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 contrattaque 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 sisterinlaw and tortured love letters to Bataille and an essay by Bataille about Laures death of tuberculosis at the age of thirtyfive.amp147People describe Laure as pure dissolute dark luminous. amp145I drank I bathed in her radiant purity Jean Bernier says. Leiris writes about her lyrically in fourbis and framp234le bruit as amp145the saint of the chasm.amp8217 Bataille calls her uncompromising pure and sovereign. It is tempting to romanticize Laure amp150 in the most sublime and violent sense amp150 as consumptive poet a fervent revolutionary Batailleamp8217s great love. But if she is radiant and dirty she is also insolent. That it seems is what saves her. amp151Jeanine HermanColette Peignot a.k.a. Laure is one of the more fascinating and intense women writers of the past century. Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris described her as amp147one of the most vehement existences that ever lived one of the most conflicted.amp8221 They summarized her volatile personality as amp147eager for affection and for disaster oscillating between extreme audacity and the most dreadful anguish as inconceivable on a scale of real beings as a mythical being she tore herself on the thorns with which she surrounded herself until becoming nothing but a wound never allowing herself to be confined by anything or anyone.amp8221 In other words Laure was the epitome of what Bataille would dub the amp147sovereignamp8221 individual. amp151Jason DeBoeramp160Absinthe Literary ReviewBy the time one emerges from this compilation of autobiographical and biographical sketches