An audacious feminist reading of the Marquis de Sade that refuses both moral condemnation and celebration.

Rather than dismissing Sade as simply pornographic or misogynistic, Carter argues that his fiction exposes the structures of power, sexuality and gender that underpin patriarchal society. Her central claim—that pornography reveals political realities rather than merely private fantasies—made the book deeply controversial on publication and it remains one of the defining texts of twentieth-century feminist thought.

Part literary criticism, part cultural history and part political manifesto, Carter writes with the same wit, theatricality and intellectual confidence that animate her fiction. She moves effortlessly between philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and literature, dismantling inherited assumptions about desire, domination and women's agency. Whether approached alongside Dworkin, Millett, Foucault or Bataille, or simply read as an astonishingly original essay in its own right, The Sadeian Woman remains one of the sharpest and most uncompromising explorations of sexuality ever written.

First American edition, published by Pantheon Books in 1979. Hardback with original dust jacket. Jacket shows light shelf wear with minor rubbing to extremities; pages are clean and bright, and the binding remains firm. A very good, well-preserved copy.