The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

The Sleeping Beauty Quartet

Penguin trade paperback cover
Author	Anne Rice
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Erotic novel
Publisher	E. P. Dutton/Plume, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Publication date	The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: 1 March 1983 Beauty's Punishment: 26 March 1984 Beauty's Release: 3 June 1985 Beauty's Kingdom: 21 April 2015
Media type	Print, audiobook
Pages	The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: 253 pp
ISBN	(The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, 1983 hardcover and trade paper editions) (Beauty's Punishment) (Beauty's Release) (Beauty's Kingdom)
OCLC	22915205

The Sleeping Beauty Quartet is a series of four novels written by American author Anne Rice under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure. The quartet comprises The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, Beauty's Release, and Beauty's Kingdom, first published individually in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 2015 in the United States. They are erotic BDSM novels set in a medieval fantasy world, loosely based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The novels describe explicit sexual adventures of the female protagonist Beauty and the male characters Alexi, Tristan and Laurent, featuring both maledom and femdom scenarios amid vivid imageries of bisexuality, homosexuality, ephebophilia and pony play.

In 1994, the abridged audio versions of the first three books were published in cassette form. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty was read by actress Amy Brenneman. Beauty's Punishment was read by Elizabeth Montgomery (known for her role in the ABC situation comedy Bewitched) as Beauty with Michael Diamond as Tristan, and Beauty's Release was by Montgomery with actor Christian Keiber reading as Laurent. A compact disc version of the audiobooks was read by Genviere Bevier and Winthrop Eliot.

After the success of Interview with the Vampire (1976), Anne Rice wrote two extensively researched historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1982). Neither of them gave her the critical acclaim or the commercial success of her first novel; the main complaints about The Feast of All Saints were that it was too heavy and dense to read easily, and most of the reviews for Cry to Heaven were so savagely negative that Rice felt devastated. She had been thinking about a story set during the time of Oscar Wilde for the next novel, but decided to abandon it and go back to the erotic writing she had explored in the 1960s. Her idea was "to create a book where you didn't have to mark the hot pages" and "to take away everything extraneous, as much as could be done in a narrative". To gain a creative freedom for the new work, Rice adopted the nom de plume A.N. Roquelaure from the French word Roquelaure, referring to a cloak worn by men in the 18th-century Europe. Rice came out as the author of the trilogy only sometime during the 1990s.