SOURCE: "Madame Rachilde: 'Man' of Letters," in Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1983, pp. 117-22.

In the following essay, Gerould presents an overview of Rachilde's literary works, including several of her best-known plays.

One of the most colorful and appealing figures in Parisian artistic and literary circles at the turn of the century—a period rich in flamboyant characters—was Marguerite àEymery, wife of Alfred Vallette (founder of the magazine Mercure de France) but known to her readers and fellow writers by her pen name Rachilde. Author of dozens of novels with provocative titles (The Marquise de Sade, The Sexual Hour) that dealt with bizarre sexual fantasies, she was condemned by respectable bourgeois society as a monster and hounded by the police as a pornographer, but revered by the literary world for her generosity in recognizing and encouraging new talent. The guardian angel of Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de...