A Female Marquis de Sade
REAGE, Pauline [pseudonym for Anne DESCLOS]. Histoire d'O. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert. 1954.
8vo. Original cream card wraps with black lettering, in original publisher's glassine wrapper; pp. [6], xx, [2], 245, [3], pages untrimmed and partially unopened; very minor chipping and nicking to glassine, with one larger tear to lower panel; else a near-fine copy.
First French edition, numbered 155/600, with a preface by Jean Paulhan - the writer, critic and publisher responsible for the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française..
When Jean Paulhan, an ardent admirer of the Marquis de Sade and the writer of this edition's preface "Du bonheur dans l'esclavage" (The Happiness in Slavery), argued that it was implausible that any woman be capable of writing an erotic novel, his lover set out to produce this extraordinary work. Histoire D'O was written by Anne Desclos, a French journalist and translator, under the pseudonym Pauline Reage. She only revealed her secret in 1994 (forty years after this edition was published) in an interview with The New Yorker. The novel's portrayal of graphic female submission caused widespread controversy and in 1959 the government brought obscenity charges against it which were later overturned in court.
Graham Greene described the book as "'A rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity". In 1955, it was awarded the Prix des Deux Magots.
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