Men, Joyce thought with a cold anger rising in her. She felt a new affection for Mary Jean. She would have liked to pat her head or put her arm around her, but she was afraid of being sentimental. She felt so alive and secure herself that she was ashamed.

Joyce is eighteen, a freshman at a fashionable school for girls; suddenly all that matters to her is a woman twice her age. This beautifully written pulp novel was published as a mass market paperback in 1957 and is widely considered a historic milestone for its openly lesbian, feminist content, which shocked many readers at the time. It has been described as an "anti-romance novel" for its grounding in the reality of lesbian experience.

Whisper Their Love was the first lesbian novel by Valerie Taylor, which she wrote while raising her three sons; it sold an amazing two million copies. This new edition, which brings this classic book back into print, includes an appendix of historical materials about the book and author, as well as an introduction by Barbara Grier, co-founder of the legendary lesbian publisher Naiad Press.

Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world.
“from the original book jacket

Little Sister's Classics is an Arsenal Pulp Press imprint dedicated to reviving lost and out-of-print gay and lesbian classic books, both fiction and nonfiction. The series is produced in conjunction with Little Sister's Books, the heroic gay Vancouver bookstore well-known for its anticensorship efforts.

Valerie Taylor (born Velma Young) was a novelist, poet, feminist, and social activist. Whisper Their Love (Fawcett Library) was her first lesbian novel; she followed it with numerous lesbian pulp fiction classics in the late 1950s and 1960s, including The Girls in 3-B, Stranger on Lesbos, A World Without Man, and Return to Lesbos. A member of the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, she died in 1997 in Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for 20 years.

Valerie Taylor's profile page

Barbara Grier is the founder of the Naiad Press, the legendary American lesbian publishing company. She wrote the introduction to the Little Sister's Classic reissue of Whisper Their Love by Valerie Taylor in 2006.

Barbara Grier's profile page

"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)

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