Victorian Salvation

by Jean Roberta

In Victorian novels (as well as those from earlier eras), heroines are saved from starvation and disgrace by offers of marriage from gentlemen of means, or by inheriting money from unexpected sources.

I seem to be a Victorian heroine, not that I was facing starvation or any more disgrace than I’ve faced for the past forty-some years.

Last week, I went to a lawyer’s office to pick up a very large cheque (5 figures in Canadian money) and bring it to the bank to park it in the joint account I share with my spouse Mirtha. This windfall is the last installment of my inheritance from my parents, who both passed away in 2009. There will be no more money from that source, and I will probably never hear from my two sisters again, since they will have no reason to forward me their emails about family financial affairs.

The amount in my bank account is already earmarked for some big projects: fixing the roof of the house where my younger stepson lives, still owned by Mirtha and me, and renovating the basement of our own house. (Since all the stuff down there will have to be cleared out, this project can wait until spring.)

I’ve already registered us to attend Eroticon in London, England, in March 2018. I hope we can meet up with erotic writers I already know.

I’m not sure an inheritance can be considered a “triumph,” since I didn’t do anything to earn it, but it’s certainly good news.

A character in my most recent story is saved from entering the oldest profession by parallel news about money from an estranged relative. The story itself is far from a triumph, since it was rejected by Delilah Devlin for her upcoming “bad boys” anthology about pirates. She explained that some of the stories she received had enough sex in them, but not enough romance for her "bad boy" series. Fair enough.

Considering that my story, “Launched,” takes place in the imaginary world of my novella, The Flight of the Black Swan, romance between a woman and a man would be quite a stretch.

The narrator, Lady Florinda, escapes from the family mansion in 1861 rather than be forced into an arranged marriage. She dyes her hair and finds a job as a barmaid called Flossie in a certain pub, the Fairy Ring, that caters to the Green Men’s Society of gentlemen who prefer other gentlemen.

Two of Flossie’s devoted customers turn out to be bisexual, and the three of them enjoy a romp in her little bed-chamber, where her two friends encourage her to join them on a stolen ship, The Black Swan, to evade the police. She says she just couldn’t, but tells them she will join the demimonde on land.

One of the men, himself a nobleman in disguise, gives her some good news:

Bruce used his shirt to wipe my face, my belly and my thighs. “Dearest, please don’t sell yourself to every man in London. I couldn’t bear to think about the treatment you could receive. You have resources, you know.”

If he meant my face and my body, how else could I use them except to barter for the necessities of life?

He changed the topic of conversation, or so I thought. “Did you ever hear of Lady Cassandra Hightart, your father’s cousin and my aunt by marriage?”

“Yes,” I told him, “but she never came to visit. I thought her cold and rude, or possibly insane.”

“That’s what you were told.” The look of sympathy in Bruce’s ocean-blue eyes was unsettling. Colin looked from one of us to the other as though watching a game. Or a duel.

“Your father never forgave her for leaving most of her fortune to you in her will. She took a fancy to you when you were a tiny girl just learning to speak, and you asked to use her parasol to shelter your favorite doll from the rain. She decided that if she never had children, she would make you her heiress. That was why she was banned from your house.”

For a moment, I was speechless. Bruce held me as I tried to digest the news.

“She has gone to her reward, as you probably know.”

“I didn’t.” I was growing indignant at my father, whose control over me was more important to him than my welfare. My mother surely would have protested against his methods had she lived.

“How smashing!” said Colin. “You’re going to be a lady indeed. Not to us, though.” He squeezed one of my nipples.

My body reacted, but my mind was whirling. “What do I need to do?” I asked Bruce.

“Before we go to sea, I shall introduce you to the solicitor handling the will. After that, it should be a simple matter of blocking your father’s interference. You’ve come of age, so he can’t claim to act in your behalf.”

Tears poured from my eyes, but now they were signs of joy. “Thank you,” I sniffed. “Thank you for this.”

“You can still whore about,” Colin advised me. “All the best ladies do.”

Another consideration presented itself to me. “How long have you known about Lady Cassandra’s will?”
Bruce looked away from me. “I knew before my own disgrace. Then, of course, I was banished from my own home, and I never had a chance to speak to you before finding you here. Why would I tell you something that might send you away from me? From us.”

So Bruce had resigned himself to my refusal to join him on a stolen ship, even if Colin hadn’t.

All we three had left to do was to clean up after ourselves in every sense. Luckily, there was some water in the pitcher on my trunk, which I used as a dressing-table, and I poured it into the basin to wash myself as well as I could.

I would have many opportunities for luxurious baths in hot soapy water in the future. For now, I wished to make myself presentable while avoiding an emotional scene with my two dear friends, from whom I would soon be parted. When I wiped my cunny with the edge of my wash-cloth, it was smeared with blood.

“Flossie.” Bruce’s low voice sounded almost like a lullaby. “Please let me keep the evidence as a souvenir.” He pulled the cloth from my hand, and I let it go. If he wanted a souvenir of my entry into sexual womanhood, that meant he didn’t intend to forget me.

We were all washed with tears again when we said our private goodbyes. Colin looked very downhearted when he realized that our paths had already diverged considerably. “We can send you letters,” he promised. “I’ll bring paper to write down our adventures, and when we meet other ships, I’ll ask them to take our epistles to you, in care of Mr. Robin Straw at The Fairy Ring.”

“I’ll watch for them, Colin. Please write to me too, Bruce. If you wish to send me private messages in code, use French or Latin, and I will use a dictionary to decipher them.”

My hairy, muscular man pressed me to his chest, and I could feel his heart thumping. “We’ll return someday, Florinda, and we hope you won’t shun us when we do.“

“Not even if I’m the wife of a prince. I wouldn’t marry any of them, but if I did, you would still be my honored guests.” For that, I received a kiss on the mouth from the man who held me, and a playful smack on the bottom from the other.

Bruce reluctantly opened his arms to let me dress myself in clean underthings and the same gown in which I had come upstairs, in what felt like a different age. I couldn’t afford to stop appearing as Flossie the Raven-Haired Barmaid until my affairs were settled.

And that is how I was launched into my present life, before the Black Swan played a celebrated part in the American war, and returned home in triumph. Just as my heart-brothers, the Green Men, have no regrets for anything they have done, neither have I.

I don’t know when this story will be launched on the world, but it probably won’t be any time soon. It could become part of a fleet of stories in the world of the Green Men.

Since I’m not planning to quit my job, however, I have a mountain of student essays to mark before launching into any new writing projects.

Illusions by Candlelight

By Jean Roberta

There is so much to say on this topic that I hardly know where to start.

At one time, I didn’t think it was possible to write explicit sex scenes in the style of some past era. I probably believed that sex hadn’t been discovered before the time of my parents’ courtship (WW2, hubba-hubba). Then I read The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, edited by Maxim Yakubowski (circa 1999). Those stories were both hot and realistic, and some were set in times and places before the Christian Era.

I wanted to write that stuff, but I wasn’t sure I could.

A lot of popular historical art that has been produced since 1980, approximately, manages to produce the flavor of a past era, but with full use of current technology and the relative freedom of a culture that isn’t dominated by a Church or an all-powerful Emperor. Historical movies that fit that description include the painterly films The French Lieutenant’s Woman (with a kind of Victorian palette) and Goya in Bourdeaux (which looks like the kind of film the Spanish painter Francisco Goya would have produced if video cameras had existed in the 1700s). Then there is Schindler’s List, set in the 1940s and shot in black-and-white, but with a crisper, clearer chiaroscuro than you can see in any movie actually made in that time.

The literary version of that kind of thing avoids the kind of euphemisms that were generally used in “literary fiction” (as distinct from “porn”) right up to recent times. (Try reading Hemingway’s famous line that “the earth moved,” or the intense abstractions in D.H. Lawrence’s sex scenes, or Radclyffe Hall’s version of lesbian sex: “And that night, they were not divided.” See if you can keep a straight face.)

Like Lisabet, I love the Victorian era (1830s-1900), though the Enlightenment and Romantic eras seem fun too (mid-1700s-1830s). I like the combination of a culture that is now far enough in the past to seem exotic, yet close enough to our time that the literature actually written in those days is still comprehensible. The language doesn’t need to be translated.

Shakespeare’s era (approximately 1590-1616) is a little more remote, but as Sacchi demonstrated, it’s still possible to write a story with a Shakespearean feel that doesn’t require pages of footnotes to be understood. (And on that note, William Shakespeare was born AND died on April 23. We can still drink to his memory a day late.)

Then there is the Renaissance and before that, the Middle Ages. Linguistically, 1100-1450 (more or less) was the era of Middle English, which definitely does not look or sound like modern English. Here is a famous passage (part of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, circa 1380s), which I can still recite from memory:

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

(There are many more lines, but these are the ones I remember.)

Anyone who wants to set a plot in an English-speaking environment before the mid-fifteenth century, and lure a non-scholarly 21st-century audience to read it, has to improvise a lot.



In order to write a story set in the universe of King Arthur (though technically, it’s about his conception), I reread my old copy of The Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory (mid-1400s).

Here is the beginning of my story:

My lord, the Duke of Cornwall, has accepted Christ Jesus as his savior for a score of years. As his lady, I have a duty to pray as he does before our people, whatever I believe in my heart. My lord’s honor deserves no less.

How different things were when the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone commanded us to follow our hearts. No man took offense if his lady held a paramour in her arms before the Beltane fires, nor would a good woman try to keep her wedded lord on a short tether throughout life. I remember a time when love was not confined, but I was a little maid who barely understood it. I was simply Igraine then, and I was too merry to be wise.

Now I wait alone behind the thick stone walls of Castle Tintagel for news of my lord Cornwall, and of the King that I love beyond measure. They plan each other’s destruction, and I fear for them both.

I’ve written elsewhere about the challenges of writing this story. The editor to whom I sent it liked the style, but didn’t find the story sexy enough, even after I had revised it to give Igraine more, shall I say, physical ecstasy. Her emotional ambivalence (the King and the Duke are threatening to tear the kingdom apart over her – oh, for the love of all the saints!) seemed inherent in the original story. Whether this story will ever find a home remains to be seen. I might have to rewrite it as straight historical fiction, with much of the sex kept out of sight.

Since Annabeth was so flattering about The Flight of the Black Swan (set during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, and slightly beyond), I’ll introduce the narrator, Emily (represented in the audio version by a British actor, Catherine Carter). Here are her opening lines:

Almost the worst thing that can happen to a young lady is to be loved by her parents.

Consider it: attentive mothers and fathers do all in their power to protect their daughters from risk and notoriety—in short, from every experience which gives savor to life. Fortunately, I approached the age of majority with my most exciting memories of childhood intact.



The book is available in several formats from Amazon and from the publisher, Lethe.

I would love to read a sexually-explicit version of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights (written in the 1840s, but with much backstory set in the late 1700s). Since a certain British publisher has been soliciting raunchy versions of the “classics” for several years, I suspect that someone more qualified than I will write it before I could finish the necessary research. But then, there are quite a few intense female-female relationships in the fiction of that era that would benefit from a clearly lesbian interpretation. :)