One day, Patricia Highsmith, while working at a doll counter at a department store in the US, met a woman in a mink coat who made her feel “odd and swimmy in the head”. That very night she wrote the outline of a novel that was the love story of Therese – which, in her words, “came from my own bones” – and Carol, who surfaced “from her desire for the lover she’d lost, a beautiful, witty, reckless Maine Line socialite”.

The lesbian novel that’s now a major motion picture was published in 1952 using the pseudonym “Claire Morgan” for the respectable author, who didn’t want to be penalised not only for writing a novel with homosexual content, but also for giving it a happy ending.

The novel unapologetically focuses on pleasure that comes without guilt or punishment. “Yours is the first book like this with a happy ending! We don’t all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine,” a reader wrote to Highsmith. One can only imagine what it must have been like reading it at a time when gay men and women were considered not only perverts but also security risks.

Don’t be perplexed if you stumble upon many versions of this (in)famous novel as over the years its editions have multiplied, attributed to Morgan or to Highsmith, titled either The Price of Salt or Carol, with all kinds of covers, blurbs and quotes. It’s quite easy to forget what The Price of Salt is about when one begins to discover how the novel itself came about and became what it is today.

Published in 1952.