Recommendations
Books Like Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)
Books for readers who loved Laclos's brilliant anatomy of libertine warfare
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 Les Liaisons dangereuses is the most precisely constructed epistolary novel in French — 175 letters in which the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont use seduction as social warfare, destroying virtue for sport. These eight books share its cold intelligence: novels of manipulation and social power, fiction where the pleasure is watching a mechanism of destruction operate, and the libertine tradition from Crébillon through Laclos.
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Buy on AmazonClarissa
by Samuel Richardson
The English original that Laclos inverts — Richardson's virtuous Clarissa defending herself against the libertine Lovelace is the moral landscape Laclos subverts by making the libertines the cleverest characters.
- 2
Buy on AmazonVanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp is an English Merteuil — a woman of low birth using intelligence and social performance to climb a society that would otherwise exclude her; Thackeray's nineteenth-century adaptation of the Laclos type.
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Buy on AmazonPoint de lendemain (No Tomorrow)
by Vivant Denon
The most perfect short libertine novel of the period — a one-night seduction narrated with the economy Laclos expanded across 175 letters; the essential companion for understanding the libertine mode.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle are a Laclosian pair — a man and woman who conspire to use Isabel Archer as a piece in their social game; James's nineteenth-century adaptation of the libertine conspiracy.
- 5
Buy on AmazonGone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Amy Dunne planning and executing a revenge that requires sustained manipulation of everyone around her is a contemporary Merteuil — the cold analytical intelligence, the weaponization of social perception, the pleasure in precision.
- 6Buy on Amazon
Dangerous Beauty
by Anne Rice
The Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco navigating a world where women can only exercise power through sexual strategy — the Laclos world of seduction as the only politics available to women.
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Buy on AmazonNever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A different kind of manipulation — the characters manipulated not by other individuals but by a social system so total they cannot see it; Ishiguro's cold prose creates the same sense of watching victims be processed as Laclos's letters.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A group of students who believe themselves above ordinary moral constraints until they destroy themselves — the same structure of elite arrogance and mutual destruction as Laclos, transposed to a Vermont college.
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