Overview

The struggle for power between two magnetic personalities, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte to Valmont, is charted through a series of brilliant letters whose shimmering surface reveals all the more clearly the cynical amorality of their authors. These former lovers manipulate innocent victims into their elaborate schemes of seduction and revenge – the teenage Cécile, just out of her convent, her sweetheart the Chevalier Danceny, Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous married woman – with appalling success until events and feelings spiral out of control, and the main protagonists turn fatally upon each other. Over the years Dangerous Liaisons has gathered devotees as disparate as Marie Antoinette, Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf. It has inspired plays, films, ballets, operas and TV series, but it is the original novel that best demonstrates Laclos’ unique combination of comedy and tragedy, sentiment and brutality, farce and horror; and Laclos’ own subtle prose that conveys both psychological insight and an erotic tenderness as essential to the story as the verbal fireworks.

Full Product Details

9781841594408

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Reviews

The best epistolary novel I’ve ever read – and one of the best novels tout court. -- Christopher Hampton

Author Information

Peter Washington (Introducer) Editor's Biography. Peter Washington is General Editor of Everyman's Library. He is the editor of a number of anthologies in the Everyman Library's Pocket Poets series, including Love Poems, Erotic Poems and Poems of Sleep and Dreams

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