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Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs) is the debut novel of French writer Jean Genet, first published in 1943. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society.
The novel tells the story of Divine, a drag queen who, when the novel opens, has died of tuberculosis and been canonised as a result. The narrator tells us that the stories he is telling are mainly to amuse himself whilst he passes his sentence in prison – and the highly erotic, often explicitly sexual, stories are spun to assist his masturbation. Jean-Paul Sartre called it "the epic of masturbation".
Divine lives in an attic room overlooking Montmartre cemetery, which she shares with various lovers, the most important of whom is a pimp called Darling Daintyfoot. One day Darling brings home a young hoodlum and murderer, dubbed Our Lady of the Flowers. Our Lady is eventually arrested and tried, and executed. Death and ecstasy accompany the acts of every character, as Genet performs a transvaluation of all values, making betrayal the highest moral value, murder an act of virtue and sexual appeal.
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Subjects
Fiction, Gay men, Prisoners, Transvestites, Gay prisoners, Continental european fiction (fictional works by one author), Translations, French fiction, Romance literature, Cross-dressers, Homosexuels masculins, Romans, nouvelles, Prisonniers, Travestis, LGBTQ fiction before StonewallPlaces
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20th centuryShowing 11 featured editions. View all 67 editions?
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Our Lady of Flowers
March 1976, Grove Press, Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
in English
039417903X 9780394179032
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Book Details
Edition Notes
38 pages of publisher's advertisements at end.
Translation of: Notre dame des fleurs.
"First American printing."
"Complete & unexpurgated"--Cover.
"A Collectors publication"--Cover.
Originally published: New York : Grove Press, 1963. With introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre.
This reprint omits the introduction by Sartre.
The Physical Object
Edition Identifiers
Work Identifiers
Source records
First Sentence
"Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell."
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History
- Created February 12, 2009
- 5 revisions
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| September 7, 2025 | Edited by dcapillae | Merge works (MRID: 235815) |
| October 25, 2021 | Edited by Jenner | Merge works |
| December 15, 2009 | Edited by WorkBot | link works |
| April 26, 2009 | Edited by ImportBot | add OCLC number |
| February 12, 2009 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from San Francisco Public Library record |









