The Sleeping Beauty Quartet

About The Sleeping Beauty Quartet

Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty books retell the fairy tale as an explicit BDSM erotic fantasy: a prince wakes the sleeping princess not with a kiss but by claiming her as a captive, and carries her off to a kingdom where the nobility openly practice ritualized submission and discipline. Written in ornate, deliberately old-fashioned prose that plays the fairy-tale register straight even as the content is anything but childlike, the first three volumes follow Beauty from her initial captivity through an escalating education in desire, humiliation, and eventually power, as she moves from prisoner to a figure who commands the very rituals that once controlled her. Rice published the original trilogy in the early 1980s under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, at a time when explicit erotica by a literary novelist under her own name would have been commercially unthinkable; the pen name was an open secret for years before Rice formally reclaimed the books.

Three decades later, with erotica publishing transformed by the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey (a book Rice herself has said drew on her Sleeping Beauty novels), Rice returned to the world she'd built and wrote a fourth volume, Beauty's Kingdom, published in 2015 under her own name from the outset. All four books were subsequently repackaged and reissued as Anne Rice titles, folding the Roquelaure pseudonym into her acknowledged body of work alongside the two other erotic novels she wrote as Anne Rampling.