[La Bâtarde] was not only a succès de scandale … but was acclaimed by many as the most striking book of imaginative literature in a rather lean year. Its faults are glaring, and they will more than once exacerbate a fastidious or an impatient reader. The bâtarde is also a bavarde: she never wearies of recording her woes, her mad sexual and spiritual yearnings, and the petty doings of daily life, in what some male readers may regard as inexhaustible prattle.

Though it is too long, the volume is never dull, and it is much less monotonous and annoyingly complacent than most autobiographies and personal records. The lack of restraint or of pudeur—that "wrapping of the body by the soul," in the phrase Nietzsche admired and stole from another woman … the candor in the totally uninhibited description of the author's Lesbian loves has contributed not...