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.


'A Woman’s Affair is melodrama at full pelt... Beneath the melodrama is something more interesting: a straightforward acceptance of same-sex love that in 1901 could perhaps only have been expressed in Paris... It is worth noting that (A Woman's Affair) was nearly thirty years before Radclyffe Hall’s much milder allusion (to lesbian love) prompted a British court to brand The Well of Loneliness (1928) obscene...The more thoughtful feminism glimpsed beneath (the frou-frou and silliness in A Woman’s Affair) is illuminating on the choices facing women in the early 1900s, and on the dangers of sex work. Anderson does justice to both registers – silly and serious – in a lively translation that captures Pougy’s effervescence as well as her uneven style.’

Miranda France in The Times Literary Supplement