In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she’s ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her–college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life–is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her. When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with the remote, brilliant older woman, she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden’s student outside of class as well. Whatever the subject–Baudelaire, lipstick colors, or how to travel with a lover–Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.
Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for You, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2001, is a novel of first love and sentimental education. Seventeen-year-old Flannery Jansen, new at college, falls for Anne Arden, a graduate student in her twenties, and learns from her about Baudelaire, lipstick and how to travel with a lover, until she discovers more about Anne than she wanted to know. It won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book by the American Library Association the same year.
The book built a devoted readership over the following years. In 2017 Brownrigg published a sequel, Pages for Her, which brings Flannery and Anne together again twenty years on, and Picador reissued the original alongside it, by then described in the lesbian press as a cult classic.
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Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for You, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2001, is a novel of first love and sentimental education. Seventeen-year-old Flannery Jansen, new at college, falls for Anne Arden, a graduate student in her twenties, and learns from her about Baudelaire, lipstick and how to travel with a lover, until she discovers more about Anne than she wanted to know. It won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book by the American Library Association the same year.
The book built a devoted readership over the following years. In 2017 Brownrigg published a sequel, Pages for Her, which brings Flannery and Anne together again twenty years on, and Picador reissued the original alongside it, by then described in the lesbian press as a cult classic.