Liber Amoris: or, The New Pygmalion, by William Hazlitt (1823).
The hilariously squalid (and strangely affecting) record of the great nineteenth-century critic's erotic obsession with his landlady's daughter. Mother and daughter conspired to milk him for everything they could get. No one has written better about falling catastrophically in love with someone you know is completely unworthy of you.
A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin, by Bianca Lamblin (1996).
A Jamesian parable set among Left Bank glitterati. Though not ostensibly written "out of revenge or retaliation," Lamblin's book is in fact a sapphic J'accuse! directed at Simone de Beauvoir. In the late 1930s, when Lamblin was a mixed-up lycée student, the Turbaned One seduced her ("both intellectually and sexually") and then handed her off—with breathtaking nonchalance—to her lover Sartre. He was just as vile, and not much to look at either. Quel bordel!
A Madman's Manifesto, by August Strindberg (1895). Strindberg intended this scabrous roman à clef about his tormented marriage to the actress and feminist Siri von Essen to serve as a suicide note. He got cold feet about killing himself but decided to humiliate her anyway by publishing this devil's banquet of unseemly allegations. (He accused Von Essen of promiscuity, drunkenness, and lesbianism.) A more loathsome yet absorbing example of misogynistic dementia would be hard to find.
