The Bitch was published by Pan Books in 1979 (first published in hardcover by W.H. Allen), and it returns to Fontaine Khaled — the wealthy, sexually predatory woman of The Stud — now older, less wealthy, and facing the particular terror that Collins’s world reserves for women who are losing their looks.
Fontaine has been divorced, her money is running out, and her power — which was always based on her beauty and her wealth rather than on any institutional position — is ebbing. She must find a new strategy: a new man, a new source of income, a new way of maintaining the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. The novel follows her maneuvers with a mixture of sympathy and cool observation, showing both the desperation beneath the glamorous surface and the genuine intelligence required to survive in a world that offers aging women no mercy.
The title is deliberately provocative: Collins reclaims “bitch” as a term of admiration rather than condemnation. Fontaine is a bitch — aggressive, selfish, manipulative, and sexually voracious — but these qualities are presented as survival strategies rather than moral failures. In Collins’s world, women who are not bitches are victims.
Collecting The Bitch
First edition (W.H. Allen, London, 1979): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$12
- Film tie-in edition (1979): $5–$15