A Classic of LGBTQ+ Literature — Now in a New Unabridged English Translation
When Anna Elisabet Weirauch published the first volume of Der Skorpion in Berlin in 1919 — nine years before Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness — it found an immediate and passionate readership. Censored in 1926 for fear it would corrupt youth and placed on the Nazi Index of Dangerous Literature, it survived anyway: passed hand to hand, translated, reprinted, abridged, and mutilated by pulp publishers.
This edition features:
- A new unabridged English translation from the original German
- Both Book One (1919) and Book Two (1921) — the full arc Weirauch intended as a single story
- A comprehensive introduction by the editor
- Scholarly analyses of both books
- Chapter-by-chapter historical notes
- Comprehensive bibliography of Anna Elisabet Weirauch
The Story
Mette Rudloff grows up motherless in Berlin, raised by a well-meaning but remote father and an overbearing aunt. As a young woman, she drifts through a stifling social world of needlework circles and dull French reading circles until the day a door opens and Olga Radó walks into her life.
What follows is one of the great love stories in early twentieth-century literature. Olga is brilliant, cultured, commanding, elusive — a woman who carries a golden cigarette case engraved with a scorpion.
She becomes Mette's teacher, her intellectual awakening, and eventually her great love. But their relationship exists in a society that has no tolerance for it, and Mette's family — led by the implacable Aunt Emilie — mobilizes every weapon at its disposal: private detectives, psychiatrists, forced separation, and the relentless pressure of respectability.
The Scorpion is not a tragedy, nor is it a story of triumphant liberation. It is something rarer and more honest: the story of a woman learning to live with the full weight of who she is.
Perfect for:
- Readers of classic, vintage, and historical literary fiction
- Fans of lesbian and sapphic fiction (romance)
- Readers of forbidden love stories and recovered literary histories
- Anyone interested in Weimar Berlin and early twentieth-century European social history
- Anyone who loved The Price of Salt, Fingersmith, The Well of Loneliness, Tipping the Velvet
- Readers of Sarah Waters, Radclyffe Hall, Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Donoghue
- Book clubs exploring underrepresented voices in literary history
- Collectors of annotated and scholarly editions of rare texts
Part of Ovid Publishing Group's LGBTQ+ Library
Ovid Publishing Group's LGBTQ+ Library brings forgotten and overlooked works of queer literature back into print through new English translations and carefully annotated editions. Specializing in public domain works from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, the collection recovers voices that were censored, prosecuted, published anonymously, or simply lost to time — from the only surviving copy of an 1895 lesbian novel found in the Berlin State Library to the landmark works of Weimar Berlin's queer underground. Each edition pairs faithful new translations with scholarly introductions that place these works in their historical and cultural context, ensuring that the pioneers of LGBTQ+ literature finally reach the modern readers they were written for.
