The Two Lovers

Two young women, a student named Dora and the liberated Lisa, meet each other in Athens in the late twenties and fall in love. Dora, the more introverted and thoughtful of the two, chronicles their doubly tormented love in diary form; primarily because of the social and temperamental differences between the two girls and secondly because theirs was a homosexual love in a rigidly heterosexual society. Dora Rosetti, both author and main character of the book, uses an uninhibited style and throughout her diary continuously makes reference to sexual promiscuity and drug use. The novel, published in 1929, was praised for its originality by the famous critic Grigorios Xenopoulos but soon fell into oblivion probably to avoid a scandal. In the early twenty-fist century the literary historian Christina Dunia discovered two copies of The Two Lovers, the fist in Lesbos in the personal library of the painter Takis Eleftheriadis and the second in the personal library of Constantine P. Cavafy.