Above is a cover for Odd Girl by Artemis Smith. The book, published in 1959, is often called a lesbian classic, and since we just read Satan Was a Lesbian, we thought we’d double up on this theme. But there’s really no comparison between the two books. Satan Was a Lesbian is a crude joke, while Odd Girl is the incisively written tale of Anne, a New York City beauty who thinks she’s gay and goes about searching for her true self in a world of lesbian bars and among an assortment of friends and lovers. The other women—Cora, Skippy, Beth, Esther, etc.—run the gamut from butch to femme, and in Smith’s competent hands have distinctly different personalities too. As far as the men in this tale go, the focus is on one—Anne’s youthful mistake of a husband Mark, who she’s desperate to get rid of via divorce or annulment. If only it were that simple. If vintage fiction teaches any lesson it’s that bad men don’t go away easily.
We liked this book. It was serious and adult, wasn’t exploitative, and had the feel of realism. The latter quality we couldn’t have confirmed through personal experience, not being gay women, but the tale simply felt accurate for the period. And no wonder, because when we checked into Artemis Smith it turned out she was actually a gay woman who lived in New York City, was the author of the lesbian oriented novels The Third Sex and The Bed We Made, and was active in the mid-century civil and gay rights movements. She’s probably better known today as Annselm L.N.V. Morpurgo and has a very active Twitter feed of a progressive bent. If you intend to take a foray into early lesbian fiction, Odd Girl is about as good as it gets. It’s not a literary masterpiece, but it’s as well written as most genre novels, and is a consistently entertaining read.
