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The Other Side of Venus
Book by Verel, Shirley
Paperback
Published January 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 15, 2026
The Other Side of Venus is not pulp fiction. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, since that is the context in which it invariably surfaces (on those rare occasions when it surfaces at all). But it was first published in hardcover, in London, by Quadriga Press, which apparently specialized in serious literature with, perhaps, a sexually adventurous edge. (Quadriga’s most enduring offering was the 1969 English translation of Noble-winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata’s highly disturbing, but admittedly gorgeous, House of the Sleeping Beauties.) Like many twentieth-century queer European literary novels, The Dark Side of Venus was reprinted in the United States as a “pulp” paperback, albeit with a notably demure cover and tagline.
Certainly, the novel has something in common with the lesbian pulp of its era—a characteristic combination of frankness and discretion about sex, an intermittently sociological tone that can read as warding off the censors. And it is at once understated and melodramatic in a way characteristic, somehow, of mid-century literature and cinema in general.
Still, I can’t help but wonder how I would have reacted to the novel if it had been presented to me as literary fiction—reprinted by the New York Review of Books, say. I can imagine being less impressed. I can also imagine being more, and more immediately, impressed. It’s difficult to say. The novel’s matter-of-fact style is dramatically out of step with most contemporary queer writing. Its brilliance snuck up on me. But in the end, I am convinced that the novel—which is of immense interest as a historical source—is also a genuinely beautiful and important work of literature, with a subtlety of voice and characterization vanishingly rare in any genre or time period.
The Other Side of Venus is the story of “a love affair, marriage, whatever it is to be called,” between Judith—28, divorced, cool, very Carol from The Price of Salt —and Diana—19 and already a published novelist, beautiful (though we only see her through Judith’s eyes, so of course she would be), understood by those around her to be flighty and impulsive, but clearly neither of those things. A perhaps less mousy Therese.
The Other Side of Venus is not a particularly happy novel. Like The Price of Salt, the novel dances on the edge of a living nightmare—the nightmare of compulsory heterosexuality; what Judith calls “the tragic folly . . . of ever imagining you can live your life as if you weren’t you at all.” Or as Diana puts it, in characteristic understatement: “It would have been better to leave us alone. And kinder. That’s all.”
Diana puts up with a rather unpleasant amount of heterosexual sex in The Other Side of Venus—an experience she utterly despises, and yet can’t quite seem entirely to avoid. The tragedy of this is vivid, heartbreaking, almost impossible. And so although the novel’s ending is terribly ambiguous, it is also not. It is a novel from a nightmare world. Judith and Diana make it out of the haunted house alive. If they weren’t haunted by it, it wouldn’t be true, it wouldn’t make sense.
The Other Side of Venus is about Judith and Diana’s relationship. But it is really about the experience of being gay in 1950s London. For every kiss, there is at least one conversation about how hard it is to be a homosexual (the word Judith uses for herself, though, as Diana says in one of those conversations, it’s “‘hard all the same to think of us as anything so classified as homosexuals.’”) The novel is full of gay women talking to each other about how it feels to be gay, what it might mean about them and their place in the world, how they are to manage it. What emerges from these conversations, in the end, is that being homosexual is terribly difficult, but that being a straight woman is too, really. After a visit to Judith’s aunt, who raised her—and who is terribly unhappy in a perfectly conventional way—Diana observes, “It must be awful to get old and feel the whole thing, really, has been a flop.”
The novel might be glossed as the long, slow realization that what felt, at first, like having nothing to lose was in fact having everything to lose. Which may be why, reading in 2026, I find the novel so fundamentally encouraging. Because it is about pain, but really it is about courage.
The world seems to know very little about Shirley Verel. I haven’t been able to find a shred of biographical information beyond her bibliography—and even that has been difficult to establish. She was a lesbian—that much is clear. The Dark Side of Venus was apparently her first novel. It was republished by the legendary lesbian press Naiad in 1988, with the involvement of the author. The 1988 edition gave the novel its new, notably less negative, title. It also removed the final line, shading the novel’s ambiguous happy ending a touch more positive. Naiad published a second novel by Verel, The Bee’s Kiss, the following year. The brief author bio in that volume describes The Bee’s Kiss as Verel’s second novel and implies that it was newly written. Neither appears quite true. A bit of late-80s self-fashioning, I suspect, from a gifted author who had made concessions to the mores of her time and place she’d come to regret in a freer age.
The best—really the only—information I’ve been able to find on Verel’s other novels comes from a 2011 blog post by Dia Tsung. Tsung notes that she’d acquired two other Verel novels published in the 60s, Room for Trouble and Goodnight My Vow, adding that parts of Room for Trouble were incorporated into The Bee’s Kiss. Tsung also mentions a fifth novel, Little Girl Left, of which she found a single mention—though I haven’t been able to track down even that. I’ve just spent more money than I should have ordering a rare first edition of Room for Trouble, and hope to review that novel and the easier-to-acquire Bee’s Kiss in the near future.
In the meantime, Verel has left us at least one extraordinary novel of queer life—and of the inevitable realization that love is not an otherworldly accident, but a choice that we must make again and again, sometimes against all odds: “At any rate it’s true, it’s true, that we love each other. Not that I deceive myself there’s immunity in that; from next summer, and the summer after.”
A slightly expanded version of this review (with footnotes!) is available at https://scorpionreview.substack.com/p....
Certainly, the novel has something in common with the lesbian pulp of its era—a characteristic combination of frankness and discretion about sex, an intermittently sociological tone that can read as warding off the censors. And it is at once understated and melodramatic in a way characteristic, somehow, of mid-century literature and cinema in general.
Still, I can’t help but wonder how I would have reacted to the novel if it had been presented to me as literary fiction—reprinted by the New York Review of Books, say. I can imagine being less impressed. I can also imagine being more, and more immediately, impressed. It’s difficult to say. The novel’s matter-of-fact style is dramatically out of step with most contemporary queer writing. Its brilliance snuck up on me. But in the end, I am convinced that the novel—which is of immense interest as a historical source—is also a genuinely beautiful and important work of literature, with a subtlety of voice and characterization vanishingly rare in any genre or time period.
The Other Side of Venus is the story of “a love affair, marriage, whatever it is to be called,” between Judith—28, divorced, cool, very Carol from The Price of Salt —and Diana—19 and already a published novelist, beautiful (though we only see her through Judith’s eyes, so of course she would be), understood by those around her to be flighty and impulsive, but clearly neither of those things. A perhaps less mousy Therese.
The Other Side of Venus is not a particularly happy novel. Like The Price of Salt, the novel dances on the edge of a living nightmare—the nightmare of compulsory heterosexuality; what Judith calls “the tragic folly . . . of ever imagining you can live your life as if you weren’t you at all.” Or as Diana puts it, in characteristic understatement: “It would have been better to leave us alone. And kinder. That’s all.”
Diana puts up with a rather unpleasant amount of heterosexual sex in The Other Side of Venus—an experience she utterly despises, and yet can’t quite seem entirely to avoid. The tragedy of this is vivid, heartbreaking, almost impossible. And so although the novel’s ending is terribly ambiguous, it is also not. It is a novel from a nightmare world. Judith and Diana make it out of the haunted house alive. If they weren’t haunted by it, it wouldn’t be true, it wouldn’t make sense.
The Other Side of Venus is about Judith and Diana’s relationship. But it is really about the experience of being gay in 1950s London. For every kiss, there is at least one conversation about how hard it is to be a homosexual (the word Judith uses for herself, though, as Diana says in one of those conversations, it’s “‘hard all the same to think of us as anything so classified as homosexuals.’”) The novel is full of gay women talking to each other about how it feels to be gay, what it might mean about them and their place in the world, how they are to manage it. What emerges from these conversations, in the end, is that being homosexual is terribly difficult, but that being a straight woman is too, really. After a visit to Judith’s aunt, who raised her—and who is terribly unhappy in a perfectly conventional way—Diana observes, “It must be awful to get old and feel the whole thing, really, has been a flop.”
The novel might be glossed as the long, slow realization that what felt, at first, like having nothing to lose was in fact having everything to lose. Which may be why, reading in 2026, I find the novel so fundamentally encouraging. Because it is about pain, but really it is about courage.
The world seems to know very little about Shirley Verel. I haven’t been able to find a shred of biographical information beyond her bibliography—and even that has been difficult to establish. She was a lesbian—that much is clear. The Dark Side of Venus was apparently her first novel. It was republished by the legendary lesbian press Naiad in 1988, with the involvement of the author. The 1988 edition gave the novel its new, notably less negative, title. It also removed the final line, shading the novel’s ambiguous happy ending a touch more positive. Naiad published a second novel by Verel, The Bee’s Kiss, the following year. The brief author bio in that volume describes The Bee’s Kiss as Verel’s second novel and implies that it was newly written. Neither appears quite true. A bit of late-80s self-fashioning, I suspect, from a gifted author who had made concessions to the mores of her time and place she’d come to regret in a freer age.
The best—really the only—information I’ve been able to find on Verel’s other novels comes from a 2011 blog post by Dia Tsung. Tsung notes that she’d acquired two other Verel novels published in the 60s, Room for Trouble and Goodnight My Vow, adding that parts of Room for Trouble were incorporated into The Bee’s Kiss. Tsung also mentions a fifth novel, Little Girl Left, of which she found a single mention—though I haven’t been able to track down even that. I’ve just spent more money than I should have ordering a rare first edition of Room for Trouble, and hope to review that novel and the easier-to-acquire Bee’s Kiss in the near future.
In the meantime, Verel has left us at least one extraordinary novel of queer life—and of the inevitable realization that love is not an otherworldly accident, but a choice that we must make again and again, sometimes against all odds: “At any rate it’s true, it’s true, that we love each other. Not that I deceive myself there’s immunity in that; from next summer, and the summer after.”
A slightly expanded version of this review (with footnotes!) is available at https://scorpionreview.substack.com/p....
February 6, 2016
This classic British lesbian pulp novel was published in the early 1960s and was also published under the title "The Dark Side of Venus." Unlike many lesbian pulp novels of the mid-20th century, this novel has a happy ending. No one ends up dead, institutionalized, or heterosexual. The story centers on divorcée Judith Allart, her relationship with the younger Diana Quendon, and Judith's circle of friends. The only reason I gave this 4 stars vs. 5 is due to the slightly didactic pro-homosexuality discussions. To my late 20th/early 21st century sensibilities it was a bit over the top. However, I understand exactly how important that would have been at the time. This novel holds an important place in the history of lesbian fiction, and like other pulp lesbian classics, really transcends the pulp category. The only reason it was a pulp novel when it was published was due to its lesbian content and is not a reflection of the novel's quality.
March 18, 2020
I don't know why specifically, but... this book spoke to me. I liked the setting, the writing, the main character, her love interest, the ending! I've realized lately, I often enjoy older writing to that of recent years. (I had this realization during a conversation with someone who told me they only like writing from after 1980/90, haha.) This makes it difficult for someone who enjoys queer literature, since a lot of the older stuff is tragic and/or rubbish. Books like this fill a specific craving I have. This is maybe not a 5 star book, but I was 5 star invested! And for a time of isolation, I couldn't ask for more!
February 27, 2010
one of the few lesbian pulp fiction books the chicago public library has. i was so excited to put it on hold i didn't realize i'd read it before. oh well. as with other vintage books it takes forever for them to get it on, but it's fun and and makes me so so happy i live in such a modern era.
March 7, 2019
This started really really really slow. It was short but it felt like it was taking me forever to wade through. There were some good lines in the last third or so about lesbian desire but overall this was pretty unremarkable.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews