“Through the melodrama cuts the fresh frankness of Olivia’s all-consuming ardor, and in her Strachey captures perfectly the urgency, excitement, and fire of a first adult crush.”
—The Paris Review
“Lushly lays bare the intensity of infatuation and first love.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Both ferocious and wholesome, and readers can rest assured that [Olivia’s] journey through adolescent discovery and desire doesn’t end in doom or punishment . . . Transporting and accessible to young contemporary readers, as well as for lovers of classic literature looking for historical queer and lesbian fiction.”
—them
“A little masterpiece.”
—André Gide
“A brilliant gem.”
—Bill Goldstein, NBC’s Weekend Today in New York
“A beautiful glimpse at the fickle flames of love . . . [Olivia] was a masterpiece when it was first written nearly 100 years ago, and it remains a masterpiece today. Not only does it stand up to the test of time, but in its exquisite attention to language, to feeling, its desperate determination to cultivate sensation and longing in the reader, it easily surpasses many of the more positive narratives that characterize modern gay and lesbian literature.”
—PopMatters
“A remarkable novel . . . It has a strange combination of strength and delicacy.”
—The Times (London)
“[A] short, breathless tale . . . Extravagantly French in its sensibilities.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Written in a continual tremor of excitement . . . A novel of meltings, glowings, softenings and glooms, which declares its delicacies boldly, and announces the author’s adherence to spontaneity and romance with some question-begging flourishes: ‘How can one . . . write without laying bare one’s soul?’”
—London Review of Books
“A perfect distillation of the queer subject’s fear of the future—as well as the tragedy of self-discovery inherent to queerness, that first horrified recognition of an unwanted self.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Strachey’s depiction of Olivia’s sexual and erotic longings is what makes this novel remarkable. Olivia’s ‘thinly veiled passions’ erupt into all that goes with first love: obsession, jealousy, idealization, longing, endless waiting, despair, disillusionment. Strachey takes the reader through all of these stations of the cross of first love.”
—The Gay and Lesbian Review
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