Pierre Louÿs (1870 - 1925)
Related: 19th century literature - French literature - Symbolist literature - lesbian literature - erotic fiction
Contemporaries: Gustav Klimt - Georges Méliès - Claude Debussy - Edvard Munch - Luigi Pirandello - Gaston Leroux - Paul Chabas - Marcel Proust - Paul Valéry - Alfred Jarry - Arnold Schoenberg - Francis Picabia - Guillaume Apollinaire
Titles: Bilitis (1894) - La Femme et le Pantin/The She Devils (1898)
Pierre Louÿs is better known nowdays for his friendships rather than his own poetry: he was one of the composer Claude Debussy's closest friends, he travelled with André Gide, he attended Mallarme's soirees, and campaigned for Oscar Wilde's release from prison. [May 2006]
Georges Pichard adaptation of Trois Filles de leur Mère (1926)
Biography
Pierre Louys (1870 - 1925) was a French author, writer and poet.
He used lesbian themes in many of his poems. The 20th Century lesbian-oriented homophile association the Daughters of Bilitis is named for his 1894 compilation The Songs of Bilitis. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lou%FFs [Feb 2005]
List of Clandestine and 'Public' Erotic Works
So far as possible, the following pages contain a listing of all the French language editions, both clandestine and 'public', of the erotic works of Pierre Louÿs that I have been able to locate. It also conveniently illustrates the point of what I've called the 'Scissors & Paste Bibliographies.' --http://www.sonic.net/~patk/Louys.html [Sept 2004]A mother and her three daughters
A mother and her three daughters...sharing their inexhaustible sexual favours between the same young man, each other, and anyone else who enters their web of depravity. From a chance encounter on the stairway with a voluptuous young girl, the narrator is drawn to become the plaything of four rapacious females, experiencing them all in various combinations of increasingly wild debauchery, until they one day vanish as mysteriously as they had appeared.Described by Susan Sontag as one of the few works of the erotic imagination to deserve true literary status, The She Devils remains Pierre Lous' most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity. --Kathleen Murphy