A Woman's Affair

This is the first English translation of Liane de Pougy's 1901 novel A Woman's Affair (Idylle Saphique) which shocked French readers with its lesbian lover story, and is based on Liane de Pougy's affair with Natalie Barney. Despite her beauty and her riches, Annhine de Lys, one of the most notorious courtesans of 1890s Paris, is bored and restless. Into her life bursts Flossie, a young American woman, and everything changes. The love she offers Annhine is dangerous, perverse and hard to resist. Ignoring the warnings of her best friend, Annhine encourages the affair. Yet she cannot commit: she advances, retreats, becomes bewildered, ill. After a tragic incident at a masked ball, Annhine leaves Paris to make a long tour through Europe. But the attempt to put time and distance between them comes to nothing and the fateful relationship must run its course.

Born in 1869 near the town of Tours she married Armand Pourpe, a naval officer, after becoming pregnant by him while still at her convent school, aged 16. She soon left her violent husband to go to Paris. Their son, born 1886 was brought up by his grandmother. She was a dancer at the Folies Bergere in the 1890s and had occasional acting parts but it was in the demi-monde she rose to fame. As a runaway teenage mother, celebrity courtesan, and in later life a princess, a fundraiser for disabled children and, finally, a Dominican lay sister, Liane de Pougy led an extraordinary life. She died in Lausanne in December 1950, aged 81.