The Princess of Darkness

Rachilde, the writer whose formal name was Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1853), is primarily remembered today for her sensational decadent novel Monsieur Vénus (1884), which was prosecuted as pornography in Belgium, where it was initially published, resulting in a conviction and a sentence of two years’ imprisonment imposed in absentia. She was, however, the author of numerous other works which, though less well-known, are of equal and sometimes even greater excellence. One of the best and most striking of these is The Princess of Darkness (1895), here presented for the first time in English, in a superb translation by Brian Stableford. The novel, unquestionably one of the most daring works to come out of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, was written under Rachilde’s other pseudonym, Jean de Chilra, and is at once a profound psychological study and a neo-Gothic masterpiece, featuring a haunted house and a family curse and other much more unusual motifs that are calculated to alienate readers as well as to challenge them, in a frightening treasure that any connoisseur of perversity is bound to savor and to think precious.