Out of Time by Paula Martinac

Lesbian ghosts have been haunting Susan ever since she felt compelled to make off with a 1920s photo album from a New York City antiques store. The ghosts–the women featured in the album–whisper in Susan’s ear, titillate her with gossip about their love lives and literally seduce her. A confused 30-year-old with a bunch of advanced degrees and little desire to use them, Susan becomes swept up in the lives of her spiritual predecessors and sets out to understand their history. Her quest is complicated by a rocky relationship with her lover, Catherine, who is bothered by Susan’s obsession with the ghosts. Martinac, whose writing appeared in Voyages Out 1: Lesbian Short Fiction , has a passion for the remnants of yesteryear; she excels at descriptions of antiques stores, 1920s nostalgia and the experiences of maverick women of those times. Less successful is her depiction of contemporary romance, which is weighed down by the kind of solemn analysis that engages only the people in the relationship. Susan’s romance with the past, however, and the lessons she learns from her ghosts, ought to satisfy readers interested in lesbian social history.

Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

Seeking shelter from the rain, Susan steps inside a Manhattan antique store. She finds a scrapbook and looks ‘the pages over quickly, taking in the faces of four amazing women.’ For this amateur collector of old books about lesbians, the photo album seems too good to be true: ‘it was almost like holding the women, protecting them from the silence of time.’ The photos – of Harriet, an actress during the 1920s, her partner Lucy Warner Wier, a writer, and another couple, Elinor and Sarah – stop in 1927. Susan’s search to find out what happened to them affects her own life; the more involved she becomes with the photos, the more strained her relationship with her partner, Catherine, becomes. The scrapbook women become real to Susan; she seeks and visits places they visited and before long is conversing with them, but she is afraid to share this with Catherine. Though some of the action wraps up a little too neatly, Paula Martinac’s engaging writing makes Out Of Time a fun romp through the twists and turns of the past and present. Out Of Time is a mystery, a history, and a love story in one.