Review of “The Story of O” by Pauline Reage

I know too that you are among those girls who have been to Rois­sy, and I imag­ine you’ll be go­ing back again. In prin­ci­ple, the ring you’re wear­ing gives me the right to do with you what I will, as it does to all those men who know its mean­ing.

I thought it was finally time that I read this book. It goes nicely with this article on the author, which concludes with one paragraph that does a better job of reviewing the book than I could:

But beyond its merits as a literary work, its merits or limits as pornography, there lies the paradox that this incendiary book was written by a woman who wore little make-up and no jewellery, who dressed with quiet elegance, who lived out a polite, bluestocking existence in a small flat with her parents and son. Beneath this unlikely exterior raged terrible passions. In the end, the most instructive aspect of the book is that it demonstrates the demoniac nature of sexuality in any or all of us. This quiet, learned woman understood the power of sex. She knew that desire can ignite compulsions to commit sudden, arbitrary violence and induce a yearning for voluptuous, annihilating death.

If you’re really interested in the darker side of sex and the darker aspects of the nature of women, you’ll enjoy the book. Interestingly, though the book is full of sexual torture, the worst and most violent torture is committed by women (to women).

That the fe­male of the species was as cru­el as, and more Im­pla­ca­ble than the male, O had nev­er doubt­ed for a minute.

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