Syta’s Harem and Pharaoh’s Lover

Jane de La Vaudère

Translated by Brian Stableford

Presented here, for the first time in English, in fabulous translations by Brian Stableford, are two exotic novels by Jane La Vaudère, one of France’s most interesting, and most Decadent writers.

In the first, Syta’s Harem, we are taken to a proto-anthropological India, to an ancient kingdom which is ruled by Princess Syta, a beautiful woman idolized by the members of her male harem who she exercises tyrannical authority over. The novel soon becomes a surreal phantasmagoria, featuring religiously-impelled orgies, bloody sacrifices, and mysterious fakirs.

The second novel, Pharaoh’s Lover, placed in ancient Egypt during the Third Empire of Thutmose I, is a bizarre masterpiece of the highest order. In it the reader learns of the misadventures of Zelinis and Hary-Thé, who, in the aftermath of the sudden loss of their perfect amour, become the subject of rather eccentric liaisons—Zelinis, as a slave, is made to be a stimulant to the effete Pharaoh by engaging in romance with the latter’s sister, while Hary-Thé carries on a quasi-necrophlic relationship with a mummy.

These two supernatural fantasies, in the feverish pitch of their narratives and the voluptuousness of their settings, are sure to delight and entertain all those who have sympathy for unusual expressions of passionate distress.

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.

Paperback, 294 pages
Release date: June 30, 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-032-6
Price: US$23.00

Hardcover, 296 pages. Limited to 100 copies.
Release date: June 30, 2020
Price: US$38.00