'Forever Amber' tells the story of Amber St. You can read it on the beach, and later, at your hotel, you can open it to any page to steam the wrinkles out of your new resort clothes.

With summer coming on, we are afforded the perfect season to rediscover 'Forever Amber,' which was republished in a handsome paperback edition last year by the Chicago Review Press. I imagine Miss Winsor was profoundly grateful to Will Hays, the Boston censor, that priest, and every parent or public bluestocking who fulminated against her book.

At mass the next morning the priest announced that if anyone in the congregation went to see that movie they could expect to go straight to hell. She and a girlfriend went to see it on Saturday night. (There are still women of my generation, in their early '40s, who can recall being forbidden it by their mothers - and some, like my cousin, who got hold of it when she was about 12 and realized she'd stumbled onto hot stuff.) When Otto Preminger's bowdlerized film version (starring Linda Darnell) came out in 1947, I think that the experience my aunt had was not unique. 'Forever Amber' was the book girls wanted to read and were warned against by their mothers - who were probably reading it themselves. The book sold 100,000 hardcover copies in its first week alone (on its way to an eventual 3 million plus), was banned in Boston, and was denounced by Hollywood's Hays Office before anyone had even purchased the movie rights. That year, Macmillan published her first novel, a fat (nearly a thousand pages), juicy Restoration bodice-ripper called 'Forever Amber.' To say it was a sensation is not to leave fact behind for hyperbole.

Her quiet death, after years of being out of the spotlight, shouldn't let us forget the stir she caused in 1944 at the tender age of 24. It's likely that most New York Times readers flipped right past the obituary in Wednesday's edition for Kathleen Winsor, who died in Manhattan this past Monday at the age of 83.

Kathleen winsor