Spring Fire

There was a girl named Leda who was Queen of the campus.  There was a girl called Mitch who desperately wanted to be loved.  Suddenly, they belonged to each other. Not since The Well of Loneliness has there been such an honest, provocative novel on a theme too important to keep from the light.

This classic lesbian pulp novel about the forbidden love between two college girls is often considered by many to have launched the lesbian pulp genre. Although Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks was the first novel to feature lesbian characters, Spring Fire was the first to portray main characters in a lesbian relationship.

Susan Mitchell (Mitch) is a freshman student at Cranston University pledging to the Tri Epsilon sorority. Although shy, awkward, and not particularly “sorority girl” material, she is accepted into the sorority because of her father’s wealth. Mitch is immediately drawn to the older Leda, the campus beauty queen, and they become roommates in the sorority house. Before long, they fall in love and begin an affair they must keep secret from their sorority sisters. In a dramatic and shocking conclusion, their relationship is discovered and both girls must come to grips with the consequences an unforgiving and prejudicial society thrust upon them.