Winter Love: Han Suyin

"The private world of bliss, frustrations, lies, and substitutes involved in a love outside the canon of western mores is bitterly and movingly told"

The subtitled quotes from a Times Literary Supplement review of Han Suyin’s Winter Love (1962), the story of a doomed lesbian love affair. Red (Bettina Jones) looks back to the “shiver-making, viscous, yellow-grey” winter of 1944, the dreary last days of WWII. She first spots beautiful Mara Daniels on the first day of class. Mara’s married, wearing make up, heels, drenched in perfume and little gold earrings, while everyone else, the whole city, wears rational clothes and survives on dull rationed foodstuff, the other students unkempt and crude, with their pettiness and jealousies, the classrooms and Red’s boarding house are shabby and smell rank. Red instantly goes to Mara, whose dressed in blue-green, gleaming, rich, feeds herself with expensive little snacks, unexpectedly excels at exams, disarms and wins over people who dislike or are jealous with her charm and impractical childlike naivete. She’s an otherworldly enigma that we only see through Red. They grow closer, then insepara…