Carol had previously admitted to Harge that she had a short-lived sexual relationship months earlier with her best friend, Abby. Richard accuses Therese of having a 'schoolgirl crush,' but Therese knows it is more than that: she is in love with Carol.Ĭarol's husband, Harge, is suspicious of Carol's relationship with Therese, whom he meets briefly when Therese stays over at Carol's house in New Jersey. Therese develops a strong attachment to Carol. Carol, who is going through a difficult separation and divorce and is herself quite lonely, unexpectedly responds. On an impulse, Therese sends her a Christmas card. The woman's name is Carol Aird and she gives Therese her address so her purchases may be delivered. On a long and monotonous day at work in the toy section of a department store during the Christmas season, Therese becomes interested in a customer, an elegant and beautiful woman in her early thirties. Therese is dating Richard, a young man she does not love and does not enjoy having sex with.

When she was a young girl, her widowed mother sent her to an Episcopalian boarding school, leaving her with a sense of abandonment. Therese Belivet is a lonely young woman, just beginning her adult life in Manhattan and looking for a chance to launch her career as a theatre set designer. Carol, a film adaptation released in 2015, was nominated for six Academy Awards and nine British Academy Film Awards. Ī British radio adaptation of the novel was broadcast in 2014. It is also notable for being the only one of her novels with 'a conventional 'happy ending '' and characters who had 'more explicit sexual existences'. The Price of Salt (later republished under the title Carol) is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym 'Claire Morgan.' Highsmith-known as a suspense writer based on her psychological thriller Strangers on a Train-used an alias as she did not want to be tagged as 'a lesbian-book writer', and she also used her own life references for characters and occurrences in the story.Īlthough Highsmith wrote over 22 novels and numerous short stories and had many sexual and romantic relationships with women, The Price of Salt is her only novel about an unequivocal lesbian relationship, and its relatively happy ending was unprecedented in lesbian literature.

鹽的代價 by Claire Morgan