Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers, novel by Jean Genet, published anonymously in a limited edition in 1943 as Notre-Dame-des-fleurs. The book was published under Genet’s name in 1944, and the definitive French edition was published in 1951. The author, who wrote the novel while he was in prison for burglary, was championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who brought the work to public attention and helped engineer a pardon for Genet.

A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who consorts with thieves, pimps, murderers, and other criminals and who has many sexual adventures. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, the novel moves back and forth in time, opening with Divine’s funeral. Genet affirms a new moral order, one in which criminals are saints, evil is glorified, and conventional taboos are freely violated.