Women in the Shadows by Ann Bannon (All Editions)

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Women in the Shadows is the third of Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker novels, published by Gold Medal in 1959, and the darkest book in the series. Laura Landon and Beebo Brinker have been together for two years in Greenwich Village, and the novel follows the collapse of their relationship as Beebo sinks into drinking and violence and Laura is drawn to Tris, a dancer who presents herself as Indian and is hiding that she is Black. Laura finally agrees to marry their friend Jack Mann, a gay man, in a marriage of convenience that becomes one of the book's central subjects.

Bannon has said the book was written during one of the darker periods of her own life, and it has long been the most controversial book in the series, with many readers troubled by its handling of race. It is also among the most revealing. Where the earlier books celebrated the discovery that lesbian communities existed at all, this one looks at the serious problems inside them, from bar raids to heavy drinking, a decade before Stonewall.

Like the rest of the series it was reissued by Naiad Press in 1983 and by Cleis Press in 2002, with a new introduction by Bannon, and it is now freely available through Project Gutenberg. Bannon, often called the Queen of Lesbian Pulp, received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award in 2008.