she explained that Rachilde was the name of a long dead Swedish lord who had come to her in a seance. This allowed her to shift the blame for her perverse writings to spiritual possession, but that also gave her an internal explanation for why she felt unnatural and unlike the others around her. This idea would be recapitulated later in life with the idea of possession by a werewolf. In 1878 Rachilde began to be published by Parisian newspapers, and in 1879 she published her first novel. In 1884 she was a scandalous sensation. One little-known serial novel (La Joise d'Ameir) was published in 1885 under the name Jean Yvan, but that was a brief and unsuccessful experiment and she returned to Rachilde. Then, in 1895 at the insistence of her publisher, two novels of her novels were published under the name Jean de Chilra, an anagram of Rachilde, though typographical errors plagued its few printings. This imperfect pseudonym had its own personality, that of a young male anarchist, and was treated as separate person. Unafraid to interact with an artificial identity, Rachilde herself wrote a lengthy and personal review of the de Chilra novel L'Heure Sexuelle. Neither novel was a publishing success and by 1899 she was publishing exclusively as Rachilde once again. Stylistically, Rachilde occupies an interesting place in French literature, most closely associated with the Decadent Movement but also linked to French symbolism. She was published in the pages of La Décadence, which was formed as a symbolist-leaning rival to Anatole Baju's Le Décadent, but then she was also published in Le Décadent. In fact, despite the symbolist qualities of much of her work and her close association with that group, Rachilde actively opposed an attempt by the symbolists to take over the more explicitly decadent publication. Maurice Barrès certainly put her in the company of the early decadents when he described as writing as a dream-like extension of life, intending primarily to titliate but also to explore la maladie du siècle, the ennui and disillusion of the age, which in women was known at the time to result in hysteria. Her writing embraced or at least explored many different forms of sexuality at odds with the morals and expectations of her society, often shocking for its depravity rather than any explicit descriptions: prostitution, cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, homosexuality, sadism, incest, bestiality, Pygmalionism, and necrophilia, and more.