Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

[[3]Darconville lifted down this volume and, as he did so, a sheet of paper fluttered out of it — one he quickly saw was covered with a curious language. Unobserved, he put it in his pocket.]

Algernon Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time”; J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht ; T he Book of a Thousand and One Nights ; The Works of André Tiraqueau; Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus ; Coventry Patmore’s Religio Poetae; The Women Who Bark by A Cynophobe; Le Solitaire’s La Femme ne doit pas travailler ; Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage ; Nathaniel Ward’s The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam (1647); The Dutch Courtezan by John Marston; Tuteur and Glatzes’s “Murdering Mothers”; E. Jacobson’s The Wish for a Child in Boys ; E. J. Dingwall’s The American Woman ; Thomas Campion’s The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres; Les Prières des Picards ; The Works of Andreas Salernitanus; Hieroglyphic Tales by Horace Walpole; Modern Woman: The Lost Sex by Lundberg and Farnham; Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton; Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s “Misogynie.”

Apollinaire’s The Debauched Hospodar ; F. Lee Utley’s The Crooked Rib ; The Lyrics of Archilochus; Gelett Burgess’s The Maxims of Noah and The Maxims of Methuselah; The School for Reform by Thomas Morton; Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas (1576); Dr. Magnus Hirschfield’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Geschlechtskunde; Reveries of a Bachelor by Ik. Marvel; François Villon’s “La Belle Heaulmière aux filles de joie”; Karen Horney’s The Dread of Women; Sex Antagonism by Walter Heape; The Difference Between a Man and a Woman by Theodore Lang; Lord Bemers’s Six Requirements for a Happy Marriage ; Théodore Joran’s La Trouvée Féministe ; John Webster’s The White Devvil; The Chinese Book of Odes ; J. D. Unwin’s Sex and Culture ; Thomas Gisbourne’s An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797); Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man ; H. Fuseli’s Aphorisms; Religio Medici by Thomas Browne; Correa M. Walsh’s Feminism ; John Betjeman’s An Oxford University Chest ; Dr. Heilborn’s The Opposite Sexes ; James Corin’s Mating, Marriage, and the Status of Women ; P. J. Proudhon’s La Pornocratie, ou Les Femmes .

Philip Wylie’s A Generation of Vipers ; John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit ; Tertullian’s On Monogamy and On Pudicity; Why She Wouldn’t Marry (1948) by C. Linda; Thomas Otway’s The Orphan ; Rudyard Kipling’s Mary Postgate; The Enemies of Women by Vicente Ibanez; “Men and Women Speak Different Languages” by Col. Thomas Stott; George Farquhar’s Sir Harry Wildair (1701); L’Homme-femme by Alexandre Dumas, fils; Theodor Reik’s The Creation of Women; The Fundamental Error of Woman Suffrage by William Parker; Euripides’s Hippolytus ; L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics ; William Blake’s “How Sweet I Roam’d”; The Female Offender by Prof. Caesar Lombroso; Ford Madox Ford’s No More Parades; The Fear of Being a Woman by Joseph Rheingold; Dr. Fritz’s Wittels die sexuelle Not; The Seven Sages of Rome ; Karl Krause’s Werke ( 14 vols.); Remy de Gourmont’s L’Histoire tragique de la princesse Phénissa .

Thomas Dekker’s The Batchelars Banquet ( 1603); Stephen Gosson’s Quippes for Upstart Newfangled Gentlemen ( 1595); The Works of Barbey d’Aurevilly; W. S. Gilbert’s Gentle Alice Brown ; Heinrich Schurtz’s Urgeschichte der Kultur ; William Shakespeare’s King Lear ; Paul Theroux’s Girls at Play; Life with Women and How to Survive It by Joseph Peck, M.D.; Pierre Janet’s L’Automatisme psychologique ; William Prynne’s The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes (1628); Ben Jonson’s “Epigram on the Court Pucell”; Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe ; Plato’s Apology ; Oskar Vogt’s Altindische Dichtung und Weisheit ; John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (1639); Alexis, the Attic Comedian’s “On the Numerous Beauty Aids Used to Fit Young Ladies Out as Shiny Snakes”; Rumplestiltskin ; The Complete Strindberg; Massinger’s The Duke of Milan ; Anonymous, The Praise and Dispraise of Women ; John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman ; Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et phitonicis muliebribus (1489); J. S. Redfield’s Modern Women and What Is Said of Them ; Aeschylus’s Eumenides ; T. X. Hoeur’s Die schwarze Herzogin ; Thomas Otway’s The Orphan ; The Works of the Knight of La Tour Landry; the Topica Legalia of Claude Chansonnette.

Augustus Wolff’s Die Frauenfeindleichen Literatur; Some of the Reasons Against Women’s Suffrage by Francis Parkman; James McGrigor Allan’s “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women” (1869) and The Intellectual Severance of Men and Women ; T. W. H. Crosland’s Lovely Woman ( 1903); The Works of Chrysippus; Charles Reade’s The Woman-Hater; On Wives and Wiving by Alexander Nicchols; George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide; A Briefe Anatomie of Women (1653); “Viraginity and Effemination” by James Weir, Jr., M.D.; Edward Young’s The Universal Passion (1725); Adnil Notrub’s The Kept Woman Who Didn’t Keep Long ; Montherlant’s Les Jeunes Filles ; Aristotle’s Generation of Animals ; Douglas Jerrold’s Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures ; Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle ; The Works of Nevisanus; Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents .

P. J. Mobius’s “L’Inferiorità mentala délia donna”; Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys; The Works of Jean Weir; James Thurber’s Men, Women, and Dogs ; The Works of Procopius; John Donne’s “Loves Alchymie”; Tolstoy’s Father Sergius ; Thomas Middleton’s Micro-Cynicon (1 599); Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazusae; Her Royal Highness Woman by Max O’Rell; P. J. Proudhon’s Amour et Manage ; G. J. Romanes’s Mental Differences Between Men and Women ; The Works of St. Bonaventure; Matrimony: A Novel Containing a Series of Interesting Adventures by John Shebbeare; Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609); Alistair Crowley’s White Stains; The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson; A. Conan Doyle’s John Barrington Cowles ; Ernest Dowson’s The Pierrot of the Minute ; Richard Sibbes’s Bowels Opened (1641). Francis Bacon’s “On Marriage and the Single Life.”

St. Bernardino of Siena’s Prediche Volgari; Darwin’s The Descent of Man ; The Poems of William Cartwright; On Sleeping with Women by Roger Lawson; The Epic of Gilgamesh; The Embattled Male in the Garden, or Why Women Are Queer in the Country by Dwight Farnham; G. E. Moore’s Celibates ; Philipp Mainländer’s Philosophie der Erlösing (1876); the thirteenth-century Coutumes du Beauvoisis ; Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sexual Life Among the Melanesians ; Semonides Amorgos’s Elegy and Iambus ; Axel, Thane O’Droxeur’s Love and Hate ; Francesco Barbara’s De re uxoria ; The Works of Paraeus; August Strindberg’s Giftas ; the Tomes of La Croix; De legibus connubialibus ; Les Opères de Cretin; the Doulaq Papyrus of 1400 B.C.; The Works of Palladis of Alexandria; Miroir de Manage by Eustace Deschamps; the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvois.