The Scandals of our Past
“Do you recant your views?” The dean glared at the student
who faced him across the desk.
“I stand by every word.” The boy, for at nineteen that’s all
he was, stared back, defiance in his dark eyes. “The world is ready for atheism
and men like me will help it spread.”
“Not in my college, at my university you won’t.” The dean
pointed a finger to the door. “There is no place for you here.”
The student shrugged and strode out. He didn’t look back; he
made no plea for clemency. Percy Bysshe Shelley had taken the first steps on a
road that even one hundred and ninety eight years later in a far more hardened
world, is scandalous.
Within four months he had eloped to
Scotland with Harriet, a sixteen year old friend of his sister, not because he
loved her but because she loved him and threatened to kill herself because she
was so miserable at home.
Not surprisingly the marriage wasn’t entirely happy and
Shelley abandoned Harriet and fell in love with Mary Godwin, daughter of the
famous feminist and advocate of free love, Mary Wollstonecraft.
Mary Godwin had two half-sisters, Claire and Fanny. Claire
had a liaison with Lord Byron. Fanny
fell in love with Shelley. Honestly, I don’t know what he had going for him but
it must have been something pretty potent.
Shelley took Mary and Claire with him to Switzerland, where
Claire introduced them to Lord Byron. Fanny, in misery at being left at home,
killed herself.
In the meantime, Percy’s wife, pregnant now to another man
and mistakenly believing he’d left her, killed herself by drowning in the
Serpentine River in London.
So why am I telling you all this? Because just recently I
had a conversation with a conservative person who claimed that “The moral decay
of the twenty-first century” was the forerunner of all sorts of doom and gloom.
“Nothing good can come of this,” the woman claimed. Apparently I, and all the
erotic romance writers of my ilk were at least partially responsible for all
the ills of the world.
I have a few objections to this.
First of all, we didn’t invent sex, we didn’t invent
different ways of living or scandalous lifestyles.
BDSM has been around a long time. Open marriages are not
new. As many of you know, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries particularly,
morality was seen as a middle class virtue. Different rules applied in the
upper classes. Appearances mattered far more than behaviours. If you could keep
it quiet, you could do what you liked. People like the Godwins, Wollstonecrafts
and Shelleys weren’t necessarily behaving all that differently to many others
in society, they were just more open about it. Living their lives, not in
defiance of the ways other people of the aristocracy behaved, but in defiance
of their hypocrisy.
I see the same criticisms being levelled today at people who
want to live in situations that differ from the majority of people. There is
the obvious, and hopefully diminishing, rejection of homosexuality. It has
always existed, but we should reject the hypocrisy that makes us have to hide
it or to deny its existence.
Whether it’s BDSM, slave/master, polyamory or any one of a
myriad of arrangements that are possible between consenting adults, this is not
new. We’re just finally being honest and admitting it happens, it has always
happened. The more progressive amongst us realise that one person’s
relationship need not diminish or impact on another’s.
So that’s my first objection. None of this is a twenty-first
century problem, if it’s a problem at all.
My second objection is against the assertion that nothing
good can come of this.
Mary Godwin, Percy’s sixteen-year-old wild child lover became
Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein,
an recognised part of the literary canon. It has inspired hundreds of writers,
poets and film makers with its exploration of the relationship between man and
creator and what it means to be human.
The Shelleys and their friends rejected conventionality, but
embraced creativity. Percy Shelley wrote poetry, as did Byron.
Great minds are not
always bound by the rules of others The artist as radical became a pretty
well-established concept.
So what has this to do with me? And how did I get into the
argument with my conservative critic in the first place?
I wrote two historical, ménage novellas - The Gardener’s Sins and a Boudoir for Three. My critic mailed me
with a complaint - such an arrangement would not have happened in the time
period I wrote about.
My response? “Rubbish.”
It happened. And the Shelleys prove it. Like all fiction
writers I write, not the truth, but a truth. I explore aspects of human
nature and while monogamy and one-on-one relationships are certainly touted as
the norm, there have always been exceptions and in the case of monogamy, the
exceptions are more numerous that we often admit.
So if I want to write historical ménage - I will; secure in
the knowledge that what I’m writing probably isn’t even half as scandalous as
what actually happened.
Extract From A Boudoir for Three
www.total-e-bound.com
The
blood-red wine splashed a little, but Christophe’s hand steadied hers and
lifted the heavy crystal to her mouth. She took a sip, then a large swallow,
needing the added courage. One more gulp and the glass emptied and she held it
out for more. A smile briefly curved Armand’s lips and he tilted the bottle.
The second
glass disappeared almost as quickly. Angelique’s head felt light but her limbs
grew heavy. Christophe’s face, surprisingly close, seemed soft around the
edges. “More wine,” she murmured.
Christophe
took a sip of his own wine and touched his mouth to hers. She gasped. The
instant her mouth flew open, wine, warmed from Christophe’s mouth, trickled in.
Her eyes widened. Astonishment held her motionless, then her throat moved and
swallowed. Warmth spread throughout her body pooling in hot dampness at the
juncture of her thighs.
Without
raising his lips from hers, Christophe pushed her back against the padded
side-rest of the couch. He lifted her legs and draped them over his thighs.
Hands— Armand’s, her dazed mind assumed—unlaced her shoes and slipped them from
her feet. She felt strong fingers caress her arches, then slide upwards,
lingering briefly at the backs of her knees before inserting themselves under
the tied ribbons to deftly slide her stockings down.
Her ruffled
skirt and petticoats were pushed up and moist kisses pressed on the, as yet,
untouched skin of her thighs. Again she gasped and Christophe’s tongue,
flavoured with wine and some sweet musky essence of his own, thrust into her
mouth.
Armand,
kneeling beside the couch continued his exploration, sliding upwards, his teeth
taking small, devastating little bites, until he came to the slit in her silk
draws. He probed into the gap. Angelique’s hips surged involuntarily upwards,
and Armand’s tongue made a long, leisured journey between her wet, pleated
folds.
Christophe
broke the connection of their mouths to turn his head to watch. His breath
rushed in and out, the rise and fall making Angelique aware of the hard rod
pressed against her hip where he leaned over her. When she had been forced to
feel the Marquis D’Arly’s cock, revulsion had made her snatch her hand away.
Now she lifted one heavy arm and delved into the tiny space between herself and
Christophe. She curled her fingers around the rigid cylinder and Christophe’s
shuddering breath hitched and restarted with the force of a bellows.
At this
sign of her power, a small delicate flower of desire began to unfurl. The hot
rasp of Armand’s tongue shocked her to the depths of her soul, but she didn’t
want him to stop. Tendrils of excitement wound deep into her brain.
Armand
found a hard point she had not even known existed and flicked it with his
tongue. Her limbs melted, her thighs dropped apart and pleasure flooded her. He
flicked again, over and over with a rapid pulsing rhythm, drawing her tighter
and tighter.
Christophe’s
hands rubbed her nipples through the dress and his tongue continued its sensual
exploration of her mouth. The world shrank to nothing more than this couch and
the hot, hard bodies of the two men caressing her into a state of abandon.
Suddenly
with the force of embers exploding into red hot shards in the fire, the tension
snapped, burning through blood and bone and skin, leaving her gasping, shaken
and quivering, seared with pleasure in a way she had never imagined. A misty
cloud blurred her vision, and when it cleared she saw Armand nod, his chin and
lips glistening, a measuring look in his eyes, as if confirming something to
himself.
“Is that
it?” she asked. “I am no longer a virgin?” It was easier and more enjoyable
than she had been led to believe.
