The Committee found the book offensive and lurid. Torrès’ novel was condemned in 1952 by the U.S House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. It was reprinted in 2005 by the Feminist Press in its Femmes Fatales series, which features pulp, noir and mystery novels by women of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Originally published by Gold Medal Books, “Women’s Barracks” has sold four million copies in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Though its sexual scenes appear tame to 21st-century eyes, the author’s forthright depiction of the liaisons of the women in her unit with male resistance members - and with one another - scandalized midcentury America. The book is a fictionalized account of the author’s wartime service in London with the women’s division of the Free French forces. Torrès remained inadvertently best known for “Women’s Barracks,” published in the United States in 1950 as a paperback original.

Though she wrote more than a dozen novels and several memoirs, Ms. Her last book, published earlier this year, was Mission Secrète (Tallandier), a memoir of detailing her campaign to “help the ‘black Jews’ of Ethiopia to emigrate to Israel.” Torrès wrote 16 books in all, both novels and memoirs. Kudos to the editors for bringing this lost classic back into print-it never should have left us in the first place.The French writer Tereska Torrès, who was best known for her controversial pulp novel Women’s Barracks, died on Thursday in her home in Paris. The edition includes an illuminating interview with the author and an afterword by Judith Mayne that nicely contextualizes the narrative as well as the book's curious publishing history. Truly, it is a more literary novel than the lurid original cover would have one believe-its many sexual encounters invariably veer from the promise of pornography to the achingly real, and often painful, emotional excavations of these women's lives.

It is, in fact, a moving and bittersweet tale of a tight-knit community of women, their loves and losses, hopes and despairs, with a charmingly modest salaciousness that runs through to justify its ''pulp'' marketing. Translated from the French (though never published in France), this heavily autobiographical tale of life in the Free French Army women's barracks in WWII London is a delicious blend of sex and melodrama that manages to be sentimental without ever becoming mawkish or campy. From the Feminist Press's 'Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp' series comes this reissue of a long out-of-print 1950 classic, the ''first lesbian-themed pulp'' novel.

Women's Barracks by Tereska Torrès