The book’s reception, and its subsequent enshrinement as a lesbian literary landmark, bewildered and irritated Ms. Torrès, who was married for many years to the writer Meyer Levin. In interviews, she expressed dismay at what she saw as the public’s disproportionate fascination with the novel’s scenes of erotic love between women at the expense of all else.

“There are five main characters,” Ms. Torrès told the British newspaper The Independent in 2007. “Only one and a half of them can be considered lesbian. I don’t see why it’s considered a lesbian classic.”

And yet it was.

“ ‘Women’s Barracks’ really launched the modern genre of the lesbian paperback,” Susan Stryker, who discussed the novel in her 2001 book, “Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback,” said in a telephone interview on Monday. “It paved the way for the next entry into the genre, which was Vin Packer’s ‘Spring Fire.’ ”

(Published in 1952, “Spring Fire” tells the story of love between college sorority sisters. Vin Packer is a pseudonym of Marijane Meaker, today widely known for her novels for young people written under the name M. E. Kerr.)

Ms. Torrès’s personal narrative was far more dramatic than anything in her fiction. She was born Tereska Szwarc in Paris on Sept. 3, 1920. Her father, Marek, a prominent painter and sculptor, and her mother, Guina Pinkus, a novelist and poet, were Jews from Poland. Before her birth, they had settled in France, and — in secret, so as not to antagonize their families — converted to Roman Catholicism and sent Tereska to a convent school.

When Tereska was 13, as she recounts in a memoir, “The Converts” (1970), news of her parents’ conversion was reported in the world Jewish press, alienating their relatives in Poland. But though the family practiced its Catholicism openly from then on, they knew it would not be enough to save them once the Nazis occupied France in 1940.