Dominique Aury - A Brief Biography

Dominique Aury (Anne Desclos) (b. in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Sep. 23, 1907 - d. in Corbeil-Essones, 26/27 Apr., 1998)

Born in a bilingual family, Anne Desclos started to reading English and French literature in her early age. After her studies at Lycée Fénelon, Lycée Condorcet and English studies at Sorbonne, she was engaged in a career as journalist and translator with the pen name of Dominique Aury. During the second war she editied and published two anthologies of poems in collaboration with Thierry Maulnier, and Anthology of French religious poems by the good offices of Jean Paulhan.

In 1946, when Jean Paulhan founded Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, she was engaged as general editorial secretary. It was the beginning of their close collaboration which would develop into soon an intimate relationship and would last until Paulhan’s death in 1968. In 1950 she joined the reading committee of Gallimard and in 1953 became Secretary General of the NRF (Nouvelle Revue française) that was relaunched then under the co-directorship of Jean-Paulhan and Marcel Arlan.

Being a highly respected critic, she served on the jury for important literary awards such as Prix des Critiques, Prix Paul-Valéry, Prix Femina and Prix Fénéon, and was appointed in 1974 to a member of Conseil supérieur des lettres for the Government. A great reader of English and American literature, she translated or introduced to French readers works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, James Hogg, John Cowper Powys, Virginia Wolf, T. S. Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, etc.

As a fiction writer she left only one novel i.e. Story of O, which was published in 1954 under the pseudonyme of Pauline Réage. The last part of the novel which had been suppressed in the 1954 edition was published in 1969 as Retour à Roissy (Return to the chateau) accompanied with an essay entitled Une fille amoureuse (A Girl in Love). While she published in 1975 an undercover interview as Pauline Réage with Régine Deforges, she was refusing to answer to the question of authorship for a long time. It was finally in 1994 that she acknowledged publicly to be Pauline Réage in an interview with a British journalist de St. Jorre (published in The New Yorker). She died in the night of 26 to 27 April 1998 at the age of ninety. In 1999 an interview book Vocation : clandestine was published by Gallimard from a film recording realized in 1989 for posthumous publishing.

Principal Sources : D. Aury, Vocation : clandestine (Paris, Gallimard, 1999); "Hommage à Dominique Aury", NRF, n° 550 (June 1999), pp. 153 - 193; Articles published in Le Monde and l’Humanité (see the detailed list); “Dominique Aury” in Yahoo! Encyclopédie; F. Badré, Paulhan le juste (Paris: Grasset,1996); Repères biographiques de Jean Paulhan published in the web site of the Société des lecteurs de Jean Paulhan.

By Autel (Ver.1, December 2002)

Dominique Aury’s Works

Poems
- Songes (Mazamet, Babel Editeurs, s.d.)

Critics
- Lecture pour tous (Paris, Gallimard, 1958)
- Lecture pour tous II, préface de Jean Roudaut (Paris: Gallimard, 1999)

Interview
- Vocation : clandestine, entretien avec Nocole Grenier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999)

Editorial Works
Anthology of Poems
- Thierry Maulnier and Dominique Aury (ed.), Introduction à la poésie française, Illustrations poétiques choisies avec la collaboration de Dominique Aury (Paris, Gallimard: 1939)
- Poètes précieux et baroques du XVIIe, Introduction de Thierry Maulnier; Choix de poèmes et notes de Dominique Aury (Angers: J. Petit, 1941)
- Anthologie de la poésie religeuse française (Paris: Gallimard, 1943, rep. 1997)
- Jean Paulhan and Dominique Aury (ed.) La Patrie se fait tous les jours: textes français 1939-1945 (Paris, Editions de Minuit: 1947)
- Jean Paulhan and Dominique Aury, Poètes d'aujourd'hui Préface de Jean Paulhan; Textes réunis par Dominique Aury et Jean Paulhan(Paris et Lausanne : Editions Clairefontaine, 1947)
Text Editing and Annotation
- François Villon, OEuvres complètes Préface, établissement du texte et notes de Dominique Aury (Lausanne : La Guilde du Livre, 1948)

Translations and prefaces to translated books
see Dominique Aury as translator

As Pauline Réage
see Dominique Aury as Pauline Réage