Loosely based on one of the most notorious crimes of the seventeenth century, The Marquise de Gange by The Marquis de Sade is a neglected classic. Although a departure from his earlier pornographic and libertine works, the novel reads with the same subversive tension of an author plotting against virtue in his distress. Will McMorran's excellent Introduction dramatically retells the story of the notorious true crime in which a Provençal noblewoman was murdered by her husband's brothers in 1667, showing where Sade's tale fits within the many accounts of her death. He also provides a very helpful selected bibliography of the retellings of the story.