Mature
The Romance of Lust
A Confessional Memoir of Forbidden Desire, Victorian Sexuality, and Underground Print CultureBy Anonymous
Length19h 15m
About this audiobook
The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences is a four-volume Victorian erotic novel first issued anonymously in the 1870s. Presented through the recollections of its young protagonist, Charlie Roberts, it traces a series of sexual initiations and encounters that steadily expand beyond the boundaries of respectable domestic life. Its prose combines the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the confessional memoir, and the pseudo-medical discourse of nineteenth-century sexology, producing a revealing tension between narrative instruction and sensational fantasy. The work's frank treatment of desire, secrecy, taboo, and sexual experimentation places it within the clandestine literature of Victorian publishing while also exposing the era's anxieties about education, morality, and bodily knowledge. The author remains unidentified, a fact that is itself significant to the book's cultural history. Published in an underground market associated with London bookseller William Dugdale, the novel emerged when obscenity laws, commercial curiosity, and expanding print circulation shaped the production of erotic literature. Its anonymous authorship may reflect both legal danger and the conventions of pornography, which often subordinated literary identity to readerly appetite. Although various attributions have been proposed, none is conclusive; the text is therefore best understood as a product of its publishing milieu rather than securely attached to a known biography. Readers interested in Victorian culture, the history of sexuality, and marginal forms of the novel will find The Romance of Lust an important, if challenging, document. It rewards critical attention to its narrative strategies and historical contradictions, especially the ways it transforms forbidden material into an apparently educational story. Approached with scholarly distance, it illuminates the intimate relationship between censorship, commerce, and literary invention.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★ 3.4 (1.7K)
Includes Goodreads, Amazon, LibraryThing, StoryGraph
GenreRomance
Length19 hrs 15 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 24, 2021
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Scarlet Plague (Dystopian Novel) (Annotated)
7VOLUME III. (pt. 1)
2The Romance of Lust
8VOLUME III. (pt. 2)
3VOLUME I. (pt. 1)
9VOLUME III. (pt. 3)
4VOLUME I. (pt. 2)
10VOLUME IV. (pt. 1)
5VOLUME II (pt. 1)
11VOLUME IV. (pt. 2)
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6VOLUME II (pt. 2)
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