Tottie by Sarah Aldridge (All Editions)

Tottie: A Tale of the 60s by Sarah Aldridge is a 1975 lesbian romance set against the social upheaval of the 1960s. Connie, a young lawyer navigating the professional barriers placed in front of women, is engaged to be married when she meets Tottie, a young woman who has fled her conservative family and found her way into the counterculture underground. The novel was published by Naiad Press and reissued in subsequent editions through the 1980s.

Genre: Grier Rated; Romance

Subjects: Fiction / General; Lesbianism

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Comments

Tottie is the second novel published by Naiad Press and the third by Sarah Aldridge (Anyda Marchant). Where The Latecomer is set in a relatively timeless social world of ships and drawing rooms, Tottie plants itself firmly in the 1960s, using the decade’s political and cultural ferment as the backdrop for its central relationship. The contrast between Connie’s professional world — where women lawyers were still a novelty — and Tottie’s rootless countercultural existence gives the book more social texture than its predecessor.

Aldrich’s prose remains measured and the romance unhurried, which will suit some readers and test the patience of others. The book holds its place in the Naiad catalogue as an early example of lesbian fiction that treated its protagonists as capable adults with full professional and social lives rather than cautionary figures. It carries a Grier rating but no formal star rating in the source records. For readers working through Aldridge’s output chronologically, it is a solid step forward from The Latecomer, though not her strongest work.

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Publication History