Our Lady of the Flowers (1949)

• Published: Paul Morihien, Paris, 1949
• Contributors: Translated by Bernard Frechtman
• Edition: First edition in English
• Limitation: Limited subscribers' edition
• Binding: Leatherette with gilt Cocteau portrait of Genet, red silk marker, slipcase
• Pages: 394 pp.
• Language: English
• Condition: Fine.

Genet wrote Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs in prison in 1942; by his own account, a guard destroyed the first draft and he began again. It follows Divine, a drag queen of Montmartre, her pimp Darling and the young murderer called Our Lady of the Flowers, in a prose that turns criminals into saints and the language of the Church into the language of desire. Cocteau arranged its first, clandestine publication and later campaigned for Genet's pardon.

This is the first translation into English, by Bernard Frechtman, issued privately in Paris in 1949 by Paul Morihien, Cocteau's secretary, in a subscribers' edition of 500 copies, fourteen years before Grove Press could publish it in America. Sartre's Saint Genet (1952) soon made the novel the centre of a philosophy of freedom. Cocteau's portrait of Genet is stamped in gilt on the cover.

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