My first story

[Jen24]

Hey - just popped my Lit cherry - long time reader, first time writer ... blah, blah, blah. Would appreciate any feedback you're prepared to give. Anonymous fb has been occasionally useful but is predominantly either witlessly lecherous or very generic in its praise/condemnation. I'd be very grateful if any of you guys could find the time to give me a more specific critique.

Thanks.

http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=251573

I am currently working on the second instalment - I was greatly encouraged by the 4.49 rating, though was much happier when it had 4.50 and a little 'H' next to it. Obviously, anyone who felt like it could click on the five rating and just bump it up that crucial 100th of a percentile. That would be good. Love to all and reciprocity (with regards to reading and constructive criticism, not rigging the vote) where requested.

Jen

 

[Darkniciad]

Your story is an interesting angle and was a good read. There was one thing that threw me off a bit, and I sent that via private feedback. It may just be a personal thing that wouldn't have the same effect on anyone else.

Like I noted in my feedback, certainly continue on with this series, because it is an interesting concept that has a lot of potential.

 

[Jen24]

Thanks

Thanks for your quick reply, and for the kind words. I hope that your criticism will be answered by a passage I've just written for the next instalment - I'm rather proud of it, if I can say so without sounding smug or hubristic.

All my loving,

Jen

(And just because of that sign-off, I'm going to have the Beatles going around my head for the rest of the night. "All my loving / I will send to yooooouuu! / All my loving / Darling I'll be true!")

 

[kbate]

The final passage in which, I believe, it is not unlikely that thoust hath chanced further from period then is meet.

Otherwise, well written, minor punctuation errors in a few places and one or two phrases which could be redone for better flow and perhaps accuracy. The capitalisation is interesting and refreshing in that it was held throughout the story.

Whilst, calling the female sexual apparati - flowers, and perhaps everything other than female sexual organs, the last few paragraphs used - tits, nipple, orgasm - and climax. I believe the ornamental terminology of the 'story' would have been a little more proper in keeping in line with the previous paragraphs.

Overall, I say well done, creative and different. I do not feel badly for having returned this to red H status - if indeed my vote was causative of such.

 

[apoet43987]

Great Story..right down my alley!

Hey - just popped my Lit cherry - long time reader, first time writer ... blah, blah, blah. Would appreciate any feedback you're prepared to give. Anonymous fb has been occasionally useful but is predominantly either witlessly lecherous or very generic in its praise/condemnation. I'd be very grateful if any of you guys could find the time to give me a more specific critique.

Thanks.

http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=251573

I am currently working on the second instalment - I was greatly encouraged by the 4.49 rating, though was much happier when it had 4.50 and a little 'H' next to it. Obviously, anyone who felt like it could click on the five rating and just bump it up that crucial 100th of a percentile. That would be good. Love to all and reciprocity (with regards to reading and constructive criticism, not rigging the vote) where requested.

Jen

Jen,

I am new to Literotica. I am a published author of two books, one with an agent in N>Y>, and working on a fourth. I find your style and story line most effective and I love the 19th. Century touch. I have found main line literature publishers shy away from erotica and I have a co-author/editor that deletes all my attempts at such. She say's, "not while my parents are alive"!. I have found men are truely from Mars and have no idea what a woman wants in the love making department. I hope to find my feminine side by reading worthwhile pieces like yours. Congrats on this write and keep writing I cannot wait to see your second! LUV POET

 

[Jen24]

Anachronistic use of language

The final passage in which, I believe, it is not unlikely that thoust hath chanced further from period then is meet.

...

Whilst, calling the female sexual apparati - flowers, and perhaps everything other than female sexual organs, the last few paragraphs used - tits, nipple, orgasm - and climax. I believe the ornamental terminology of the 'story' would have been a little more proper in keeping in line with the previous paragraphs.

Yeah - you have a point there. In my defence, I wanted to make my protagonist feel and sound like a modern woman trapped in an age of sexual troglodytes. I know that Fanny Hill always uses euphemisms and fine metaphors to describe sex acts and male and female genitalia, but that seemed a bit false to me. Why would a self confessed and unabashed 'Woman of Pleasure' shy away from calling a spade a spade, so to speak? According to legend, Cleland told James Boswell that he started writing the book in Bombay, partly as a dare to prove to a friend that it was possible to write of prostitution without using 'vulgar terms'. Also, I think that sexual liberation is dependant on freedom of sexual language; words create and subvert as well as describe, and to call the female pudenda "aromatick flowers" and anything but to the purpose is deleterious to our perception of 'female appariti' as organs of procreation and pleasure, and to some extent denies and eschews female sexuality itself. The 'True Tale of the Aristocracy' is there in part as a counterpoint to the more modern erotic style adopted by the heroine, who finds the wilful ornimentalism amusing and absurd and consciously turns from it when writing of her own sexuality.

When I began writing I decided that my rule of thumb with regards to language use would be simple - if a word or phrase existed in the period then the young lady would automatically know of it and be able to use it if it suited her. She is a sexual autodidact, who is able to appropriate ideas from a wide range of sources; she is widely read and it is even possible that she had a saucy maid with whom she would discuss sex, or a raucous circle of friends who would share there sexual experiences in discussion around the card table, while their menfolk smoked cigars and drank brandy. Since, of course, she is already unthinkable as a real historical person, it seems a bit of a fool's game to prohibit her from using any words that there is the remotest possibility that she might have overheard. While I might have betrayed the proper young lady as a fiction, I have tried to stay faithful to the period with regard to the language I used and the erotic sensibilities I invoked; the 'True Tale' is plausible as a contemporary illicit pornographic text.

Anyhow, I reasoned with myself, erotica ought to be a little fanciful and a little divorced from humdrum realities. In a real life journal, after all, she'd have just been writing about the weather and how much she was looking forward to the Such-and-such's Summer Ball: "The Twentieth of July - To-day I didn't masturbate again, because that would be a disgusting, immoral, unimaginable Thing to do. And, in any Case, I wouldn't know how to go about it. And I've never heard the Word 'masturbate'. The Weather continues fine and I'm thinking about going for a Picnic with Kitty ..."

If you're interested in word history - my Etymological Dictionary dates 'orgasm' (with regard to coitus) to 1802, and tit (meaning 'teat') to 890AD. 'Nipple' was used as early as 1538. 'Climax' (in the sexual sense), however, was not used until 1918 - so I slipped up there. Let's just say that she coined the word in that sense a century earlier and it just didn't catch on. The leap of meaning from the 1789 sense of "highest point, as reached by a gradual ascent" isn't so implausible made by a lusty young woman seeking an innovative way of describing her orgasm.

BTW: for anyone else considering writing a period piece I have found http://www.amatory-ink.co.uk/thesaurus/thesindex.htm to be an invaluable resource for those words and phrases for which a thesaurus and etymological dictionary just won't do.

Thanks for the kind comments and the crucial vote and I hope I haven't been too tedious. I'm just interested in language and its history.

 

[314p]

Dear Jen!
I saw this thread yesterday and bookmarked it, because I liked the idea of your story. Just now, I finally came to read it - and I loved it. I'm really looking forward to a sequel. What I'd really enjoy is if you'd develop the character of the young lady a little further. I think the story should keep eroticism as the main aspect, but I'd love to read a bit more, perhaps, of her family, of her dreams (some young guy she fancies and fantasizes about perhaps), of her life (slightly bored young lady from a wealthy house?)... well you get the idea.
Thanks so far for this great idea

See you, 314p

 

[Worker11811]

It is good to see that you are studying up on your language.

I read your story and thought it was good but for the difficulties of writing in the Victorian voice. But, now, I see that you are going to remedy that problem.

Send up a flare when your next installment hits the boards!

 

[Jen24]

Victoriana

I read your story and thought it was good but for the difficulties of writing in the Victorian voice.

Thanks for the criticism, but I feel I must point out that I wasn't trying to write in the 'Victorian Voice'. In the 'public comments' section you suggest that I read Dickens to hone my knowledge of the era and to improve the linguistic elements of the story. I wish that I could write like Dickens, and certainly would do so if I thought I could pull it off. However, in this instance, I don't think that the anaemic, weedy pseudo-Dickensian authorial voice I could muster would be appropriate for the character, and would be inappropriate for reasons that give the lie to the notion of a homogeneous voice that belongs to the Victorian era. Dickens writes with an infectious joie d'ecrire; as readers we smile and gasp at his linguistic acrobatics and at his sheer delightful verbocity. It is an entirely different experience to, say, reading the prose of Thackeray or of Henry James.

Dickens's voice is impudent, indignant and magnanimous by turns, but, crucially, it is always very, very male. Even (and especially) when he is writing as Esther Summerson in 'Bleak House'. For a feminine perspective on the age of Victoria - of Empire and of dark satanic mills - we must turn to the Brontes, to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to Elizabeth Gaskell and to George Eliot. And even these women did not write with one voice. We need only compare Emily Bronte's girlish fantasy of the dark, brooding, powerful Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights) to George Eliot's Edward Casaubon (Middlemarch) to see that authorial responses to the age, and to the ideas of masculinity and femininity, were wildly at variance with one another. Indeed, the great age of the novel was an age of multivocality.

All that is by the bye, since I dated the diary to the early nineteenth century - specifically the 1810s. Dickens would not begin serialising 'The Pickwick Papers' until 1836 and Victoria herself would not take the throne until 1837. The diary is Georgian and is thus contemporaneous (more or less) with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. This wrangling over dates may seem pernickity, but, in fact, it makes a great deal of difference: in 1810, while the Industrial Revolution was well underway, it had not yet reached the dizzying rate of expansion witnessed under the auspices of Queen Victoria; the British were at war with Napoleon's Europe; the general population were entirely disenfranchised; and, most crucially of all, there were no trains. Later authors were ambivalent about the railways (the younger Paul Dombey is run over by a train in Dickens' 'Dombey and Son'), but their impact was immense and undeniable. Everywhere was suddenly very much closer to everywhere else, and, so, people were more mobile and, consequently, became more cosmopolitan and more free.

And we still have to take into account the enormous sea change in philosophy and religion that took place later in the Nineteenth Century. The discovery of dinosaurs (where were they in 'Genesis'?) had already called into question the received ideas about the Creation story, but that was as nothing compared to the catastrophic impact on religious ideology of the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' and also of the humanist philosophies of Strauss, Feuerbach and, in their wake, George Eliot. Paley's famous watchmaker analogy had allowed Christianity to coexist harmoniously with Newton's ordered Universe, but how it could continue to do so amidst the apparently chaotic system of Evolution was going to take some serious thought by serious men and women. Robert Browning's Bishop Blougram, thus, comes to symbolise a great collective crisis of faith. This exciting maelstrom of events and new ideas infinitely affected Victorian writers, whether they lent their voices to reaction and railed against the current condition of England (like Thomas Carlyle) or celebrated the new humanist sensibilities imported from Germany (like George Eliot). Our proper young lady has all this to look forward to in 1810, and is thus caught between the Romantic twilight of the Eighteenth Century and the mechanical onslaught of the Nineteenth.

In short, all of this has, of course, been a tremendous fudge and an attempt to conceal the fact that, in essence, you're absolutely right, and I should have taken more time and effort in making the language I used suit the time period and the character. Part Two is coming along nicely and should be ready very shortly.

 

[Worker11811]

In short, all of this has, of course, been a tremendous fudge and an attempt to conceal the fact that, in essence, you're absolutely right...

Yes, but you are also right. In fact, your points are better grounded than mine!

I chose Dickens because he was one of the most popular writers of the time, even if he came along later than your story's setting. Yes, he used a lot of lingustic acrobatics in his writing but that's not the thing that made me think of him.

"[Jacob] Marley was dead."

Those are the first three words of A Christmas Carol.
It was his use of the Time Shift that really made me think of him.
He (the narrator) knows what has already happened. He is relating it (to the reader) after the fact. A similar situation is occuring in your story. You are talking about the past and you are about to bring the reader into it as if it is happening, now.

I have to agree, 100%, that Dickens wrote from the male perspective and, in those days, men didn't even think about womens' orgasms. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't even think the wisdom of the times even considered that women COULD have orgasms. Here, you have a woman who is having orgasms... and enjoying them... in a time when it was forbidden for women to express sexual feelings. Isn't that what you're going for? Couldn't you use Dickens' naivety as a springboard from which to launch your "attack" on the sexual prohibitions of the period?

So, here I am, a man, reading about a woman having sexual pleasure in a time when women were thought of more as sexual property than as sexual partners. I'm thinking, "Woah! Paradigm shift!"

As I mentioned above, you are WAY ahead of me in your thought and research. I am only relating to you what I am thinking as I read the story. I think you are about to rhetorically mop the floor with me!

I'll be looking forward to the second installment!

 

[Jen24]

Female sexuality in the nineteenth century

I have to agree, 100%, that Dickens wrote from the male perspective and, in those days, men didn't even think about womens' orgasms. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't even think the wisdom of the times even considered that women COULD have orgasms. Here, you have a woman who is having orgasms... and enjoying them... in a time when it was forbidden for women to express sexual feelings.

When I first conceived of the idea of a Georgian journal, I began researching about sexuality and sexual mores in the period. I found this task more difficult than I had anticipated, because there is so little work readily available on the subject and what there is in mainstream literature is deeply encrypted. There is a wonderful moment in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' when the ascetic Dorothea, while tolerating the more flighty Celia's desire to try on her mother's jewels, unwittingly reveals her sublimation of her own latent sensuality and her St Theresa-like Puritanism is temporarily overthrown:

' "How very beautiful these gems are!" said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. "It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them." '

Her choice of words as much as her seduction by the trappings of femininity betray her. Why, we might ask, did she use such an evocative verb as 'penetrate'? You talk about a mindblowing 'paradigm shift' (as you call it) in my work, so you'll no doubt enjoy the fact that George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) is writing as a man writing about women trying to conform to essentially male ideas of asceticism and purity. In Dickens, women (or at least the heroines) are not really real, but are angels of domesticity and shining, virginal examples of chastity and good sense. Does Agnes Wickfield have a sex drive? Of course not, and a good deal of her and David Copperfield's contempt for Uriah Heep stems from his unbridled, unclean, ever so 'umble desire, which is not only to climb the social ladder but is also sexual in nature.

Even when Esther Summerson falls in love with Allen Woodcourt in 'Bleak House', sexuality is subsumed beneath her conception of his worthiness as a doctor and a man of compassion. Dorothea attempts a similar eschewal of carnality, and wilful promotion of purely aesthetic ideals. She marries Casaubon, because he seems Puritanical enough and she thinks his dry pursuit of his scholarly chimera subdues in him the erotic drives which she so fears in herself. However, when Will Ladislaw and Naumann see Dorothea leaning against a semiclad statue of Ariadne she is on her honeymoon and I don't think that it is too big a leap of inference to believe that she is fresh from the marriage bed, again she is contemplating the sunlight, and again, we might suppose, she is thinking of penetration:

"They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor."

The Ariadne becomes a counterpoint to her staid Puritanism, and a symbol, appropriated from a version of antiquity that Casaubon will never understand, of her sexual self. The ideals of the Renaissance, which Casaubon resolutely ignores in his book, are, then, superimposed over, and belie, the almost mediaeval creed of obeisance and godly parsimony to which Dorothea subscribes. This is the essence of her character, and of the emotional journey she undergoes in the novel, eventually leading her to Ladislaw. She could never have finished Casaubon's book, as he insists in his will in a posthumous attempt to repress her sexual, Renaissance, self.

You're absolutely right that the received wisdom of the nineteenth century did not accept female sexuality. Doctors and anatomists and religious and secular thinkers on the subject were, of course, male. Male promiscuity was winked at, but excessive desire in a woman was treated as a disease that needed to be treated. If a woman looked like she was enjoying sex too much she was entreated to seek medical help. The Victorians knew about female orgasms, then, but thought of them as symptoms of what they called 'hysteria' (hysteria meaning, of course, 'of the womb'). In the 1870s they came up with an ingenious cure for hysteria - you'll never guess what it was. Yes, that's right. It was the vibrator. Go figure.

I think the traditional idea of a woman lying back, thighs apart and thinking of England might be a little narrow and I find it very hard to believe that women didn't occasionally enjoy themselves between the sheets, or that sex in the nineteenth century was never adventurous. Fanny Hill is a 'woman of pleasure' and her first sexual encounter is with a woman, who uses her hand to masturbate. (there's a text online at http://eserver.org/fiction/fanny-hill/ if you're interested). John Cleland was obviously not a stranger to the idea that women were capable of experiencing sexual excitement. Further, it is not inconceivable that a woman might occasionally masturbate. What is doubtful is that she would talk or write about it.

Hope this was interesting.

 

[CervanServidor]

I think it should be kept in mind that the fictional narrator here is not a professional author of any kind and even states, at the very beginning, that this is her first attempt at keeping a written journal. Her very next statement is that she is writing in the expectation that she alone will read what she writes.

Once equipped with this knowledge, I don't expect the writing to be masterful. That isn't to say that writing as an amateur diarist from two centuries ago gives you the liberty to be as careless as you like, not at all: you still need to avoid anachronisms, for instance. And while it's true that I don't expect a handwritten diary from 181- to read like Jane Austen, it still needs to be written well enough to keep my interest as a completely impartial reader, and you certainly accomplished that.

I think you set yourself a difficult challenge and rose up to it nicely. I'm interested in reading more.

C.

 

[Jen24]

The Genuine Article!

I think it should be kept in mind that the fictional narrator here is not a professional author of any kind and even states, at the very beginning, that this is her first attempt at keeping a written journal.

I found this "Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia" (dated to 1782) if you're interested.

http://aleph.haifa.ac.il/F/?func=find-b&find_code=SYS&request=1013315

It's not quite as steamy as my fictional one, but still a fascinating read.

 

[janiexx]

bump...

 

[Jen24]

My Second Story

To anyone who's interested: I have at last finished the second part of the Journal and it has been accepted.

http://english.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=271077

I apologise for the formatting - my indentations must have been lost in transit. I'll bear that in mind next time I submit something. I hope it doesn't make it too difficult to read.

This second piece is a little more ambitious than the first (there's more than one character for a start) and, I think, it is a little better. Let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Jen xx

 

[BrandyWine69]

its really good!