The Price of Salt

The Price of Salt (later republished under the title Carol) is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan." Highsmith—known as a suspense writer based on her psychological thriller Strangers on a Train—used an alias as she did not want to be tagged as "a lesbian-book writer", and she also used her own life references for characters and occurrences in the story. Although Highsmith wrote over 22 novels and numerous short stories and had many sexual and romantic relationships with women, The Price of Salt is her only novel about an unequivocal lesbian relationship, and its relatively happy ending was unprecedented in lesbian literature. It is also notable for being the only one of her novels with "a conventional 'happy ending'" and characters who had "more explicit sexual existences". A British radio adaptation of the novel was broadcast in 2014.