The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952) – a review
By Nava Atlas | On July 25, 2017 | Updated January 17, 2026 | Comments (0)
When The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith was published in 1952, it was a rarity in lesbian literature. Lesbian pulp novels were quite a thing around that time, but in order to pass censors, one of the two protagonists had to either come to a bad end or realize that she was straight, after all.
The Price of Salt, however, was a rare lesbian novel with a relatively happy ending (the couple stays together, but Carol must relinquish custody of her child).
The Price of Salt was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It was an early departure from what was to be her preferred genre — psychological thrillers starring sociopaths — and would remain an outlier among her works. Her first book, Strangers on a Train, (1951) was immediately adapted into the now-classic Hitchcock film).
. . . . . . . . . .
Scene from Carol (2015 film version of The Price of Salt)
. . . . . . . . . .
A novel about two women women falling in love,The Price of Salt became the basis of the 2015 film adaptation, retitled Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. It would have been impossible to make a film of the novel upon its publication in the paranoid, anti-gay 1950s.
Yet even revisiting this mid-century love story in 2015 wasn’t easy. “The challenge with Carol is that we’re viewing this same-sex relationship through the prism of a 2015 film,” Blanchett saidin this Hollywood Reporter feature. She added:
“These are desperately isolated women, not simply because of their sexual orientation but because they’re female in the 1950s, when there wasn’t a freedom of emotional speech around this stuff that there is today.”
Not many mainstream newspapers would have undertaken a critique of this controversial novel in its time; and so, the following review was surprisingly sensitive and sympathetic:
“Difficult Subject Delicately Treated”
From the original review in the Oakland Tribune (May 1952): The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (the pseudonym used by Patricia Highsmith for this book): This is a love story.
That is, it concerns the development from the first tentative attraction to compelling emotional involvement between two human beings, with the nuances of feeling, the crises and quandaries that beset them. The lovers are a sensitive, intense girl just emerging from her teens and a slightly older, more sophisticated woman.
It is a very considerable triumph for the author (who obviously knows what she is talking about) that she walks this tightrope without overbalancing into clinical case history or sociological indictment.
Judged as a novel, it is a far more subtle and persuasive performance than Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness which raised such a storm of controversy a couple of decades ago.
. . . . . . . . . .
See also: Romantic Quotes from The Price of Salt
. . . . . . . . . .
The predicaments of Carol and Therese are of the highly special sort determined by emotional natures at variance with the established mores. For many readers they will be altogether too special. But the two protagonists are individual persons, not statistics out of a Kinsey report, and it is as such that they command and hold our interest.
The subject matter may be, in general opinion, out of bounds, but the handling of it is on an altogether different level from the prevailing mawkishness and shrillness that alienates instead of inducing sympathetic understanding in the near-flood of stories from the other side of the fence.
Miss Morgan stands on firmer ground. She writes about human beings whose humanness is not circumscribed by their sex deviation, and she tells a story which is a story, not a wail or a tract.
. . . . . . . . . .
Patricia Highsmith
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
. . . . . . . . . .
More about The Price of Salt
- 5 Thriller-Crafting Lessons from Patricia Highsmith
- Reader discussion on Goodreads (as Carol)
- Forbidden Love: The Passion Behind Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt
- The Choice Carol had to Make
Leave a Reply