Children in Uniform [Mädchen in Uniform]

WINSLOE, Christa (author); SAGAN, Leontine (director); BURNHAM, Barbara (translator & adaptor); NESBITT, Cathleen, TANDY, Jessica (lead actors)

Published by Duchess Theatre: Licensed by the Lord Chamberlain to John Percy Mitchelhill, Aldwych, London, 1932

FIRST EDITION. Side-stapled pamphlet, pp [16], incl. b/w illustrations. Original black, white and red illustrated paper wrappers. Gently soiled, staples rusty with some bleed into adjacent pages. Else, clean and tidy. Near fine. JiscLHD locates no copies. An excellent copy of this rare and fascinating piece of lesbian ephemera, whose cover illustration features Jessica Tandy and Joyce Bland in an amorous clinch as Manuela and Fraulein von Bernburg, and opens to a photograph of Cathleen Nesbitt, who holds the reader in her direct gaze. Better known by its German film title, Mädchen in Uniform (Dir. Leontine Sagan, 1931), Christa Winsloe's melodrama set in a Prussian boarding school, in which the motherless Manuela falls in love with School Mistress Fraulein von Bernburg with near-disastrous consequences, has long been a classic of lesbian cinema. A popular and critical success, domestically and internationally, it was eventually banned by the Nazis, with many of the women involved in its production, including Winsloe and Sagan, later forced to flee Germany. Translated into English by Barbara Burnham in 1931, the English stage production, again directed by Leontine Sagan and with an all-female cast, opened in 1932 at the Duchess Theatre, only four years after the banning of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness for obscenity (for more on literary censorship see our copy of Lovat Dickinson's Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness, ref. 1294). As the pamphlet suggestively suggests, the production toyed with what was stage-able/ representable in terms of female same-sex desire and did so successfully, it seems. Seller Inventory # 2901

Bibliographic Details

Title: Children in Uniform [Mädchen in Uniform]
Publisher: Duchess Theatre: Licensed by the Lord Chamberlain to John Percy Mitchelhill, Aldwych, London
Publication Date: 1932
Binding: Paper wrappers
Condition: Near Fine
Edition: 1st Edition