Patience and Sarah Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A tender, plain-spoken 1816 love story that gave lesbian fiction one of its first happy endings, held back by a sagging final third and a few elements that have aged badly. Best for: Readers who want a gentle, hopeful historical romance with a guaranteed happy ending, and who can read a 1969 novel as a 1969 novel — colonial assumptions, a stray incest reference and all. Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — behind closed doors) Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 3.92 Goodreads average, a 1% did-not-finish rate, and a handful of complaints that have grown louder with time) Tropes: Forbidden love, opposites attract, class difference, butch-femme, dual POV, running away together, disguise and gender nonconformity, frontier homesteading, found courage, happily ever after. Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller — the pen name of Alma Routsong — is a standalone historical lesbian romance first self-published in 1969 as A Place for Us, set in rural Connecticut in 1816, where a genteel spinster painter with an inheritance and a farmer’s daughter raised to work as her father’s son decide that the only way to be together is to leave everything and build a farm of their own. It holds a 3.92 average across 5,321 Goodreads ratings, it won the American Library Association’s very first Gay Book Award in 1971 — the prize now called the Stonewall — and its audiobook, read by Jean Smart and Janis Ian, carries 720 Audible ratings of its own. Most readers love it. A vocal, growing minority reads it now and flinches at things 1969 did not notice. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Patience and Sarah About?

Patience and Sarah is a historical novel and a romance at once, and it is also a document: Miller based it on what little is known of the folk painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion Miss Brundage, who farmed together in Greene County, New York, in the early nineteenth century. That means Puritan New England, church and family as the machinery of control, and a world where a woman without a husband needs either money or a brother’s roof. Patience White has money, an education and a talent for painting, and everything a woman in her position is allowed to want: a comfortable life as the unmarried aunt in her brother’s house. What she lacks is anything of her own. Sarah Dowling has none of Patience’s advantages — she hauls wood, wears breeches and cannot read — but she has already decided to go west, and she assumes, wrongly, that nothing and nobody can stop her. The chapters alternate between the two women in first person, and Patience’s educated voice and Sarah’s blunt, unlettered one are distinct from the first page.

What Makes This Lesbian Historical Classic Work

The happy ending: Nearly every positive review names it first. In an era when lesbian novels ended in death, madness or marriage to a man, this one lets two women win, and readers who found it young describe it as the first queer book that felt safe.
Two voices that never blur: The alternating first-person chapters give Patience and Sarah different vocabularies, different fears and different kinds of humour. StoryGraph readers call it 67% character-driven, and 84% say the characters are loveable.
Sarah herself: Raised as “Pa’s boy,” Sarah is the book’s heart, and her stretch living as a young man called Sam is what one romance.io reader calls a fascinating interlude on gender and passing — the part modern forbidden love readers remember.
The domestic dream: The women want a house, land and each other, and readers find that modesty unexpectedly radical.
Brevity: At around 225 pages it is short, and StoryGraph’s 1% did-not-finish rate says people get to the end.

Book Synopsis

Connecticut, 1816. Patience White lives in her own set of rooms attached to her brother Edward’s house, provided for by a carefully worded will that lets her stay single in comfort. She paints, she reads, and she has settled into the assumption that this is the whole of her life. Then Sarah Dowling delivers a load of firewood. Sarah is twenty-one, the biggest of a houseful of daughters, and her father has raised her to do a son’s work in a son’s clothes. When Patience’s sister-in-law treats her like hired help, Patience invites her in instead, and something neither of them has words for begins that afternoon. Sarah has been saving towards a plan: to leave for the frontier and take up land, with her sister Rachel beside her. After meeting Patience, she has a different partner in mind. Plans like that do not stay secret in a small town. Rachel feels abandoned and tells their father, and a family that already bends the rules for Sarah draws a hard line at the thought of her running off with a woman. Patience, who has everything to lose and has never had to be brave, has to decide whether a love she has only just recognised is worth her name, her comfort and her family. Sarah has to decide whether she can wait for someone else to find her courage — and what she will do if Patience never does.

My Review

The thing Patience and Sarah does best is also the thing that made it matter: it takes two women seriously as a couple and then lets them keep each other. Reading it knowing that Routsong printed a thousand copies herself and sold them on New York street corners and at Daughters of Bilitis meetings changes how the book lands.

Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller book cover

The second strength is craft, and it is more specific than readers who call the prose “simple” give it credit for. The dual first person does real work. Sarah’s chapters are blunt and funny; Patience’s are careful and self-watching, the voice of a woman who has always been allowed to think and never to act. The romance lives in the gap between them and the early chapters are genuinely lovely. Sarah’s summer as Sam, travelling with a book peddler who teaches her to read, is the most surprising section. Where it struggles is the back half, and this is the most consistent craft complaint rather than my own quibble. Several reviewers say the book peaks early: once the two commit to leaving, the journey that follows is pleasant but slack. Around that sit the complaints that have grown with time. More than one reader flags Patience trying to reshape Sarah — into someone more ladylike, more educated, more like Patience — as controlling rather than romantic. Three separate reviewers on the first page of Goodreads reviews raise passing references to incest in Sarah’s family as unnecessary and jarring, and StoryGraph lists it among its warnings. And a recurring objection points out that the women’s utopia is a farm on newly opened land, with no acknowledgement of who that land was taken from. A February 1971 Kirkus notice found the prose plain at first and overripe later. One expectation to reset: this is shelved as romance, and it is one, but it is not a period-accurate portrait of persecution. The book softens homophobia on purpose — families object, but the book never turns tragic — and readers split on that. Some call it unrealistic; many more call it the whole point. If you want historical rigour and period danger, calibrate; if you have read enough tragic lesbian classics to last a lifetime, relax. My honest note: A landmark that still reads as a warm, living love story rather than homework, even with its dated edges showing. If you need a book to be free of 1969’s blind spots, this will frustrate you. If you can meet it on its own terms, it is one of the kindest books in the canon.

Element	In Patience and Sarah
Central relationship	Patience White & Sarah Dowling — genteel painter and farmer’s daughter, opposites-attract forbidden love
Core tropes	Forbidden love, class difference, butch-femme, dual POV, running away together, frontier homesteading
Setting	Rural Connecticut in 1816, then the road west and Greene County, New York
Heat level	2/5 — behind closed doors
Series	Standalone — complete story with a happily-ever-after
Content notes	Homophobia and religious bigotry, misogyny, sexual harassment, sexual assault, references to incest, animal death, slavery, colonial settlement of Indigenous land

How Spicy Is Patience and Sarah?

A 2/5. romance.io lists it at “behind closed doors,” its second-lowest band, and reader reports match: the intimacy is sensual and emotionally frank, but the scenes close before anything gets explicit. One Goodreads reader calls the love scenes fade-to-black; another calls them hot — the book works by implication. The one thing worth flagging in advance is not the sex but its framing: at least one reader found some of the physical description odd, and a romance.io reviewer warns that the book dwells on the body in ways that feel of their period. No reviewer flags anything explicit beyond that. For the same gentle heat level, Meet Me in the Garden and Waiting on a Friend sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a lesbian historical romance where nobody dies, you care about queer literary history, you like distinct dual narrators and quiet domestic stakes, and you would rather have tenderness than heat. You may want to skip it if: you need historical romance to confront period homophobia head-on, you want explicit scenes, you lose patience with a story that peaks before its final act, or colonial settler fantasy and passing incest references will spoil the whole thing for you. In short: a warm and historically important love story that asks you to forgive the year it was written.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is a backlist classic, so there is no live release cycle and no viral moment — and the book does not need one. Its readers arrive through the canon: lists of essential lesbian novels, the Stonewall Award history, the Publishing Triangle, which placed it 24th on its 1999 list of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels, and an Arsenal Pulp Press edition with an introduction by Emma Donoghue that keeps it in print. BookTok barely registers it; the #patienceandsarah hashtag is filled with unrelated videos. Reddit could not be checked from here, so I cannot say what its footprint is there. The quiet engine is audio. The 2015 audiobook runs 5 hours 45 minutes, narrated by Jean Smart and Janis Ian, and holds a 4.3 average across 720 Audible ratings; its Goodreads listing credits it with a Grammy nomination, and it is the single most praised version of the book in the reviews. Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The happy ending, first and loudest. Review after review calls it the first lesbian book the reader found that felt positive, and several describe discovering it as teenagers or while coming out and never forgetting it; StoryGraph readers tag it hopeful at 75%, far ahead of any other mood. Then the distinct dual voices and the tenderness — “sweet” and “tender” are the recurring words. Audiobook listeners repeatedly say Smart and Ian made the book for them. At least one reader ranks it alongside Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch as a favourite, and another sums it up affectionately as “Little Butch On The Prairie.” What readers argue about and complain about: The pacing of the final act, above the rest — several reviewers say the story peaks once the two women commit to leaving and loses energy afterwards. The second theme is the relationship’s power dynamic: Patience’s attempts to polish and re-educate Sarah read to some modern readers as controlling. Third, the passing incest references in Sarah’s family, which three reviewers on Goodreads’ first page and a romance.io reviewer all flag as unnecessary. Fourth, the frontier: at least two lower-star reviewers argue that a utopia built on “opened up” land erases the Indigenous people who lived there. The genuine split is over the softened homophobia — some readers want more realism, while a larger group treat the absence of tragedy as the book’s gift. Still, only about 6% of Goodreads ratings are one or two stars. The standalone question worth asking first: it is complete. There is no sequel, the romance resolves in a happily-ever-after, and nothing further is required. The natural next step is sideways into the tradition — the real-life story behind the novel, or the classics it is always shelved beside.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Patience and Sarah have a happy ending?

Yes. Patience and Sarah end the book together, building the life they planned, and that happy ending is the main reason the novel is famous. It was one of the first lesbian novels to refuse a tragic ending.

How spicy is Patience and Sarah?

A 2/5. romance.io rates it “behind closed doors.” The intimacy is sensual and emotionally frank, but the scenes stay off the page.

Is Patience and Sarah based on a true story?

Loosely. Isabel Miller based it on the folk painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion Miss Brundage, who farmed together in Greene County, New York, in the early nineteenth century. Very little is known about the real women, so the story itself is invented.

Is there an audiobook of Patience and Sarah?

Yes. The 2015 audiobook is narrated by Jean Smart and Janis Ian and runs 5 hours 45 minutes. It holds a 4.3 average across 720 Audible ratings, and many reviewers call it the best way to experience the book.

Are there content warnings for Patience and Sarah?

Yes. StoryGraph readers flag homophobia, religious bigotry, misogyny, sexual harassment and sexual assault, with minor mentions of incest, animal death and slavery. Some readers also object to the book’s uncritical view of settling frontier land.

If You Loved Patience and Sarah, Read These Next

If the true story underneath is what caught you, Charity and Sylvia tells the documented history of two women who built a life together in early-1800s Vermont, almost exactly Patience and Sarah’s world. For the frontier journey and a heroine who passes as a man, Backwards to Oregon takes that premise down the Oregon Trail with more heat. And for the other mid-century classic that dared to let its women walk off together, The Price of Salt is essential — and The Well of Loneliness shows exactly what both books were writing against. For more in this register, browse our complete historical lesbian romance reading list, the literary and character-driven fiction shelf, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Patience and Sarah set out to give two women in 1816 a future, and it still does. The alternating voices are distinct and alive, Sarah is one of the great early butch heroines, and the happy ending remains the reason people press this book on each other more than fifty years later. It is also slack in its final act, uneasy in how Patience handles Sarah, and blind to what its frontier dream costs other people. The reader who can read it in its own time gets a short, warm, deeply hopeful love story, and ideally hears it in Smart and Ian’s voices. Check Patience and Sarah on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Patience and Sarah ranks as a foundational lesbian historical romance — tender, hopeful and still readable, held back by a slack final act and period blind spots, and best approached for the two voices and the happy ending rather than for historical realism.