In Thrall

A touchstone novel of lesbian adolescence, set years before gay liberation.

“Dear Miss Maxfield … what I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you?—probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me …”

First published in 1982 and set prior to Stonewall, Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall is a touchstone narrative of lesbian adolescence. Publishing Triangle called it one of the “best gay and lesbian novels of all time.” 

After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter, they embark on one of the funniest—and saddest—love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Years before gay liberation, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass as “normal,” Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make homophobic jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, she checks the mirror for telltale signs of “perversion” each night. 

Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall has been compared to The Catcher in the Rye and to Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story. “The single most wonderful quality of this novel,” the Los Angeles Times Book Review writes, “is its absolute credibility.”

This new edition includes a foreword by Irish author Colm Tóibín.