winter light falls through department-store windows and lands on cigarette smoke, wool coats, and the flat chill of New York in December, and the prose keeps that same restrained, observant eye throughout. Highsmith writes in close third person with clean, unhurried sentences, where a glance across a crowded toy counter or the rattle of a train can carry more than a paragraph of declaration. The middle stretch shifts into a road trip across the American interior, with motel rooms, long highway stretches, and a sense of wide open distance that feels both freeing and exposed. Vibe: wistful, quietly tense, slow-burning hope. It suits a rainy weekend afternoon, a late-night read with the lamp low, or a long train journey where the scenery outside can match the mood. Its emotional register is restrained rather than lurid; the central pairing moves from hesitant attraction to a guarded, tentative tenderness, with fear of judgment and loss running underneath. Sexual content is present but understated and largely implied, and the book contains no graphic violence, though the threat of social exposure and custody battles hangs over it. Written for readers who want a romance that hums with longing and ends with an open door, rather than a tidy, sensational story.
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