Now, of course, women are expected to write about their fantasies and what they get up to, and they do it with enthusiasm: this month sees the publication of One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bedtime, by 'Melissa P', who, we are told, is a 15-year-old Sicilian girl with a taste for blindfold sex with several men at once.
Story of O is not a book to read on the bus - or not the first 60 pages, anyway, which are written with an almost hallucinatory, erotic intensity that you would have to be rather peculiar not to be left hot and bothered by.
A young woman, O, is ordered into a waiting car by her lover, René, commanded to remove her underwear, and driven to a chateau in the Paris suburb of Roissy. Here, she is initiated into a secret society with complicated rules: she is not to look any man in the eye nor speak to any of the other women. She must wear a corseted dress that exposes her breasts, a leather collar and cuffs. Any man may dispose of her as he wishes. O welcomes all this, understanding that the harsher the treat ments she endures, the more she proves her love.
These are the pages that, in a third-person account written nearly 20 years later, the author described herself writing at night, 'lying on her side with her feet tucked up under her, a soft black pencil in her right hand... the girl was writing the way you speak in the dark when you've held back the words of love too long and they flow out at last. For the first time in her life, she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting or discarding; she was writing the way one breathes, or dreams... she was still writing when the street cleaners came by at the first touch of dawn.'
Dominique Aury, lying on her side in bed with her pencil and her school exercise books, did not intend the work to be published. She wrote it as a dare, a challenge and an enterprise de seduction for her lover, Jean Paulhan. They'd met during the German occupation, when she distributed a subversive magazine, Lettres Françaises, which he edited. Probably, they were first introduced by her father, in the hope that she might solicit Paulhan's aid in publishing the volume of 17th-century devotional poetry she had collected. (She did, and it was.) Subsequently, they worked together at the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française and at Gallimard.