ROSMANITH, OLGA. _Unholy Flame._ pbo Gold Medal 1952, (m) fco. (But I like this personally very much. A modern Svengali.)
+ ROSS, WALTER. _The Immortal._ Simon & Schuster 1958, Pocket Books Cardinal Edition 1959, (m).
ROYDE-SMITH, NAOMI. _The Tortoiseshell Cat._ Boni & Liveright 1925. An unworldly girl’s capture by a predatory lesbian.
_The Island._ Harper, 1930. Sad, tense book about an ugly, unhappy girl nicknamed “Goosey” and a clinging cousin who will neither love her nor let her go.
RUARK, ROBERT. _Something of Value._ Doubleday 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Very minor.
RYAN, MARK. _Twisted Loves._ Bedside Books 1959, pbo, scv.
SABATIER, ROBERT. _Boulevard._ (Prix de Paris award novel, trans. from French by Lowell Blair). David McKay 1958, pbr Dell 59, (m). marginal.
SACKVILLE-WEST, VICTORIA. _The Dark Island._ Doubleday, 1934. Shirin is the over-emotional, unconventional wife of Venn, dour owner of the “dark island”, Storn. He treats Shirin so badly that she seeks companionship, love and affection from Christina, her husband’s secretary; through jealousy (not unmixed with pure sadism) Venn arranges for Christina to be drowned in a boating “accident”. Haunting.
+ SALEM, RANDY. _Chris._ Beacon pbo, 1959. The plus indicates good of kind, not intrinsic merit. An interesting story of a lesbian triangle—Chris, Dizz, and young Carol. One reader commented that this story was a sort of lesbian dreamworld—these women seemed to live in a society, and a world, completely unmixed with ordinary life at all. Certainly they are all treated as quite the ordinary thing, and there are almost no hints that there is a heterosexual world outside the gay one, which must be taken into account. Certainly it makes no incursions into the novel. Chris, a conchologist, her life complicated by her frigid girl-friend Dizz, suffers and drinks too much and sleeps around until Carol, one of her random pick-ups, decides to stick to her, and eventually frees Chris from this attachment. Good but unreal.
+ SANDBURG, HELGA. _The Wheel of Earth._ McDowell, Oblensky 1958. Roughly a third of a long novel of Midwestern rural life deals with the lengthy attachment between Frankie Gaddy and an older woman, Genevieve.