First Bite of the Fruit – Emma Holt
The first erotic book I ever read was Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. I bought it at a used bookstore. I was 15 and worried that the sales clerk was going to tell me I wasn’t old enough to buy it. I knew this book had a scandalous reputation but I didn’t know why and I was determined to find out. When the clerk put the book in the bag, with nary a glance in my direction, I felt like I had just gotten away with buying cigarettes from the local convenience store (something a good girl like me never dreamt of doing). I got home and read the book from cover to cover in one day. From that day on I was hooked on reading the classics. Or so I told myself at the time because I was too repressed and consumed with Catholic guilt to admit that what I enjoyed most was reading about all the sex, sex, sex!
After that, I read every book in my library’s “classics” section. Including every woman’s favourite “erotic” novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. What can I say about Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet that has not already been said a thousand times? They are the sexiest couple in all of English literature and they never so much as kiss in the entire book. From this I learned about the importance of lust in erotica.
Ten years later, I read a sequel to Pride and Prejudice written by a woman named Linda Berdoll. It was called Mr Darcy Takes a Wife and it was my first real erotic book. If the original novel lacked sex, this one more than made up for it because Berdoll had Darcy and Lizzy screwing in almost every chapter and in almost every position (by vanilla standards). Although I would have made many editorial changes to the book, it took up permanent residence on my night table and was quickly dog-eared to tatters.
I ended up lending that book to a friend who returned it with a copy of her own favourite erotic book called Women on Top by Nancy Friday. This book honestly changed my life and triggered a string of events that ultimately led to the creation of Republica Press. It wasn’t the book as a whole that influenced me, just the introduction of the book that Nancy wrote where she outlined the importance of masturbation and sexual fantasies in the life of women. It was like she wrote this introduction just for me. I took her words to heart and set about dismantling the chains of repression and guilt that had anchored me down for so long. After the chains were off, it didn’t take long for me to become the open-minded and sexually liberated publisher of erotica that you all know today.
It was the same book for me, except I found it first on my high school English teacher’s bookshelf. I didn’t realize what it was until I actually read it. Talk about clueless…
I read bookshelves of books before Women on Top and perhaps libraries after it and I still remember the sense of fascination and self-discovery I found in Nancy Friday’s brilliant book. If I ever have a daughter, that’s one book I’m sure to ‘accidentally’ add to her bookshelf (once she reaches a certain age of course).