Review ''The book is a primer on lesbian pulp, but it also departs radically from the genre because of [Valerie] Taylor's frank discussion of gender, class, rape, abortion, and suicide. It's most compelling as a document of a particular time and as a reminder of the many social constraints that governed the lives of women in the '50s.'' —fastForward (Calgary) (fastForward ) Product Description • Includes an Afterword on the history of pulp paperbacks • Digitized from rare pulp edition • Grier Rating: A* Desire and torment swept through Joyce's trembling young body at the gentle touch of Edith's cool hand upon her face. She had never felt like this before. It frightened her ... and filled her with a terrible excitement! Joyce is a young woman off to her first year at college at prestigious all-girl school. She gets along well with her roommate, Mary Jean, who is somewhat boy-crazy. Joyce begins to think there’s something wrong with her… that perhaps she is frigid… because she has no interest in boys. Then she meets Edith, the dean of the college, and falls head over heels in love. Suddenly all that mattered to her was a woman twice her age. Whisper Their Love is a haunting and courageous story of how a young girl's hunger for love leads her to discover passions she didn’t know existed. Only a writer as skillful and sensitive as Valerie Taylor could have taken such a daring subject and fashioned it into such a stirring a novel. About Lesbian Pulp Fiction: In the early 1950s new sub-genres of the vintage paperback pulp novel industry emerged—science fiction, juvenile delinquent, sleaze, and lesbian fiction, for instance—that would tantalize readers with gritty, realistic and lurid stories never seen before. Mysteries, thrillers and hardboiled detective pulps were already selling quite well. Publishers had come to realize, however, that sex would sell even more copies. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they tossed away their staid and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with these sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the ''good girl art'' (GGA) cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago. With the birth of the lesbian-themed pulp novel, women who loved women would finally see themselves—their experiences and their lives—represented within the pages of a book. They finally had a literature they could call their own. For lesbians across the country, especially those living in small towns, these books provided a sense of community they never knew existed, a connection to women who experienced the same longings, feelings and fears as they did—the powerful knowledge that they were not alone. We are excited to make these classic lesbian pulp novels available in ebook format to new generations of readers.