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The groundbreaking French feminist journal La Fronde, at its height, had a circulation of 100,000 copies a day, and published the work of many of the period's best women writers, one of the greatest talents of that enclave being May Armand Blanc (1874-1904), a somewhat mysterious figure who died prematurely. The current volume gathers together the seventy-six known short stories and prose poems she wrote for the journal, as well as a number of pieces from various other sources. This superb body of work, presented here for the first time in book form, collected and translated by Brian Stableford, might be seen as a travelogue of amour on the road to hell-the heart-rending compositions of an author who, in her careful and meticulous fashion, was the most extreme and the most relentless of the female Symbolists.
May Armand Blanc was one of the truly distinctive and eloquent voices of her unfortunately-brief era, and although she was crying in a wilderness, her song warranted being heard and appreciated then, and still does.
As love stories go, the two offered here, firmly planted in the field of Decadent Symbolism, are certainly among the most intense in literature, written as they are with a variety of creative energy that was unique to their author.
