Augustus and Lady Maude (Victorian Library)

This is one of the harder to find members of the substantial collection of late Victorian erotic novels that were re-issued by Grove Press in the mid 1980s. It is characteristic, in that it has the appearance of being patched together from different sources, and in this case, whilst the first two of its three sections are reasonably consistent, the third differs. The earlier parts are a correspondence between the worldly wise Lady Maude, having a voyeuristic holiday in Venice, and her innocent, lovelorn cousin Augustus left behind in England and lusting futilely. The objects of his attraction are girls of lower class who have a tendency to do their chores wearing tight denim clothing as they kneel provocatively on the floor. Lady Maude show more uses her contacts to forcibly deprive Augustus of his fantasy objects, and in the third part we witness his conversion to the joys of punitive dominance of the lower class females while being married respectably. Some of the named characters in this last section will be familiar to devotees of the genre, including the ubiquitous Noreen. A classic. show less