The free publication of Story of O in this country is an event of considerable importance... it is a significant measure of how far we have come in lifting the restrictions on art and our responses to it... In brief, Story of O relates the progressive willful debasement of a young and beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover, Rene. The test is severe - sexual in method, psychological in substance... The artistic interest here has precisely to do with the use not only of erotic materials but also erotic methods, the deliberate stimulation of the reader as a part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience. - Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

 

That Pauline Reage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade follows from the fact that art is more persuasive than propaganda... Aiming only to reveal, to clarify, to make real to the reader those dark and repulsive practices and emotions that his better self rejects as improbable or evil, Pauline Reage succeeds in drawing us irresistably into her perverse world through the magnetism of her own selfless absorption in it. Like some exquisitely balanced, gently undulating instrument, she carefully inscribes the cruel shocks inflicted on her heroine’s refined sensibility - and we believe. - The New York Times Book Review

 

An ironic fable of unfreedom, a mystic document that transcends the pornographic and even the erotic...[it] is so horrifying, outraging cherished beliefs in the sanctity of the body and in personal freedom... To give the body, to allow it to be ravaged, exploited and totally possessed, can be an act of consequence. - Newsweek