How erotic is it? one might ask, and thus I will answer.Īt no point while reading Story of O did I become fully tumescent and so ravenously randy that I had to run to the nearest private space in order to touch my genitals, but certainly there were a few moments in the first half where I felt the blood moving south from my stomach and – had I already been in a private space – I could have engaged with the feeling and run with it. This clear bullshit was proven wrong, and the pseudonym of Pauline Réage was appended to the manuscript which – accompanied by a forward that stoked the mystery of who Réage could be (of course the publisher knew) – was released in 1954 as Histoire d’O. A winner of many awards, it was written as a bet by a journalist called Anne Desclos as a rebuke after her publisher boyfriend told her he firmly believed a woman could never write erotica. Story of O, for those who haven’t read it, is a French erotic classic.

I love the edition, though I was startled to reach the end of the book and find, rather than a conclusion to the narrative, two short italicised paragraphs telling me that the final chapter had been “suppressed” and that an alternate ending exists with the DEATH of the protagonist.Īs this isn’t an edition from the 1950s (when the book was first published in France), it seems surprising that any “suppression” would have lasted through until 1993 (the date given at the front of this book), so one presumes that the text in here dates from the very first English language translation, which was completed in 1965 by Sabine d’Estrée.

Story of O by Pauline Réage