Dear Lady Disdain

"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."