Theodora Keogh - Writing Career

Writing Career

Keogh wrote nine novels during the period of 1950 to 1962, after which time she gave up writing completely. Her novels tended to focus on characters with psychological conflicts and often dark sides to their personalities. In this regard, her themes are similar to those of novelist Patricia Highsmith, most noted for Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Like Highsmith, she created characters who seemed quite normal on the surface and in relation to the social conventions of their day, but who had another side to their lives and their identities.

Theodora’s works explored such dark areas and themes as rape, incest, double lives, and a doctor’s psychological and emotional fascination with a child criminal. Her novels were also noteworthy for exploring gay and lesbian themes, which were daring topics for the era in which she was writing. Such daring themes brought Theodora a measure of notoriety in her day.

Her novels were largely neglected after the 1960s but were rediscovered and reissued by Olympia Press during 2002-2007. The attention to her work after about thirty to forty years of dormancy brought both surprise and delight to Theodora in the final years of her life.

Theodora Keogh’s works were reprinted primarily for three reasons. First, her style is very modern and represents a transition from Romanticism to modernism and postmodernism that mirrors not only writers like Highsmith but also Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Second, she is admired for her exploration of psychological issues and in thus creating complex characters who often present one personality to the world while having a secret and immoral life that is in contradiction. Explorations of the tensions between the socially accepted and the inwardly rebellious or evil side of the same person’s psyche have made Keogh’s novels of greater interest. Third, she is admired for her explorations of lesbian and gay themes, and this approach has made her popular as one of the writers, like Ann Bannon, Marijane Meaker, and Doris Grumbach who opened post-World War II American fiction to explorations of homosexuality. Given her handling of these themes in often lurid detail also made her popular as one of the early writers of lesbian pulp fiction.