Recommendations
Books Like Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Best books to read after Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos
Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses is one of the most formally brilliant novels in French literature — an epistolary masterpiece about two libertines who use letters and seduction as weapons. These recommendations extend the experience through the French epistolary tradition and through fiction about manipulation, power, and the destructive exercise of intelligence.
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Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson
Richardson's epistolary masterwork is Laclos's most important predecessor — both novels use the exchange of letters to reveal character through the gap between what people say and what they intend. Clarissa and Valmont-as-Lovelace are the innocent and the libertine who were Laclos's models.
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Pamela
by Samuel Richardson
Richardson's first novel, the immediate predecessor to Clarissa, established the epistolary form and the conflict between female virtue and male libertinism that Laclos inherits and inverts — where Richardson's Mr. B reforms, Laclos's Valmont and Merteuil never do, and the novel's ending refuses the consolation of Richardson's endings.
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The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Stendhal's Julien Sorel uses seduction as social strategy in the same way that Valmont and Merteuil do — deliberately, calculatingly, and with a cold awareness of the gap between performed emotion and actual feeling. The Red and the Black is the nineteenth-century French novel most directly in the tradition that Laclos defined.
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Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Flynn's novel is organized around the same premise as Les Liaisons Dangereuses: two intelligent people in a relationship that is also a power contest, using narrative and performance as weapons against each other. The epistolary form becomes alternating first-person narration, but the underlying structure is Laclos's.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley
by Patricia Highsmith
Highsmith's Tom Ripley — who uses performance, manipulation, and cold calculation to survive and advance — is the twentieth-century American thriller version of Valmont. Both characters are intelligent, charming, without normal moral qualms, and fascinating precisely because of the quality of their intelligence.
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Dangerous Liaisons
by Christopher Hampton
Hampton's 1985 stage adaptation (also the basis of the 1988 film with Glenn Close and John Malkovich) is the clearest route to the novel for readers who want to understand its structure before reading the original. The adaptation emphasizes the theatrical qualities — the performance of emotion, the staging of scenes — that are already present in the epistolary original.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Gilbert Osmond — the aesthete who marries Isabel Archer for her money and uses her as a display object — is the closest thing in American fiction to Valmont: a man of great intelligence who exercises it in the manipulation of a good woman. James's novel is the Anglophone exploration of the same power dynamics that Laclos analyzes.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp — who uses social performance, charm, and manipulation to climb a hierarchy that would otherwise exclude her — is the Victorian English equivalent of the Marquise de Merteuil: a woman of intelligence and ruthlessness operating in a society that offers women no legitimate path to power.
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