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LOST CLASSICS: A MICROCOSM OF OUR WORLD; The Microcosm
The Microcosm by Maureen Duffy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Reprinted Penguin Books (Virago Modern Classics), 1989.
There is a classic moment in many coming-out stories when the suspecting or newly-initiated lesbian journeys to the library (or in recent years the women's bookstore) in search of language about the life she is poised to enter. When I first made that journey some twenty-five years ago, I carried as my guide The Lesbian in Literature bibliography compiled by Barbara Grier. Although I now have several editions of it, the one I treasure is the original 1967 version, still sporting Grier's pre-liberation pseudonym, "Gene Damon." It is annotated with the call numbers of every book I could find in my university library. These books formed my real graduate school education.
Among the books that Grier's bible led me to was Maureen Duffy's remarkable novel, The Microcosm, first published in 1966. It is one of a handful of books from that era to capture with a degree of authenticity and perception the lives of everyday lesbians. Not a sleazy (if delicious) pulp paperback nor a homophobic psychoanalytic diatribe, The Microcosm is a work fiercely committed to the best use of language and to respect for its subjects' lives and thoughts.
In her afterword for the 1989 Virago reissue of The Microcosm, Duffy describes its genesis. Already the author of an autobiographical novel, That's How It Was, which charts the genesis of her own sexual identity, Duffy decided to write openly and directly about lesbian lives. She set out originally to produce a nonfiction ethnography based on first-person interviews with women "in the life." No publisher would touch it at that time. However, one suggested that she rewrite the interviews in fictional form, and that became The Microcosm.
The Microcosm centers on a bar (reportedly based upon the famous Gateways Club in London, which also appears in the play and film, "The Killing of Sister George") called by one of its patrons "The House of Shades." Like Stephen Gordon in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, this character, Matt, envisions lesbian life as an underground existence too often stifling the potential of its participants. But, unlike Stephen, Matt also...