The Demi-Sexes and The Androgynes
Jane de La Vaudère
Translated by Brian Stableford
Presented here in English for the first time, in a bravura translation by Brian Stableford, are two highly unusual novels from one of the fin-de-siècle’s most eccentric writers.
The Demi-Sexes, originally published in 1897, was the first of Jane de La Vaudère’s novels seriously to explore the territory of the conventionally unmentionable, which it does forthrightly, in its first chapter, when its heroine, Camille, asks a doctor, in secret, for “an operation.”
The Androgynes, first published in 1903, a tale of faithfulness and fickleness amidst the vicious rivalries of the literary and artistic worlds, presents a lush and decadent Paris, replete with cross-dressers, opium smoking, and a provocative miscellany of amour.
Intensely interesting and intriguing, with their zestful mixture of tragic lamentation and ostentatious outrage, The Demi-Sexes and The Androgynes remain captivatingly readable and are sure to be found daring even by today’s standards.
About the Author
Jane de La Vaudère was baptized Jeanne Scrive and was married to Camille Gaston Crapez, who began styling himself Crapez de La Vaudère after inheriting the Château de La Vaudère from his mother. Her prolific literary work is very various but she was assimilated to the Decadent Movement firstly because of two scandalously scabrous Parisian novels, Les Demi-Sexes (1897) and Les Androgynes (1903), and, more pertinently, because of a series of accounts of moeurs antiques, some of which—notably Le Mystère de Kama (1901)—set new standards of excess.
Other books by Jane de La Vaudère :
Syta’s Harem and Pharaoh’s Lover
The Double Star and Other Occult Fantasies
The Mystery of Kama and Brahma’s Courtesans
The Witch of Ecbatana and The Virgin of Israel
Three Flowers and the King of Siam’s Amazon
Paperback, 306 pages
Release date: June 12, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-19438-1362-9
Price: US$21.50
Hardcover, 308 pages
Release date: June 12, 2018
Price: US$34.00