WRITTEN MORE THAN a decade after Stonewall but taking place five years prior to it, Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall is a grimly comic tale of dyke awakening. This 1982 novel, reissued by Semiotext(e), recounts the sexual relationship—at once pitiful, elating, and perverse—between the book’s first-person narrator, Lynn, a sixteen-year-old senior at a selective all-girls high school in New York City, and Miss Maxfeld, her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher. Theirs is not a swoony romance like that enjoyed by the lovers in Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 sapphic touchstone, The Price of Salt: Therese Belivet and Carol Aird, another age-discordant couple who meet in Manhattan (though, crucially, Therese is nineteen, and thirtysomething Carol was never her instructor). The inevitable dissolution of Lynn and Miss Maxfeld’s unseemly affair arrives as a relief to not just the reader but also the characters. Retrospectively assaying a benighted era and bad object choices, DeLynn skillfully maintains a tone that is neither too pessimistic nor too idealistic. Having lived through the time she depicts and the sea change that followed, she writes unsentimentally about a sentimental education—one whose end signals not a dramatic transformation but a shift, however slight, to greater self-knowledge. {read}