Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover Book

Is this real Victorian erotica or not? The copy I read from Gutenberg is an 1890 imprint from St. Kitts. The British Library has an 1890 imprint from Brussels - an actual book, according to WorldCat. (However, the library website doesn't have it in their catalog, only a 1984 reprint.) It was reprinted in 1969 and has gained a wider audience with ebooks and publishers and dates get all hazy from there. I can't find a reference to it online as anything BUT an ebook. It doesn't seem to have cropped up on any site dedicated to hard copy Victorian pornography collections.

I guess it could be real, but I'm not thoroughly convinced. There is "real" Victorian erotica out there that are obvious fakes, including one long-forgotten title from Blue Moon Books that was supposedly written in the 1890s, only the story refers to reel-to-reel home movie projectors and Jeeps. So I err on the side of skepticism when it comes to some of this vintage erotica.

There are no dirty words in Laura Middleton like what often crops up in the other Victorian porn I've read: pego, quim, cunny, etc. as well as the four-letter ones we know oh so well. The shock value in this one is so muted that I started to doubt its authenticity. However, I did feel like I was reading Henry James' dense style so maybe the anonymous author was intentionally lampooning the style way back in the 1890s and it is, indeed, authentic. Or a very good mid-20th century imitator.

If the book is faux Victorian and written at a far later date, I still would give the author props for imitating the style so deftly. All those long-winded sentences with the multitudinous commas in all the correct places made it seem like I was reading a truly vintage book.

But after awhile such dense prose and unshocking word choice wore thin. This story has everything, from the heroine entertaining herself with a dildo, whipping, plenty of m/m stuff, a m/f/m incesty menage, oral and anal. Still, it ended up only an average read due to the dense inoffensiveness of it, with an extra star for the fascination factor.