New York: Greenberg, 1932

8vo, pp. 396. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated dust jacket. Small bookseller's label to rear pastedown, offsetting to endpapers, a near fine copy in a very good dust jacket, 2cm closed tear to top edge of rear panel, edgewear, spine ends a little worn.

First English-language edition, translated from the German by Whittaker Chambers. 'Scorpion' is German slang for a masculine-presenting lesbian.

Born in Romania, Anna Elisabet Weirauch [1887-1970] was a member of Max Reinhardt's acting company in Berlin for eight years. While there she began to write; her first novel, Little Dagmar, was published in 1918. She met her partner Helena Geisenhainer, in the mid-1920s; the two were still together when Weirauch died in Berlin in 1970.

A trilogy, Der Skorpion was first published in German in 1919, 1932 and 1933. This, the first English-language edition, contains the first two volumes, all that had appeared at the time of publication. (The third volume was first published in English as The Outcast in 1948.) Suppressed during the 1920s for fear it would corrupt Germany's youth, The Scorpion remained little known until its republication in English during the 1970s, and promptly became a key text of that era's gay liberation movements.