Pauline Réage

Already publishing articles under the pen name of Dominique Aury in 1946, Anne Desclos wrote the story Histoire d'O, translated Story of O, in response to the Marquis de Sade's remark that "women are incapable of writing an erotic novel" -- a remark which her then-lover and employer Jean Paulhan encouraged her to prove wrong. The novel was published in June 1953 by Olympia Press, the same publishing house which would later publish Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The book's outrageous sexual content led the French goverment to ban it in 1955, charging her publisher and its anonymous author with obscenity. Remarkably, Réage's identity remained a secret until 1994, when The New Yorker published a formal interview with her in which she admitted to having written Histoire d'O. The novel was adapted for the screen in 1975.