Presented here in English for the first time, in a bravura translation by Brian Stableford, are two highly unusual novels from one of the fin-de-siEcle's most eccentric writers.The Demi-Sexes, originally published in 1897, was the first of Jane de La VaudEre's novels seriously to explore the territory of the conventionally unmentionable, which it does forthrightly, in its first chapter, when its heroine, Camille, asks a doctor, in secret, for "an operation."The Androgynes, first published in 1903, a tale of faithfulness and fickleness amidst the vicious rivalries of the literary and artistic worlds, presents a lush and decadent Paris, replete with cross-dressers, opium smoking, and a provocative miscellany of amour.

    But if the rest of her ominous forecast is accurate, how can this ordinary child be predestined to love where the King loved, know what the King hid, and drink of the King’s cup? For the young man, Simon Dale, only one course of action can be taken: not to seek his own path, but to leave himself in the hands of Fate. This brilliant novel charts an absorbing period in history and the tumultuous life of an ordinary man in noble surrounds.