- ^ Highsmith wrote in the Afterword for the novel's Bloomsbury 1990 republication as Carol: "If I were to write a novel about a lesbian relationship, would I then be labelled a lesbian-book writer? That was a possibility, even though I might never be inspired to write another such book in my life. So I decided to offer the book under another name."[1]
- ^ The woman in the fur coat was Kathleen Wiggins Senn (Mrs. E.R. Senn). Highsmith used her name in the first working title of the novel, "The Bloomingdale Story".[3]
- ^ To help pay for twice-a-week psychoanalysis sessions to 'cure' her homosexuality, Highsmith took a sales job during Christmas rush season in Bloomingdale's department store. Ironically, this led to the creation of her novel in which two women meet in a department store and begin a passionate affair.[4][5]
- ^ The phrase "the price of salt" does not appear in the text, but Highsmith used "salt" as a metaphor twice in Chapter 22. Separated from Carol, who has been forced to return home, Therese is reminded of their time together: "In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?" Shortly thereafter, when Dannie visits Therese on his way to California, she compares her sentiment toward him and Richard: "She felt shy with him, yet somehow close, a closeness charged with something she had never felt with Richard. Something suspenseful, that she enjoyed. A little salt, she thought."[18]
- ^ The back-cover copy of the paperback stated: "Here is a novel, utterly sincere and honest, which deals with a subject until recently considered taboo. Now a young woman, Claire Morgan, comes along and writes of unsanctioned love from a completely new point of view. As the Louisville Times says:'The Price of Salt' ... seems to mark a new departure in this type of fiction ... Claire Morgan is completely natural. She has a story to tell and she tells it with an almost conversational ease. Her people are neither degenerate monsters nor fragile victims of the social order. They must—and do—pay a price for thinking, feeling and loving 'differently;' but they are courageous and true to themselves throughout."[45]
- ^ Terry Castle wrote: "I have long had a theory that [Vladimir] Nabokov knew The Price of Salt and modeled the climactic cross-country car chase in Lolita on Therese and Carol’s frenzied bid for freedom in the earlier novel."[47][48]
- ^ Highsmith wrote in her Afterword dated May 24, 1989: "The Price of Salt had some serious and respectable reviews when it appeared in hardcover in 1952. But the real success came a year later with the paperback edition, which sold nearly a million copies and was certainly read by more. The fan letters came in addressed to Claire Morgan, care of the paperback house. I remember receiving envelopes of ten and fifteen letters a couple of times a week and for months on end." "Many of the letters that came to me carried such messages as "Yours is the first book like this with a happy ending! We don't all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine." Others said, "Thank you for writing such a story. It is a little like my own story …" "The letters trickled in for years, and even now a letter comes once or twice a year from a reader."[6]
- ^ As Erin Carlston observed in her essay, the novel: "Didn't condemn its lovers to suicide or send them back to their men," and "departed from ... the standard not only in the popular conception of lesbians, but in almost all lesbian fiction before it."[16]
- ^ Marijane Meaker, who wrote lesbian stories under the pseudonym "Ann Aldrich" for Gold Medal Books, stated: "[The Price of Salt ] was for many years the only lesbian novel, in either hard or soft cover, with a happy ending."[55]
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