The Story of O: The Vice Francaise

Writer and former editor of The Erotic Review, Rowan Pelling, goes in search of Pauline Reage, pseudonymous author of the pornographic novel The Story of O, which caused a sensation upon its publication in Paris in 1954. Written with an almost hallucinatory erotic intensity in spare, elegant prose, the purity of the writing took the literary world in France by storm despite the explicit scenes of bondage and sadomasochism. Rowan goes in search of the real Pauline Reage and discovers that she was, in fact, an impeccably dressed, demure intellectual, and that she had written the novel as a love letter for her lover.