HISTOIRE D’OR

PAULINE RÉAGE
1954

If you think 50 Shades was provocative (did anyone?) think again. This banned novel about a Parisian photographer, named ‘O’, who submits to her master is CRAY! I still feel slightly violated, in the best nail-biting, why did I like this kind of way. French writer Anne Declos wrote this erotic masterpiece for a secret lover and ultimately published it under the pen name Pauline Reage. So here is a line to spank you into submission: 

“The chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself.”  

- Pauline Reage