Lisa Hilton

Fearful of the Wetlands?

Literary news this week suggests that when it comes to women writing about sex, reviewers are still reacting in the same way as Dr Johnson to his walking dog, surprised that it’s being done at all. So hats off to Charlotte Roche, who has managed to give both the Sunday Times and the Guardian the willies by cheerfully confessing to consuming pornography with her husband and starting her book Wetlands with a graphic discussion of hemorrhoids.

Male reviewers seem barely to have moved on from the mentality of the Chatterley trial: anything which disturbs or shocks them must be dismissed as pornography. Thus Rod Liddle (who presumably wouldn’t want his servants reading Wetlands) fulminates against dim feminist critics who interpret the ramblings of “cheapjack book sluts” as serious art. In the Standard, David Sexton slags off the offerings of Faye Weldon and Rachel Johnson in the short story volume In Bed With whilst claiming that a new edition of My Secret Life, the sexual memoir of a Victorian gentleman, reveals its author “Walter” to be a surprisingly modern writer.

If women are so bad at erotic writing, though, where are the male masters of the genre? I had four English graduates to dinner last night and we couldn’t come up with anyone decent except Rochester and Cleland. De Sade only works if you don’t read him (the bad boy of Victorian poetry, Swinburne, upheld the Divine Marquis as “the apostle of perfection” until he arranged a reading of Justine and his guests fell about with laughter. Presumably, as an old Etonian, Algernon felt he knew a thing or two about flogging.)

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in