Anne Cécile Desclos (23 September 1907 – 27 April 1998) is the woman who wrote Story of O. A French literary critic, journalist, and novelist, she published under two working names: Dominique Aury for the respectable Gallimard life, and Pauline Réage for the 1954 sadomasochistic novel that still sits at the center of literary BDSM. The book was a dare to a lover who said no woman could write erotica. It became a scandal, an obscenity case, and—decades later—the template for a fiction award that still carries her pen name.
Rochefort, Two Languages, Gallimard
Desclos was born in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, into a bilingual family and was reading in French and English early. After the Sorbonne she worked as a journalist until 1946, when she joined Gallimard as editorial secretary for one of its imprints and began using the name Dominique Aury. She translated or introduced to French readers Algernon Charles Swinburne, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. She became a critic and sat on juries for major literary prizes. The public Aury was demure, intellectual, almost prudish on the page—the opposite of the anonymous woman who would send O to Roissy.
The Dare, Histoire d’O, and the Police
Her lover and employer Jean Paulhan, director of the Nouvelle Revue Française and twenty-three years her senior, was a fervent admirer of the Marquis de Sade. He remarked that no woman was capable of writing an erotic novel. To prove him wrong, Desclos wrote a graphic sadomasochistic book published under Pauline Réage in June 1954 as Histoire d’O (Story of O). Paulhan wrote a sympathetic preface that did not name her. The novel was an enormous, controversial commercial success. Speculation about the author ran for decades. Many refused to believe a woman had written it, let alone the Aury who appeared in print. André Malraux and Henri de Montherlant were among the men alternately suspected.
The book’s content was graphic enough that the following March, government authorities brought obscenity charges against the publisher and the still-mysterious author. The charges were thrown out in 1959. The judge did impose a publicity ban and a restriction on sale to minors. After the publicity ban lifted in 1967, a conclusion appeared as Retour à Roissy, again as Pauline Réage. According to Angie David’s later biography, Desclos did not write that second novel. In 1975 she gave a long interview on erotic books with Régine Deforges, published by Story of O editor Jean-Jacques Pauvert; her authorship was still unknown. Viking Press issued an English edition of the interview in the United States in 1979.
Desclos publicly admitted she had written Story of O in 1994—forty years after publication—in an interview with The New Yorker. She explained the pen name: Pauline for Pauline Bonaparte and Pauline Roland; Réage picked at random off a topographic map.
Documentaries, Édith Thomas, and a Son
Pola Rapaport’s 2004 film Writer of O mixed interviews with re-enactments from the novel. In it, Aury talks about the book A Girl in Love, written about how Story of O was written. BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Story of O: The Vice Française, presented by Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, on the history of the book and its author. Maya Gallus’s documentary Erotica: A Journey Into Female Sexuality includes the last interview with ninety-year-old Aury before she died; she recounts the love story behind the novel and marvels at having reached that age.
The long relationship with Paulhan is the engine of the book. Desclos was bisexual and had a liaison with historian Édith Thomas, who may have inspired the character Anne-Marie in Story of O. She had a son from a brief marriage in her early twenties.
Leather Awards and a Hall of Fame
The forty-year secret is part of the book’s power. From June 1954 until the 1994 New Yorker interview, Histoire d’O belonged to a name on a map and two Paulines—Bonaparte and Roland—while the woman at Gallimard kept judging other people’s books. Paulhan’s preface blessed the novel without outing the lover who had written it to prove a point about women and erotica. The 1955–1959 obscenity fight, the thrown-out charges, the publicity ban, and the ban on sales to minors are the French state’s first official reading. Retour à Roissy after the 1967 lift is the sequel she did not write, if Angie David is right. The 1975 Deforges interview, issued by Pauvert and in English by Viking in 1979, is the long conversation she would have while still unnamed. Rapaport, Pelling, and Gallus later put the old woman on camera and tape; Gallus caught her at ninety, still talking about the love story and surprised to have lived that long. Édith Thomas, the possible Anne-Marie, and the son from a brief early marriage are the private facts the source actually gives.
In 2007 the National Leather Association International launched awards for excellence in SM, fetish, and leather writing. One category is the Pauline Réage Award for a fiction novel. In 2020 Desclos was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame. Dates that matter on a kink timeline: born 23 September 1907 in Rochefort; Gallimard and the Aury name from 1946; Histoire d’O in June 1954; charges the next March; charges out in 1959 with a publicity ban and a minors restriction; ban lifted 1967; identity owned in 1994; death on 27 April 1998. The respectable Gallimard secretary and the anonymous pornographer were always the same person: a critic who could move Swinburne and Woolf into French, and a lover who answered a Sadean taunt with a novel that still defines literary female submission. O’s rings, the château, the consent that looks like annihilation—those images entered kink culture because one woman in Paris decided a man was wrong about what women could write.
