Deborah Parsons describes how the character of Wendell is presented as having an 'idealistic vision of himself as a natural beast with a spiritual purpose to deliver women from the asexual state of virginity'.

In Ryder Barnes abandons the Beardsleyesque style of her drawings for The Book of Repulsive Women in favor of a visual vocabulary borrowed from French folk art.

Several illustrations are closely based on the engravings and woodcuts collected by Pierre Louis Duchartre and René Saulnier in the 1926 book L'Imagerie Populaire—images that had been copied with variations since medieval times.

Postal Service to refuse to ship it, and several had to be left out of the first edition, including an image in which a giant Sophia is seen urinating into a chamberpot and one in which Amelia and Kate-Careless sit by the fire knitting codpieces.

A 1990 Dalkey Archive edition restored the missing drawings, but the original text was lost with the destruction of the manuscript in World War II.

Barnes writes in her foreword to the novel that since censorship 'has a vogue in America' certain sections of the novel have been 'expurgated' and asterisks have been put in place so as to make it 'matter for no speculation where sense, continuity, and beauty have been damaged'.