The collected writings

This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes “Story of a Little Girl,” about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; “The Sacred,” a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with contr-attaque and acephale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. “People describe Laure as pure, dissolute, dark, luminous. ‘I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity’ Jean Bernier says. Leiris writes about her lyrically in fourbis and frele bruit as ’the saint of the chasm.’ Bataille calls her uncompromising, pure, and sovereign. It is tempting to romanticize Laure — in the most sublime and violent sense — as consumptive poet, a fervent revolutionary, Bataille’s great love. But if she is radiant and dirty, she is also insolent.