This complete collection of writings published for the first time in
English includes "Story of a Little Girl," about the Catholic priest who
sexually molested her sister; "The Sacred," a collection of poems and
fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with
contr-attaque and acephale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil
war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of
correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters
to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure's death of
tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five.
"People describe Laure as pure, dissolute, dark, luminous. 'I drank, I
bathed in her radiant purity' Jean Bernier says. Leiris writes about her
lyrically in fourbis and frêle bruit as 'the saint of the chasm.'
Bataille calls her uncompromising, pure, and sovereign. It is tempting
to romanticize Laure - in the most sublime and violent sense - as
consumptive poet, a fervent revolutionary, Bataille's great love. But if
she is radiant and dirty, she is also insolent. That, it seems, is what
saves her." --Jeanine Herman
"Colette Peignot, a.k.a. Laure, is one of the more fascinating and
intense women writers of the past century. Georges Bataille and Michel
Leiris described her as "one of the most vehement existences [that]
ever lived, one of the most conflicted." They summarized her volatile
personality as "[e]ager for affection and for disaster, oscillating
between extreme audacity and the most dreadful anguish, as inconceivable
on a scale of real beings as a mythical being, she tore herself on the
thorns with which she surrounded herself until becoming nothing but a
wound, never allowing herself to be confined by anything or anyone." In
other words, Laure was the epitome of what Bataille would dub the
"sovereign" individual." --Jason DeBoer, Absinthe Literary Review
"By the time one emerges from this compilation of autobiographical and
biographical sketches by and about her, of poems, scattered notes and
fevered letters, one can't help feeling that her true masterwork was her
ability to make others react to and remember her." -- Mark Polizzotti,
London Review of Books
Laure (1903-1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist Catholic rich
girl, and world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the
lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her real life
story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her
relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their
works.
