Fiction

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. Caroline is the story of an extraordinary woman - beautiful, strong and mischievous. Putting her looks and wit to good use, the young Caroline seduces her friend Harry and his sister Adelaide. Once married to Harry, and living comfortably with him and Adelaide, Caroline enlarges and enlivens their menage by creating an "academy" for young - and not so young - women requiring in initiation into the rites of love...

It was my privilege, many years ago, to make the acquaintance of the obscure literary hermit, whose talk I have tried to reproduce in the pages that follow.

One night a year or so ago I was the guest of a famous literary society. This society, or club, it is well known, believes in celebrating literature-and all sorts of other things-in a thoroughly agreeable and human fashion. It meets not in any gloomy hall or lecture room, it has no gritty apparatus of blackboard, chalk, and bleared water-bottle.

It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in literature.

Dreams, magic terrors, spells of mighty power, Witches, and ghosts who rove at midnight hour. The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian.--The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany; and I have been told that the ruins of the Castle of Lauenstein, which She is supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia.--The Water-King, from the third to the twelfth stanza, is the fragment of an original Danish Ballad--And Belerma and Durandarte is translated from some stanzas to be found in a collection of old Spanish poetry, which contains also the popular song of Gayferos and Melesindra, mentioned in Don Quixote.--I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not, many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious.

The principal character of the novel which the reader is about to have under his eyes is a woman, a courtesan of antiquity; but let him take heart of grace: she will not be converted in the end. She will be loved neither by a saint, nor by a prophet, nor by a god. In the literature of to-day this is a novelty.