The Marquise de Sade

Author: Rachilde

Translator: Liz Heron   Cover illustration: Lise Weisgerber  

Reviews

A decadent curio from 1887: our heroine turns the tables, cracks the whip, becomes the most fatale of femmes.

New Statesman & Society

A partly autobiographical Bildungsroman that explores the development of a sadistic personality in a girl warped and embittered by a misogynist society. La Marquise de Sade is a unique text in nineteenth-century women's writing, combining the realistic structure of a Victorian women's novel like Jane Eyre or Mill on the Floss with the pornographic and the surreal. It was Rachilde's most intense and transgressive speculation on the psychodynamics of female perversion.

Elaine Showalter in the Times Literary Supplement