The Inn of Tears

"Jacques Fréhel" was the pseudonym of Alice Télot (1861-1918), and the stories in the present volume were published between 1 June 1888 and 18 February 1903 under that pseudonym in various periodicals, though primarily in La Fronde, a feminist newspaper entirely written by women. Compiled and translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, this collection of stories and prose poems, previously all but impossible to find, is like a series of deeply intoxicating draughts of a liquor of madness, sorrow, ecstasy and splendor. Spanning the moods of Naturalism, Symbolism and Decadence, the pieces of the long-forgotten but brilliant Télot range from the starkly tragic to the hallucinatory, from rustic images of then contemporary Normandy to bizarre scenes of mythology and pseudohistory of the "Bretagne" of Druids, bards and early Christian Saints-from the mysterious boulevards of Paris to the peppery precincts of ancient Egypt. There is every reason why Alice Télot should be included in the quest undertaken by modern feminists to uncover more of the buried heritage of early feminist fiction and The Inn of Tears ought to help give her the credit she deserves for the verve, style and inventiveness of her work as well as its fugitive ideology.