Patience & Sarah

By: Isabel Miller

Synopsis: “Set in the nineteenth century, Isabel Miller’s classic lesbian novel traces the relationship between Patience White, a painter, and Sarah Dowling, a farmer, whose romantic bond does not sit well with the puritanical New England farming community in which they live. Ultimately, they are forced to make life-changing decisions that depend on their courage and their commitment to one another.
“First self-published in 1969 (titled A Place for Us) in an edition of 1,000 copies, the author hand-sold the book on New York street corners; it garnered increasing attention to the point of receiving the American Library Association’s first Gay Book Award in 1971. McGraw-Hill’s version of the book a year later brought it to mainstream bookstores across the country.
“Patience & Sarah is a historical romance whose drama was a touchstone for the burgeoning gay and women’s activism of the 1960s and early 1970s. It celebrates the joys of an uninhibited love between two strong women with a confident defiance that remains relevant today.”

Genre: Adult Fiction

Content Warnings: Child Abuse, Discussion of Slavery, Homophobia, Mention of Animal Cruelty, Misogyny, Physical Abuse, Physical Violence, Racism, Sexism, Sexual Assault

Why You Should Read It: One of the very many reading challenges I’m doing is to read every single Stonewall Award winner ever, so of course, I kicked it off by reading the first ever winner, Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller. It was a very deserving award winner. This was such a well-done book. The historical elements were incredibly present (you never forgot that this was set in the nineteenth-century) without being overbearing (you didn’t receive so much detail to place in that time period that you lost the story). The romance between the title characters was sugar sweet when things were going well, heartachingly tender at all times, and stomach-clenching awful when things were going poorly. The dynamic between the well-educated, well-off Patience and the rough-and-tumble, I-like-to-chop-wood Sarah is also so much fun to watch (though I very much dislike the part where Patience attempts to “domesticate” Sarah, so to speak, because it felt a little like “I like who you are, but I would like you better if you were a bit different.”) I think my favorite part, though, was the language. Isabel Miller uses such tender and beautiful language when she writes about Patience and Sarah’s physical love for each other. The word “melt” will probably make my heart flutter forever now.

If you want to read some seminal lesbian literature, you need to read Patience & Sarah. If you want to trace the roots of queer literature to its beginnings, you’ll need to read Patience & Sarah at some point, so might as well do it now. If you just love women who love women, historical fiction, and stick-it-to-the-man energy (which is 80% of Sarah’s character), you should go find a copy of Patience & Sarah right now.

Much like Isabel Miller when she began to write this book, I wish we knew more about the real Mary Ann Wilson and Miss Brundage, who inspired the characters of Patience White and Sarah Dowling, but I suppose if we can’t have that, I will settle for this beautiful book.

My Rating: 4/5 stars