Whisper their love

Whisper their love

176 pages

18 cm

Joyce sees Edith for the first time at the school
pages 33 -34

Damon, Gene. "Whisper Their Love." Ladder, vol. 2, no. 2, November 1957, p. 14.

A paperback set in a girls school detailing the love affair between an 18-year old student and the dean of women. The writing is not too bad, the characters come to life and the story moves at a fast pace.

Contested in the U.S.A and Canada by the National Organization for Decent Literature.

Censored in South Africa

Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world.

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 was eighteen, a freshman at a fashionable school for girls. Suddenly all that mattered to her was a woman twice her age. A haunting and shocking story of how a young girl's hunger for love made her prey to tormented and forbidden passions.

A brunette with short, curly hair is shown to the far right side of the image sitting down. Part of one of her legs is visible, showing the hem of a blue skirt and part of her shin. She is wearing a yellow, long-sleeved blouse which is buttoned at the cleavage level. Her face is slightly tilted to her right and to the back, and her gaze is relaxed and directed toward another woman, a redhead, who is sitting on the ground beside her with her body leaned over her lap and her right arm bent over the brunette's lap. Her eyes are green eyes and she is wearing a negligee with lace on its upper part, and straps. The brunette strokes her hair with her left hand, and the redhead's head is slightly curling over her right shoulder as she looks directly at the reader with a smile. To the left, in the background, a green night table is seen against a wall, with a table lamp on top which illuminates the wall in two places, over and under its shade. To the right of the image, around the brunette's left side, rays of light can be seen, seemingly coming through a window with blinds over it. The image is set over a yellow background seen at the top and the bottom of the cover.

Whisper Their Love was Valerie Taylor’s first lesbian novel. Fawcett Publications changed Ms. Taylor’s working title of The Heart Takes Many Paths to Whisper Their Love.

The publishers included an introduction by a Dr. Hoffmann with an advisory to parents and a warning against the lifestyles illustrated in the novel.