To be a masterpiece, a work has to distinguish itself in many ways. It can offer a deeper insight, a more vivid image or a more surprising turn. Or it can be unique, truly peerless in its style. Having distinguished themselves in these ways, the works in this volume represent the very best of the Victorian imagination. There's poetry and prose, narrative and instructional guide; there's fetish, queer, s/m and vanilla; there's bawdy, tender and daring. These stories cannot fail to arouse, stimulate and amaze with their delightful sexiness and bold originality.

"Why did the Victorians allow nude bathing at the seaside when a nude illustrations in a magazine could bring the full fury of the law down on the printers and publishers? Why was the Royal Academy filled with paintings of nude women when ballet dancers were considered immoral because they showed their legs? 'Tell me, pretty maiden' explores these fascinating and, to us, often ridiculous complexities. Ronald Pearsall, who has long been intrigued by this period, discusses the artists of the time and their work, and the public's reactions to them, with the help of some selections from contemporary criticism. His collection of postcards, photographs and paintings illustrates this area where prudery failed and middle-class morality stumbled, from artists as disparate as Burne-Jones and Leighton, and ranging from the nostalgic to the coy, the subtly erotic to the clinically accurate, the saucy to the decadent. This well-written and aptly illustrated book gives an intimate glimpse into the prejudices and morals of our immediate ancestors." -- dust jacket.

J. M. W. Turner, Britain's greatest and most revolutionary artist, has died. While reviewing the contents of Turner's vast artistic legacy for Britain's National Gallery, John Ruskin, Turner's greatest supporter, discovers a considerable body of previously unknown erotic sketches. Both shocked and outraged, Ruskin abruptly burns the materials he finds offensive. However, through betrayal and theft, some of the erotica has escaped the flames... William James Stillman, a young American artist and diplomat, pursues a dangerous quest across Britain, Europe, and the Eastern United States to save the remaining sketches. He is convinced that the surviving erotic studies are not only invaluable to British art history, but contain a secret clue to the master's celebrated body of public work. Unlocking this secret becomes an obsession that threatens to consume Stillman and blind him to his obligations to his friends, his family, and even to himself. Based on actual people and events, this thrilling work features not only Turner himself, but such luminary characters as Allegra Fullerton, the Rossetti brothers, other artists from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Britain's greatest swordsman and adventurer, Sir Richard Burton.

Lesbian erotica of the 1920s through the 1940s had a bold new cast to it. Unlike the tender and affectionate eroticism of the Victorian era with its naughty schoolgirls, convent antics and ladies-in-waiting, these 20th Century tales brought verisimilitude and fantasy together. While Radclyffe Hall was being prosecuted for obscenity for her depiction of "sapphics" and "inverts" in the classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, her friend Natalie Barney was riding naked through the streets of Paris on horseback with her lover, the poet Renee Vivienne and Anais Nin were penning lurid and lustful tales of very bad girls while yearning for Henry Miller's sensual wife, June.

What makes a woman 'bad' is commonly linked to certain 'qualities' or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting. In Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies, Gemma Commane critically explores the social, sexual and political significance of women who are labelled 'bad', sluts or dirty. Through a variety of case studies drawn from qualitative and original ethnographic research, she argues that 'Bad Girls' disrupt heterosexual normativity and contribute new embodied knowledge. From neo-burlesque, sex-positive and queer performance art, to explicit entertainment and areas of popular culture; Commane situates 'bad' women as sites of power, possibility and success. Through the combination of case studies (Ms T, Empress Stah and RubberDoll, Mouse and Doris La Trine), Gemma Commane offers a challenge to those who think that sexual, slutty, bad, and dirty women are not worth listening to. Significantly, she unpicks the issues generated by women who are complicit in the subjugation, policing and marginalization of 'other' women, both in popular culture and in sites of subcultural resistance.

Sir Charles, of a predilection given over too those quite younger than he, invites a bevy of virginal and bright young things to his substantial residence and grounds with the surest intention of debauching each eager and naive beauty. Under the guise of innocent games as 'hide-and-seek', 'blind-man's bluff', and the ever entertaining 'find the slipper', the old rake makes opportune of every moment to take the most lascivious liberties with them, both apart and a'la group, educating them in the ways of the gamahuche, tribade, and various positions of fornication, until all are truly awakened to the multiple pleasures of a Libertinage life. In letters to his previous loves, he describes in sumptuously graphic details the manner in which he seduces each of his wards, and the deeds they take great pleasure in partaking in. With a steady supply of inexperienced and willing young women from Mrs. J's orphanage to sate his libidinous desires, Sir Charles' virility will surely be put to the test. That's if his wife's lover as well as the sapphic tutor of one of his favorites don't put him to the sword. This classic gem of Victorian erotica, featuring some of the most titillating scenes that ever graced the pages of a like novel, and with some pistol brandishing brigands providing a dash of unexpected action, The New Epicurean, is a fine edition to any collection of the once forbidden.

"The Romance of Lust - A Classic Victorian Erotic Novel" is an 1873 erotic novel of anonymous authorship. It follows the exploits of Charlie, a virile and well-endowed young man with an apparently boundless appetite for sex. He chronicles his various sexual encounters involving his sisters Eliza and Mary, his governesses, and other various male and female friends. The narrative is saturated with taboo subjects, and it almost seems that none are omitted: orgies, masturbation, lesbianism, flagellation, fellatio, cunnilingus, gay sex, anal sex, and double penetration all appear at some point. An unparalleled and a wholly satisfying reading experience, "The Romance of Lust" is a classic Victorian erotic novel not to be missed by fans and collectors of the genre. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on the history of erotic literature.

A smart, provocative account of the erotic current running just beneath the surface of a stuffy and stifling Victorian London. At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day. As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies—the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes—to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet. In this stunning exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.

The Power of Mesmerism is erotic fiction. It tells about a young man who learned the power of mesmerism (natural magnetism to influence living beings) and decided to use this skill to fulfill erotic desires. As he gets successful with that, he starts to help other people (mostly his relatives) satisfy their lust as well. The story describes a wide range of sexual activities, including homosexual relations, flagellation, etc., and is closely reminiscent of the memoirs of Marquis De Sade.

This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.