Kinky dull

The cover of my copy of Aphra Behn's 17th-century meditation on the nature of disguising one's desire for booty in the rhetoric of transcendent love doesn't look like the one pictured here. I've been reading a boring old Penguin Classics version of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which has been blinding me with its 7-point font and explosive combination of the melodramatic and the pornographic.

This early epistolary novel is surprisingly lurid and racy. Actually, having read Behn's Oroonoko (perhaps the first early English book to make African slaves sexual objects in their owners' eyes (*shudder*)), maybe I'm not surprised. But it certainly differs from the stuff I know best (written about 100-60 previous to this) for Behn uses all the romantic language that characterizes Renaissance Comedy and Romance but turns it up to 11; but then she totally takes the piss out of it by constantly revealing what all that highfalutin language is really about: sex, sex, and more sex.

There were some good moments (see below) but overall I can't say I really liked this one. As I've indicated, I read Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister for my thesis conclusion and so much faster and with a mind less given to enjoyment than usual. Also, did I mention the 7-point font? Do you think someone publishes 17th-century literary porn in big print for the old fogies like me whose eyesight is failing? How about Braille?

Of the few really gratifying moments in this book, the following is the best. It occurs near the beginning of the story while the titular main characters, Philander and Silvia, are still in raptures over one another. Philander is trying to get into Silvia's well-guarded chamber through the garden when he encounters her father out trying to getting into the knickers of Melinda, one of Silvia's ladies. Melinda hasn't shown up for the assignation and Philander is disguised as a woman to try to get to Silvia's chamber; he and Silvia's lecherous old dad invariably meet in the dark garden and the latter, thinking Philander is Melinda, makes this charming play for her love:

"Come, come Melinda, why all this foolish argument at this hour in this place, and after so much serious Courtship, believe me I'l be kind to thee for ever; with that he clapt fifty Guinnies in a Purse into one hand, and something else that shall be nameless into the other, presents that had both been worth Melinda's acceptance..." (p.61).

I say! How rude! But so funny. I thought, because this little vignette (worthy as it is of the best 1970s porn scripts featuring the incomparable Ron Jeremy ("Plumber? I didn't call a plumber!") occurred at the beginning of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister that I was being promised a hilarious and kinky read. No. This was the book's only real instance of hilarity and it's amazing how boring kink gets when it revolves primarily around men swooning at women's feet and women drawing men in with their killing eyes (with lots of sex happening thereabouts).

(No, you pervert, there were no glowing bosoms in this book - glowing bosoms are the hallmark of the late 18th-century Gothic novel! Go, get your Radcliffe on!)