Rosie Romanes claims to have found 10 steamy stories that never made it to press from the likes of Emma, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo, Pride and Prejudice, and more for her PHD Thesis, “Lost Lit”.
Her prim and proper supervising professor, Constance Westaway, doesn’t believe a single, smutty word of it.
Are these Labours of Lust just an elaborate ruse by Rosie to cheat her way through a degree? Or did these uncovered gems really go unnoticed, hidden in archives for centuries?
Rosie Romanes claims to have found 10 steamy stories that never made it to press from the likes of Emma, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo, Pride and Prejudice, and more for her PHD Thesis, “Lost Lit”.
Her prim and proper supervising professor, Constance Westaway, doesn’t believe a single, smutty word of it.
Are these Labours of Lust just an elaborate ruse by Rosie to cheat her way through a degree? Or did these uncovered gems really go unnoticed, hidden in archives for centuries?
Taryn de Meillon –
I read the Advance Review Copy for this title, provided by Inkspot Publishing. This was such a fun and quick read – I’ll definitely use it as a future gift idea for my bookish friends. The storyline is lighthearted, the missing sex scenes that Rosie submits were un-put-down-able, and the illustrations were a fantastic embellishment to top them off!
This is quite the 180 from Catherine Evans, but her humour and detail-orientation from her other writings definitely come through.
Rosemary Johnson –
Rosie is writing a PhD thesis on ‘Lost Literature’, in other words, sex scenes which, she claims, were removed from the text of some well-known classic novels, including Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch. These are included as attachments to emails to her PhD supervisor, Constance, who is sceptical, and, indeed, she accuses Rosie of writing the ‘Lost Literature’ herself, albeit much in the style of the original writer. Well, did she or didn’t she? Could these excerpts possibly be genuine? This is what keeps the reader reading.
Be prepared for an unexpected twist at the end. (Poor Rosie.)
GP Hyde –
This novel brings an update to the epistolatory novel by showing a series of email exchanges between PhD student Rosie Romanes and her supervisor, Constance Westaway. Another campus novel? Well yes, but with a difference.
Rosie is researching ‘Lost Literature’ and the stories that Rosie unearths are excised passages considered at the time to be outrageously specific in the erotic activities depicted. Rosie herself is also too hot to handle as she blatantly skips tutorials and deadlines, preferring to submit her discoveries of this lost erotica to the hapless Constance.
This makes for a very entertaining read – great fun for the reader and great fun for the author to have created these effortless pastiches of the great and the good of 18th and 19th century literature: Jane Austen, Dumas, de Cervantes, Henry James, Victor Hugo, Trollop, George Eliot and Emily Bronte. But as the author says in her Acknowledgements, these are not parodies but homages to works much loved.
However, although these ‘lost scenes’ are compelling, the character of Rosie seems completely misjudged. She is outrageously cheeky, impudent and irreverent. As depicted, Rosie might be convincing in a badly run and ill-disciplined 6th form college but as a PhD student, it simply didn’t convince.
This is a brilliantly conceived novel which manages to be both erudite and entertaining. If you have any interest in 18th and 19th century literature, this is a must-read.