Background
After the success of Interview with the Vampire (1976), Anne Rice wrote two extensively researched historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1982). Neither of them gave her the critical acclaim or the commercial success of her first novel; the main complaints about The Feast of All Saints were that it was too heavy and dense to read easily, and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated. She had been thinking about a story set during the time of Oscar Wilde for the next novel, but decided to abandon it and go back to the erotic writing she had explored in the 1960s. Her idea was "to create a book where you didn't have to mark the hot pages" and "to take away everything extraneous, as much as could be done in a narrative". To gain a creative freedom for the new work, Rice adopted the nom de plume A.N. Roquelaure from the French word Roquelaure, referring to a cloak worn by men in the 18th-century Europe. Rice came out as the author of the trilogy only sometime during the 1990s.
The trilogy was written in the 1980s when many feminists denounced pornography as violation of women's rights, but Rice firmly believed that women should have the freedom to read and write whatever they pleased, and considered the trilogy her political statement.
Read more about this topic: The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy
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