Dear Lady Disdain

Name: Dear Lady Disdain
Author: Paula Marshall
ISBN: 0263143252

by Paula Marshall

The one I’m reading now is Dear Lady Disdain by Paula Marshall. It’s about a very, very wealthy bankeress who is seduced by an upper-class aristocrat, and they are rather like Beatrice and Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing , and they really fall in love as well as lust and it all ends happily ever after with the birth of a child. You can’t fall down on that, can you? Yes. I got the idea from a friend of mine, a great rabbi who told me he kept a whole box of forbidden literature underneath his bed. And I said: ‘What is it? Erotica?’ But it was just books with happy endings. And happy endings in a kind of Regency world that didn’t really exist. I always liked Jane Austen . No. Well, yes. But with chaps, and that’s a different matter altogether. First of all it’s a more complicated situation. The love has been real and I’ve been with my partner for 27 years in a faithful relationship, but you have to do much more adjustment. It’s a more difficult fit than a heterosexual one – socially, physically and psychologically. Men are competitive with each other and you’ve got two competitors. On the other hand, if you get through it, you are very strongly attached.

Recommended by

Rabbi Lionel Blue

"The one I’m reading now is Dear Lady Disdain by Paula Marshall. It’s about a very, very wealthy bankeress who is seduced by an upper-class aristocrat, and they are rather like Beatrice and Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing , and they really fall in love as well as lust and it all ends happily ever after with the birth of a child. You can’t fall down on that, can you? Yes. I got the idea from a friend of mine, a great rabbi who told me he kept a whole box of forbidden literature underneath his bed. And I said: ‘What is it? Erotica?’ But it was just books with happy endings. And happy endings in a kind of Regency world that didn’t really exist. I always liked Jane Austen . No. Well, yes. But with chaps, and that’s a different matter altogether. First of all it’s a more complicated situation. The love has been real and I’ve been with my partner for 27 years in a faithful relationship, but you have to do much more adjustment. It’s a more difficult fit than a heterosexual one – socially, physically and psychologically. Men are competitive with each other and you’ve got two competitors. On the other hand, if you get through it, you are very strongly attached."

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