cassandra at the threesome
Trio by Dorothy Baker is 7 x 4 x 0.5 inches & 158 crunched-font pages
Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. If you haven’t already, you absolutely may:
Sailing on unknown influential winds, I read Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novel, Cassandra at the Wedding last year in an absolute fit. Cassandra at the Wedding is a farce about a moody gay sister who’s ravenous for sabotage. I loved it. I became ravenous for Dorothy Baker and learned that she wrote another novel about queer arrangements, even more scandalously twenty years earlier.
It’s 1943 when Trio is published and we must speak of lesbians only in metaphors of an orchid shredded by long, dangerously lacquered fingers. “The human hand can make a mess of anything”: that’s the temperature of the sapphic melodrama we’re swimming in. There are lots of hands, cats of significance, and fear of the French influence.
If you’ll be disappointed by a portrait of a ruthlessly domineering elder lesbian with no moral compass who has even less patience for bisexuality, prepare to sigh a lot. But if you have a taste for midcentury verbal evasion about gays, this book bursts with total stunners. “If I didn’t know you so well, I’d think there was something pretty fancy going on,” says a straight man to a woman who is living with her erstwhile French professor Pauline. Italics are mine.
As always, I’m wishing you something pretty fancy this week!
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