Tag Archives: Victorian

Personal Reflection: On Beauty, Reading, and Writing

Posted on by

This week’s blog post begins with an exhortation from the delightful Mandy B., The Well-Read Wife:

I see this advice to writers a lot. I see it coming from readers, bloggers, and other writers. It does seem to be fairly common in the romance genre, both textual and visual, to have beautiful heroes and heroines and I am terribly guilty of it, but for my own personal reasons. Continue reading →

Victorian Sex: My Secret Life (Part 2)

Posted on by

Who was Walter?

In order to answer this question, we need to establish if there is indeed a question here to answer.

Uh, what?

Well, is My Secret Life an autobiography or a work of fiction? If it is a work of fiction, then trying to ascertain who Walter was is moot. If it is autobiographical, then someone (or perhaps several someones) wrote it, and, the question then becomes, who? Continue reading →

Works in Progress: Confessions

Posted on by

I thought about making a separate Works in Progress page, but I like the idea of a blog post so I can update my progress occasionally and followers can, well, follow along. Plus, I’ve got some confessions about one of those WIPs… Continue reading →

Victorian Sex: My Secret Life (Part 1)

Posted on by

This post is not about my secret life, it’s about the infamous tome published c. 1890, authored by a man known only as Walter. The book, My Secret Life, was written as a memoir and is often considered a work of Victorian erotica, which it most certainly is not. It is unabashedly an impressive work of pornography. Unlike a more famous erotic memoir, John Cleland‘s Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure, aka, Fanny Hill which has a plot and a resolution (actually a happy ending), My Secret Life is more a series of vignettes. It does have the elements of fiction: There are running characters; there is development of Walter’s psyche; there is a progression of time. But it lacks any plot. Weighing in between 790 and 1173 pages (depending on the version; this one is cited), My Secret Life is the epitome of the rambling sexual memoir, a prime example of that particular style of Victorian porn. Continue reading →