'I'm trying to express as exactly, as minutely as possible the sensations of physical love. There's something here that a woman can understand. I hope this won't appear more scandalous than the thoughts of Molly Bloom at the end of Joyce's Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis deserves to be heard, I think.' - Violette Leduc
Charged with metaphors, alternating with precise descriptions of sensations and human relationships, Thérèse and Isabelle was censored by its publisher in France in 1954, first published in a truncated version in 1966 and not until 2000 in its uncensored edition, as Violette Leduc intended.
For the first time in a new English translation, here is the unabridged text of Thérèse and Isabelle.
'Lesbian story ban is lifted.' - The Observer
'Violette's prose, hirsute and grating as always, throws itself into faces more spiritedly than today's provocateurs, and above all more authentically. The reticence and languor of Thérèse and Isabelle renews an erotic tradition that today has become banal.' - Liberation
'Perhaps her most sulphurous novel. But who's better at describing the first innocence of desire, the beauty of clandestine and shared love, the force of female tenderness?' Le Matricule des Anges
'This unabridged version restores, breathless, the intimate crescendo of an erotic journey, the murmur of each emotion. A woman's body discovers sensuality under the pen of a writer who's given her flesh to her writing.' - Le Magazine Litteraire
Admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute and Albert Camus, Violette Leduc (1907-1972) was championed by Simone de Beauvoir when she published her scandalous autobiography La Batarde (1964). Like Thérèse and Isabelle, many of her audacious novels are largely inspired by her life. Her vibrant and lyrical prose continues to fascinate new generations of writers around the world.
