Emily

Though the topics and themes are much the same as American erotica, the British use of English adds a luster to the stories, missing from the vulgar used in America. A young Emily is forced to marry the foppish son of a wealthy landowner to supposedly save her parents from the poorhouse. Emily, as a product of her times, certainly does not seem surprised by the fact that the young girls in her realm are the sexual targets for both family and non family members alike. After learning what she likes, Emily goes out of her way to find 'distractions'

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Excerpt:

'You will marry soon', was often said to me at twenty, and so often that I began to think of marriage as a far-off country, or rather an island whereon the inhabitants would be vaguely strange to me - having other manners, other attitudes - and where mirrors (in rooms that I had not visited but knew I must encounter) would reflect different images of me to those with which I was the more familiar. Sometimes I thought of marriage as a chair, a high chair, high with a straight back, and having ornaments of pearls and plumes, and having crested arms, in which I would forever sit.

Such curious fancies often took me then, and still possess me of many other things, of customs, attitudes, and fancies eaten as one eats a small, sweet cake. When I was young, was very young, in my eleventh year and still in bud, an old lady stopped me close by Shotter's Wood into which a meadow rises and disappears as if it had loped forward in a long, green wave and then had changed its mind, not wishing to disturb the saplings as they were then, long ago. 'Are there dreams to be had here, dear, my little dear?' she asked of me.

'Yes', I said - said 'Yes' in my simplicity, for I knew there were dreams in the myriad leaves, wound in among the stunted hedges, surging in the loam that flows like a dark sea among the aspens and the elder trees. My aunt came hastening to me then, bidding a neighbour adieu, her footsteps purposeful along the lane. I felt her frown fall like a small cloud on my back.

'What is it that you want?', she asked the old lady who mumbled something, turned, and went the way that she had come.

I felt a sadness for her - black dress fading into horrid grey, perhaps a penny only in her purse.

'There are dreams to be had here, Aunty, are there not?', I asked.

'What nonsense! Is that what she told you, pray? Downcast are those who live in dreams, for few are ever realised. Examine your mind for practicalities. Absorb your five-times table, Emily.'

I did not, nor have done so since. Tradesmen count money; I do not. I count the pearls of precious moments, yes, small drops of sunlight that I keep among dried shells, old coins and broken necklaces. I count the kisses, quick, impassioned, I have known. Such are not practicalities, but needs. Mama was not as my Aunt Mathilda was. When I spoke to her of dreams, she answered me in kind. Her lorgnettes would rise and she would peer at me with twinkling eyes. 'Absorb your dreams as earth absorbs the rain, and let them nourish you', Mama would say.