Marquis De Sade

Rachilde

Hippocrene Books

Madame La Mort and Other Plays (PAJ Books)

Rachilde is the pseudonym of Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), one of the few women active in Paris theater in the 1890's. She was a writer with a powerful personality, who made her place at the very center of the Symbolist movement in France, but she is relatively unknown in this country. She wrote over twenty plays that were produced throughout much of Europe. Rachilde was a pioneer of anti-realistic drama -- it was she who first developed the term "absurd" to characterize the new kind of theater that would be "a prextext for a dream." She wrote dramas for the Théâtre d'Art and Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, as well as several novels in the decadent style, which featured the disruption of gender expectations. Her salons at the avant-garde newspaper, Le Mercure de France, attracted international celebrities and young writers such as Alfred Jarry and Colette. In short, Rachilde had a profound influence on the new styles which sparked the beginning of modern theater. 
These new translations by Kiki Gounaridou and Frazer Lively, both on faculty at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, should be of considerable interest for Gender, Women's, French, Cultural, and Theater Studies departments. Rachilde's work should also appeal to a wider public. Her sexual politics and sardonic humor make her drama more interesting and performable today than the plays of some of her more famous contemporaries.

Literature & Fiction

Lively, Professor Frazer

Dramas & Plays

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Rachilde is the pseudonym of Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), one of the few women active in Paris theater in the 1890's. She was a writer with a powerful personality, who made her place at the very center of the Symbolist movement in France, but she is relatively unknown in this country. She wrote over twenty plays that were produced throughout much of Europe. Rachilde was a pioneer of anti-realistic drama -- it was she who first developed the term "absurd" to characterize the new kind of theater that would be "a prextext for a dream." She wrote dramas for the Théâtre d'Art and Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, as well as several novels in the decadent style, which featured the disruption of gender expectations. Her salons at the avant-garde newspaper, Le Mercure de France, attracted international celebrities and young writers such as Alfred Jarry and Colette. In short, Rachilde had a profound influence on the new styles which sparked the beginning of modern theater. These new translations by Kiki Gounaridou and Frazer Lively, both on faculty at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, should be of considerable interest for Gender, Women's, French, Cultural, and Theater Studies departments. Rachilde's work should also appeal to a wider public. Her sexual politics and sardonic humor make her drama more interesting and performable today than the plays of some of her more famous contemporaries.

Humor & Entertainment

The Juggler (La Jongleuse) is a "decadent" novel that was first published in 1900. Its author, Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), who used the pseudonym Rachilde, was a prolific novelist (over sixty works of fiction), playwright, literary critic and reviewer, and a forceful presence in French literary society of her time. The protagonist of the novel, Eliante Donalger, is in some sense an exaggerated double for her creator--bizarre in appearance, clothing, and interests. Instinctively grasping a medical and psychological truth that the turn-of-the-century scientific world was only beginning to understand, Eliante maintains that there is nothing "natural" about human sexual expression. She claims to be in love with an inanimate (though anthropomorphic and sexually ambiguous) object, a Greek amphora, and the novel traces the rivalry between this faithful partner and an ardent human suitor, a young medical student. It is only through juggling, both literally and metaphorically, that Eliante is able to use her seductive power to maintain desire. The surprise ending challenges the limits of such power in a controversial and surprising twist. Although Rachilde's work has been neglected in the past, the women's movement and feminist criticism have stimulated renewed interest in her fiction. The Juggler is a major rediscovery.

The Juggler: Rachilde

Literary

Rutgers University Press

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de V�n�rande becomes enamored of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule's suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.

Monsieur Vénus: Roman matérialiste (MLA Texts and Translations)

Modern Language Association of America

Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel (MLA Texts and Translations)

Dans le puits ou La vie inférieure, 1915-1917

History

BiblioLife

Le Tiroir De Mimi-Corail (French Edition)

Contemporary

Nabu Press

Rachilde, the writer whose formal name was Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1853), is primarily remembered today for her sensational decadent novel Monsieur Vénus (1884), which was prosecuted as pornography in Belgium, where it was initially published, resulting in a conviction and a sentence of two years' imprisonment imposed in absentia. She was, however, the author of numerous other works which, though less well-known, are of equal and sometimes even greater excellence. One of the best and most striking of these is The Princess of Darkness (1895), here presented for the first time in English, in a superb translation by Brian Stableford. The novel, unquestionably one of the most daring works to come out of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, was written under Rachilde's other pseudonym, Jean de Chilra, and is at once a profound psychological study and a neo-Gothic masterpiece, featuring a haunted house and a family curse and other much more unusual motifs that are calculated to alienate readers as well as to challenge them, in a frightening treasure that any connoisseur of perversity is bound to savor and to think precious.

The Princess of Darkness

Genre Fiction

Snuggly Books

Rachilde was the pseudonym employed by Marguerite Eymery (1860-1953). Though remembered today primarily for her novels, which include the Decadent masterpiece Monsieur Vénus, she was also an exceptional writer of short fiction. The current volume, adeptly translated by Sue Boswell, brings together six of her short stories, none of which have previously appeared in English. This array of strange, Symbolist tales, sometimes brutal, always bizarre, strikes with a deep psychological power and deft artistry. The work of a true genius, The Blood-Guzzler and Other Stories is an important addition to the writings of the Queen of Decadence available in English.

The Blood-Guzzler and Other Stories

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