In "Grape-Gatherers of Sodom", a remarkable story about the genesis of homosexuality published in 1894, the French writer Rachilde displayed the perverse tastes and sensuous prose style that had won her the nickname "Mademoiselle Baudelaire". Out of the walled town of Sodom comes a procession of male grape-pickers led by a stern patriarch. As they rest in the vineyard, the men are approached by a naked girl, her breasts burned black by the sun, who seductively twines about their sleeping bodies. She is one of the wives and daughters who have been condemned as temptresses by the priests, and driven into the desert. "I am thirsty", the woman cries, and the men look knowingly at one another: "Oh yes! It was evident to them all that she had a thirst in her!". At the patriarch's command, they stone her to death, and she falls writhing into the vat of grapes where her blood mingles with the wine. That night, the Sodomites fill their cups, and commit for the first time their eponymous "sin against nature".

This lurid parable (translated in Brian Stableford's Dedalus Book of Decadence, 1992) also conveys the negative and contradictory nature of Rachilde's sexual politics. Homosexuality, she appears to say, is the product of a murderous patriarchal misogyny; but on the other hand, women are poisonous femmes fatales, whose sexuality threatens male spirituality, genius, and transcendence. As the only women writer admitted to the literary men's club which dominated the Parisian cultural scene of the 1880s and 90s, Rachilde balanced feminist ambitions with decadent attitudes. Enormously productive—she wrote over sixty books—editor, saloniste, mentor of Jarry and Colette, defender of Dreyfus and Wilde, Rachilde was a major figure in fin-desiècle culture, and a reappraisal of her work is long overdue. These three English paperback translations of Rachilde's best-known novels, Monsieur Venus, La Marquise de Sade, and La Jongleuse, should spark a revival of this controversial writer. Her novels reverse the gender roles in French decadent writing, and carry their fantasies to sadistic extremes. Acting out elaborate rituals of sexual revenge against patriarchal conventions, her cruel heroines dominate, torment, corrupt and even embalm their lovers.

According to Jennifer Birkett, who has a brilliant chapter on Rachilde in her study of French decadence, The Sins of the Fathers (1986), she owed her success to "her willingness to play and play up the decadent stereotypes" and to put her imagination "at the service of male masochistic fantasies". None the less, Rachilde stands out as the only woman who successfully contested the theories which the decadent avant-garde used against female artists. Baudelaire and Wilde described the decadent dandy as the product of supreme artifice, opposed to all that is merely biological and material. Often called the Queen of the Decadents, Rachilde might also have been called the queen of the fetishists. She both pandered to and parodied decadent sensibility, using its symbols to work out a narrative logic of female fetishism, its sources in religious ritual and anthropology, and its relation to women's sado-masochism, ornamentation, commodification and art. Freudian theory links fetishism to the castration complex; female fetishism would represent an especially desperate effort of denial and compensation.

But the fetishism of Rachilde's heroines is always connected to the female body. Her women cross-dress or wear painfully tight dresses that make them look like insects, snakes, or flowers. They inhabit rooms that resemble the interior of the body, design piquant combinations of cuisine, collect eroticized objects that mirror themselves and combine the obsessions of the decadent artist with the domestic skills of conventional femininity. Whereas Huysmans's Des Esseintes in A Rebours gives a funeral banquet in memory of his lost virility, with a black menu of turtle soup, rye bread, olives, caviar, liquorice and chocolate, Eliante, the heroine of Rachilde's novel The Juggler, slyly serves her lover a dish of poached eggs on a purée of brains. Eggs over brains—the woman's recipe; brains over eggs would be the choice of the man. It is woman's biological capacity to create that gives her the edge in the sexual struggle.

Rachilde's career was as daring as her fiction. Her real name was Marguerite Eymery, and she was born in 1860 at Le Cros in the Perigord, the only child of a cavalry officer—who was himself the illegitimate son of a marquis—and an intellectual bourgeoise mother. As a child, she struggled hopelessly to please her father, who wanted a son to hunt and ride with him; although he detested writers, whom he scornfully called plumitifs, she started to write very young and took advantage of the family's neglect by reading voraciously in her grandfather's library, where she encountered Voltaire and Sade.

When the family attempted to marry her off at the age of fourteen to a middle-aged army officer, she attempted suicide, flinging herself into the frog pond. The engagement was called off, and writing became more and more the centre of her life. Under the androgynous pseudonym "Rachilde", which she claimed had come to her from a sixteenth-century Swedish medium in a seance, she began to publish stories in local newspapers. At fifteen, she sent a story with a request for advice to Victor Hugo, who responded with a brief but encouraging note: "Remerciements et applaudissements. Courage, Mademoiselle".

Rachilde immediately left for Paris, where she moved into literary circles at Le Chat Noir, the Café de l'Avenir and the Théâtre des Arts. There was no shortage of women writers on the scene—as one wit remarked, "there are so many women of letters today that you can't find a housekeeper"—but Rachilde quickly stood out. Often cross-dressing, calling herself "Rachilde, Homme des Lettres", she was accepted by the masculine society of "Les Hydropathes" (so called because they never drank water). The Symbolist poet and novelist Jean Lorrain described her as "a studious schoolgirl… with tiny restless hands and the earnest profile of a Greek youth or a young Frenchman in love". They were a striking couple at the masquerade artists's ball, he in a pink tunic and leopard-skin cache-sexe, she in baby shoes and a short dress.

In 1884, Rachilde published her first great succès de scandale, Monsieur Venus. Printed in Brussels, the novel was immediately seized as pornography, and she was sentenced to two years imprisonment (if she ever entered Belgium), and a fine of 2, 000 francs. The novel shocked and impressed her contemporaries. "Pornography, of course", Barbey d'Aurevilly remarked, "but so distinguished!" In Raoule de Vénérande, Rachilde created a notorious decadent heroine, an aristocratic Amazon who sets out to enslave, effeminize and corrupt a working-class man, and to savour every variation of sexual perversity, even necrophilia. Indeed, Wilde had originally considered calling the poisonous book which corrupts Dorian Gray Le Secret de Raoul. Raoule insists on playing the male role with her "mistress", Jacques Silvert, in a sadistic liaison which reaches consummation when he is killed in a duel. With hammer, scissors and pincers, she removes his hair, teeth and nails, and has them placed in a wax dummy. Jacques literally becomes "monsieur Venus"—a fetishized male version of the "anatomical Venus" used in European medical faculties to teach doctors about the female body. At night, sometimes dressed as a woman, sometimes as a man, Raoule comes to admire the mannequin: "A spring set inside the lower body is connected to the mouth and makes it move. "

Rachilde returned to, and explained, this bizarre image of a mechanized body in The Marquise de Sade (1887), a partly autobiographical Bildungsroman that explores the development of a sadistic personality in a girl warped and embittered by a misogynist society. As a lonely child neglected by her parents, Mary Barbe learns that boys are worshipped while girls are despised. By the age of ten, she already lives out violent fantasies of power: "In the stories she made up for herself, Mary usually had a little slave, half boy, half angel, who loved her very much and as a matter of honour would put up with a multitude of grotesque tortures. The feelings around these chimerical travels were always unbelievably violent, in inverse ratio to the icy calm of her real actions. She would slaughter young Indians wholesale while she was quietly scalloping a handkerchief or counting embroidery stitches." Indeed, Rachilde observes, such violent dreams are common among unloved and neglected children. "There are more little girls or little boys making up stories than one would think: some of them have a cretinous look which distresses their parents, while others have the self-satisfied expression of studious children stuffed with their lessons. "

As an orphaned adolescent, Mary goes to live with a reclusive uncle who is a scientist. Summoned for the first time to his office, she sees "an anatomical Venus… stretched asleep in a corner above the library, banished there like some discarded doll". The mannequin becomes both her image for the objectification of women and her instrument of revenge. If the female body is seen by men as a case to be pried open, or a painted shell to be admired, women's best protection is to turn themselves into automatons, to construct a glossy cara-pace. Mary uses her intelligence and sexuality to control her uncle, persuading him to teach her all he knows about geology, anatomy and chemistry, and finally convincing him to instruct her about sex. "When Mary did not grasp something he would explain it, choosing technical terms in preference to an erotic vocabulary, and soon this virgin was as experienced as a long-married woman." The anatomical Venus, "that marvellous and mechanically obscene precious thing", becomes a figure of Mary herself.

When she marries a wealthy baron, Mary uses her expertise to defend herself, explaining on her wedding night that she hates men, does not wish to bear a child and will poison him if he attempts to force her. Instead, she initiates a sado-masochistic relationship with her husband's illegitimate son, the student Paul Riche. At the end of the novel, she has destroyed both men, and is still seeking her male equal: "Where was the fearsome male she needed, she, a female whose mettle was that of a lioness?… He was either extinct or to come." At a transvestite ball, she is struck by the beauty and variety of the men, "better dressed than the women, in more striking colours and more costly fabrics… there were Watteau pastorals studded with flowers from bosom to toe and solidly corseted like dolls' waists, and several in Attic peplums with cameos; many wore picture-book outfits, slender as can be in Empire-style crinolines." Excited and repelled, she fantasizes about killing one of the men in sadistic ritual: "an exquisite plan… one which she would perhaps never carry out, but would brighten her thoughts through many a dull day".

La Marquise de Sade is a unique text in nineteenth-century women's writing, combining the realistic structure of a Victorian women's novel like Jane Eyre or The Mill on the Floss with the pornographic and the surreal. It was Rachilde's most intense and transgressive speculation on the psychodynamics of female perversion. In 1889, she married the writer Alfred Vallette, and the next year they produced a child, Gabrielle, and jointly revived the review Mercure de France. Its first issue included contributions from Mallarmé, Rémy de Gourmont and Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam. Rachilde continued to play an active role in French literary life, as a writer, playwright and mentor of the young Alfred Jarry. Among her admirers were Wilde and Beardsley, who attended her Tuesday salon in the rue des Ecoles when they were in Paris. Rachilde managed to charm the dissolute, eccentric, radical and hedonistic artists of her day without succumbing to disorder herself. She remained happily married to Vallette, and became well known as someone who never danced, drank, or took more drugs than an occasional taste of hashish mixed with apricot jam.

The Juggler (1900), regarded by many critics as Rachilde's best novel, contains many of the elements of her earlier work, but represents a different, more disillusioned phase. The decadent heroine is still a glamorous "painted doll" in a tight, metallic dress, her hair a "sharp-edged helmet"; she is still dominant, capricious, aloof; still expert in exotic sexual and culinary techniques; but she is ageing and giving way to the New Woman, the practical feminist of the twentieth century who lacks mystery and art. Eliante is a dancer who juggles with knives, in a metaphor for the risky play with sex roles that continues in this book. The Creole widow of a sea captain, she lives alone with her egg-shaped bed, collections of spices, pornographic ivory idols and oriental robes. Although Leon, the medical student she picks up at the theatre, is fascinated by her, her desires are completely fetishistic; she loves an exquisite alabaster urn and can achieve orgasm only in contemplating it. Eliante calls herself "a free recluse", an "emancipated nun", who must remain celibate and pour her passion into the objects that surround her.

In contrast to Eliante is her niece Missie, the cigarette-smoking, gauche, outspoken woman of the future: "a little coarse, quarrelsome, drunk on her recent freedom, new at everything, working at random, and piling up popularizers in the bottom of her memory to vulgarize more without much gain". Eliante sees femininity as a commodity which the new century will market like clothes in the department stores; Missie is the symbol of a future when "the grace of woman… may be recognized as a public utility and be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object… . One will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the b i g … fashion stores where it is always the same thing." But after seducing Leon into marriage with Missie, Eliante kills herself in her final juggling performance.

The Juggler is the bitter-sweet tale of the older woman who loses or yields a younger man to a woman of his own age, a romantic triangle which has been a staple of twentieth-century French narrative from Colette's Chéri to Eric Rohmer's film Ma Nuit Chez Maud. Rachilde had accurately foreseen her own decline in the face of a younger generation. Although she continued to publish novels and plays, her moment had passed. She feuded with the Surrealists over their blatant sexism, while her 1928 polemic, Pourquoi je ne suis pas feministe, alienated other radical women writers who might have supported her. When she died in 1953 at the age of ninety-four, Rachilde had been virtually forgotten.

Now rediscovered in Britain, Rachilde provokes much debate over her standing as a feminist writer. Clearly Rachilde cannot be easily assimilated into the feminist canon; she is a disturbing writer who celebrates the destructive and mechanized trappings of hyper-femininity while denouncing feminism and its interventions in the real world. But the discussion of her relation to feminism obscures the originality and distinction of her work, and perhaps has kept it from receiving the full critical attention it deserves. Like Wilde, Rachilde speaks to and about the glittering psychopathologies of the fin de siècle; she ought to be a writer whose time has come.