For all his notoriety, the Marquis de Sade must head the list of writers who are more talked about than read. In this new, representative selection Margaret Crosland encourages us to take a fresh look at his work.

Sade spent more than half his life in prison, but for which he would have had scant cause to take his revenge on society through evocations of sexual cruelty. Excluded from normal life, he developed an extremist vision of the world through stories, dialogues and historical novels. Included here are extracts from his major fiction: some of the devastating fantasies in Les Cent Vingt Journees de Sodome as well as episodes from Justine and from the compulsively vicious Juliette.

Yet, in addition to his so-called 'obscene' writing, Sade wrote with equal fervour about idealized people and democratic societies. He was indeed a passionate philosopher, a man typical in his own way of his times but eager to pass on to later centuries his incandescent ideas about human behaviour. Following her Introduction, Margaret Crosland provides astute commentaries on her selections, and finally a Chronology and Bibliography.