It was in Japan, where she lived for two years after the breakdown of her marriage, that Angela Carter first encountered the writings of the Marquis de Sade in a second-hand bookshop. The book she wrote about one of history’s most controversial writers – The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography – garnered significant backlash from other feminist figures for her defence of de Sade's representation of women.

With its fetishistic collaged cover, the First US hardback edition published by Pantheon is undoubtedly one of the most visually appealing. It would later be published in the UK by Virago Press, with the much tamer subtitle ‘An Exercise in Cultural History’.