Histoire d'O | Story of O by Pauline Réage

When the author interviewed Aury for his book, he was treated to “a double surprise”: he learned definitively that she was Réage and he learned that “the name Dominique Aury was itself a disguise.” Although she asked that he not publish her birth name, the now-elderly lady was otherwise ready to confess at last. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and The Story of O by Pauline Réage. Jorre, The Good Ship Venus (published as Venus Bound in the U.S.) about the avant garde novels published by the Olympia Press-including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, William S.

The Augissue of The New Yorker ran an excerpt from a forthcoming book by St. There was nothing to lose, nothing at stake.

She felt she was reaching the end of her own life. At that point, Aury’s lover had been dead a long time. Forty years after the publication of the French novel Histoire d’O, the full truth, a complete confession, was finally made public in a groundbreaking profile in The New Yorker by the British journalist and writer John de St. No: Anne Desclos.Īll three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic-but Pauline Réage could. The Story of O shocked readers worldwide with its sadomasochistic love affair written in a style “too direct, too cool, to be that of a woman.” Carmela Ciuraru examines the life of O ’s author.

Histoire d'O | Story of O by Pauline Réage