The Young Lady and the Gravedigger – by Mélanie Waldor

The poet Mélanie Waldor, who has been nearly erased from cultural history, was one of the most liberated and committed women in the French Romanticist avant-garde, strongly rejecting the limitations of subject-matter and decorum imposed on female writers, in both her work and her life. She played an important social role in the underground Romanticist community, within which her literary influence was acknowledged at the time, but has virtually disappeared from memory, unavailable in English, and usually mentioned, if at all, only for her romantic connections with Dumas and other men.

This disturbing 1830 masterpiece of the formally experimental, radical-gothic Frenetic Romanticist subgenre drops us intothe middle of the story, and disorients the reader through syntactical obliquity, narrative ambiguity, & unspoken inferences to the taboo. In it, Waldor creates subtle but shocking overtones & undertones of blasphemy, grave-robbing, necrophilia, lesbianism, sexual manipulation, and necromancy to craft a sophisticated, disturbing tale of feminist revenge horror.

Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann.

Forgotten Avant-Gardists TLP #13

6 pgs on folded letter. July. A.Da. 108 (2024 Anti-Vulgar)
Cover image by Louis Boulanger, with interior portrait by Gavarni.

Packed along with a few other free pamphlets from this series tossed in to make up for shopify's high s/h! (Specify other titles in a note with the order, if you have a preference.)