It was even made into a French film by Jacqueline Audry in 1951. The book has been in and out of print since its initial publication in 1949, but it’s been recognized as a masterpiece from the beginning.
In its opening pages, the author-cum-narrator laments the fact that love has been “poisoned” by psychologists, physiologists, psycho-analysts – “the Prousts and the Freuds.” Olivia, she writes, is her “offering on the altar of absence.” Smoke by werner22brigitte ( Pixabay License / Pixabay) But as countless authors have noted, repression – and repressed desire in particular – is often channeled into creative works of unsurpassed power, of literature and poetry in particular.ĭorothy Strachey‘s Olivia, is one of those works. Many of those stories are only now being reclaimed from the obscurity of an all-too heterocentric history. And let us also acknowledge there have been significant numbers of same-sex partners who lived happy lives as couples and in spite of terribly repressive social and legislative regimes, in the distant past as well as today. Of course, we ought never to romanticize queer tragedy, nor an era in which repressive and backward social norms brought about tremendous suffering and unhappiness for so many people. It has a power and authenticity that’s visceral, and even if it indulges in excess or melodrama, it manages to touch a chord inside us that writing simply for the sake of writing often misses. Literature produced because it’s the only outlet for experience exists on a different plane from carefully crafted commercial storytelling. Perhaps it’s because so many of their authors were writing from bitter first-hand experience and exorcising personal ordeals in print.
Yet those classic tragedies retain a power and magnetism that often surpasses their more upbeat contemporary cousins. We have no shortage of joyous depictions in print to choose from. What is it about tragic, doomed romances that makes them such irresistible reading? Especially in this day and age? We know, at long last, that it’s possible for queer relationships to turn out happily and for queer books to have happy endings.
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