The Price of Salt

Patricia Highsmith published The Price of Salt in 1952 under the pen name Claire Morgan. She was already known for suspense, and she chose the alias because she did not want to be filed away as an author of lesbian novels. The book was based in part on an encounter of her own: a woman she saw while working a Christmas job at a New York department store, whom she later followed. Highsmith wrote letters to the publisher setting out why the story had to end the way it does, and her argument was about the difference between a novel and a case history.

Therese Belivet is a young woman with no money and a vague ambition, sharing a flat and drifting through an affair with a man she is fond of but not in love with. Carol Aird is a wealthy woman with a husband pursuing a divorce and a daughter who will be used as leverage, which is what the custody fight in the second half is about. The two of them travel west together, and the trip becomes both the happiness of the book and the evidence that will be used against Carol in a courtroom.

The novel matters in the history of the genre because it declined the ending that readers of 1950s fiction about women who loved women were expected to get, and it gave its characters jobs, apartments and opinions rather than a moral. It fell out of print, was reissued under the author's own name in 1990, and reached a much wider audience when it was filmed as Carol in 2015. Todd Haynes directed that adaptation, with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in the leads.