Beatrice

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Beatrice is the story of a young girl who is initiated into the pleasures and pains of the flesh by an older woman who is both uninhibitedly liberal and the strictest of disciplinarians, to both of which instincts she gives what we can only call full rein. At first beaten into submission, her ingénue pupil then submits willingly to being beaten into pleasure. She narrates the story of her initiation in explicit, not to say painful, not to say exquisite, detail in the course of which her growing enthusiasm for a variety of erotic pleasures, including heterosexual ones, is whipped up.

Although Beatrice purports to be a Victorian memoir, and one famous edition has a scholarly introduction on its 19th Century origins, in fact it is a production of the 1960s. Our editors, after much discussion, have included it as a classic of its genre. Its real author, sadly, hides the light of his name under the bushel of Anonymous. Or, from internal evidence, should it be her bush under which she hides her name?

I strode to the doors and opened them. There stood Katherine, wriggling in the stronger embrace of my aunt. Between us we hustled her within and closed the doors anew upon the little ceremony I intended.
    "Oh how dare you!" Katherine blustered, her colour rising high at the sight of her manservant whose upquivering tool awaited her pleasure. There was no need to remove her dress. It hoisted cleanly and swiftly enough again to her hips. While Aunt Maude held her wrists, I smacked her bottom hard, causing her hips to jolt and bringing a light sheen of tears into her eyes.

The Illustrator: Lynn Paula Russell

The Scarlet Library edition includes 12 newly commissioned illustrations, drawn with almost documentary realism in monochrome pencil by Lynn Paula Russell. She has illustrated many erotic books, including personal memoirs and a laceratingly graphic L'Histoire d'O. The authenticity of detail she brings to Beatrice could come only from her own experience of and interest in the sado-masochistic, which she has lived on either side of the hyphen.