On a ship out of Buenos Aires, two women share a cabin for the crossing. One of them talks.
Zezé was fourteen when Leonor arrived at the convent school - seventeen, titled, and entirely certain of herself. What passed between them in the dormitory is the part of the story Zezé tells most slowly, and with the most pleasure. Everything after it she tells at speed: the ruin, the stage, the men, the long work of staying solvent as a singer in the Madrid theatres.
Ángeles Vicente published Zezé in Madrid in 1909, under her own name, nineteen years before The Well of Loneliness and at a time when the only lesbian material in Spanish fiction had been supplied by men, for men. Reviewers knew exactly what they were reading. One complained that there was a scene of lesbian love every five minutes; another that readers ought to be revolted. Others called it beautiful, combative, and morally sound. Then the novel went out of print for eighty years, and its author went out of the record altogether.
This is its first translation into English.
It is followed by Paper Trail: twenty-three pieces from the Spanish press between 1908 and 1918, translated here for the first time, two of them not previously reproduced anywhere. They document what happened to a woman who published a book like this and refused to be quiet about it: the columnists who wanted her pensioned off so she would stop writing, the death threat, the police complaint, the fortnight of jokes, and her own reply, printed in her own words.