Tereska Torrès-Levin Garden

The Tereska Torrès-Levin Garden stands as a tribute to a woman whose life encompassed both the brutal realities of war and the complexities of literary fame. Tereska Torrès was one of the last surviving members of the female volunteers who joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces in London during the Second World War. After the war, she became a prolific novelist, though she spent much of her later life grappling with the unexpected global notoriety of her 1950 book, Women's Barracks. While scholars now celebrate that novel as a groundbreaking work that brought lesbian themes into mainstream American pulp fiction, Torrès herself remained deeply ambivalent about its sensationalized marketing. This garden, dedicated in her memory in 2019, offers a quiet space to reflect on her journey from a volunteer in a wartime headquarters to a writer whose works challenged social conventions.