Louise Fitzhugh’s Lost Lesbian Novel
August 23, 2007 John Donovan may have been the first to publish a gay teen novel, but he wasn’t the first to write one. Almost ten years earlier, Louise Fitzhugh wrote Amelia, a novel based on her own teen years and her first affair with another girl. Unfortunately, her agent refused to take it because of the lesbian content. 
Fitzhugh put the manuscript away and years later reported that it had mysteriously “disappeared.”
When Karen Cook interviewed Fitzhugh’s former lover, Alixe Gordin, for a 1995 article that appeared in The Village Voice, Gordin said that Fitzhugh was working on Amelia at the same time she was writing Harriet the Spy (published by Harper & Row in 1964). “It was beautiful,” Gordin said of Amelia. Interestingly, she could recall little of her work on Harriet the Spy during those same years. “Harriet was like a game,” she said.
Fitzhugh died in 1974 at age 46. And Amelia is probably lost forever.
Wow, what a sad story.
Welcome to the sphere!
If I passed this chick on the street, I’d grab her and kiss her. (Don’t tell my partner.) Too much was lost from the early years of our herstory. What do want to bet that manuscript shows up on e-Bay?
Thanks for this - I was able to track down that Village Voice article through my library, and it gave me some details about Fitzhugh’s life that I hadn’t known. Like probably 95% of lesbian writers in my age group, I adored Harriet the Spy as a child - I literally wore out at least three paperback copies - and give that book a lot of credit for teaching me how to be a writer.
I’d give a lot to be able to read that lost manuscript.
Hello Julie Anne,
Louise wouldn’t have liked you grabbing and kissing her. She would’ve preferred it the other way around.
Sandra
That book, and Ursula Nordstrom’s sequel to “The Secret Language,” (which she destroyed, I think) are the two lost children’s/teen manuscripts I most long to read.
Me, too. “The Secret Language” was one of my all-time favorite books when I was a child.