SOURCE: “Black Sheep of the Family,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 9, June, 1999, pp. 17–18.

In the following review, Gill examines recent biographies of Sade, including At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade was a man monstrously alone. His aloneness is famously a matter of the years he spent behind bars—thirteen of them in prison without trial in mid-life, and another thirteen in a madhouse at the end. But when a free man he was as alone as in a cell—perhaps more so, since in his 74 years of life Sade made few friends, and kept none. Men of his own class seem always to have disliked and avoided him; any male companions he had were servants who shared his sexual interests but still had to be paid. Courtesans, to his rage, inevitably preferred richer men. Women prostitutes were appalled by his taste...