This provocative reading of scandalous French woman writer Violette Leduc--heralded as a great by Beauvoir, Sartre, Genet, Camus--erodes the divide between body and text in erotic literature. In The Pleasures of the Text Elizabeth Locey sets herself the task of pinning down the often slippery ways in which pleasure is mapped onto the body of the reader, and she confronts and challenges the philosophical debate between pornography and erotica.