“Some years ago a magazine asked me if I would agree to be photographed naked. They were about to run a detailed interview on my lifes and times, and wanted, I suppose, to make the most of their centre spread. At first I was amused, then aghast, but I agreed. . . .In a lofty studio in London, West one I took off my clothes. . . the common image of of sex photography, or sex writing, or sex shows, is one of lustful enthusiasm. . .Playboy boss Hugh Heffner has said that pornography celebrates women. The truth, I think, is quite different. . .Linda Lovelace, infamous star of numerous porn films including Deep Throat, was first hypnotized and then learned self-hypnosis in order to cope with the various sex acts she was required to perform. In her books Ordeal and Out of Bondage, Lovelace talks a lot about being invisible. Her `keepers’ had no interest in treating her as a human being with a particular identity, and she soon learned that to assert that identity fired their sadism and increased her humiliation. The body was there, the woman inside disappeared. . . Erotica: An anthology of Women’s writing, seeks to return women to their bodies by offering a looking glass and not a distorting mirror.” – Jeanette Winterson in Forward to Erotica : An Anthology of Women’s Writing
Erotica : An Anthology of Women’s writing is a classic and dignified anthology of erotica written by women from a feminine perspective. Re-defining the erotic sensibilities of women in terms of female rather than male experience is the speciality of this superb anthology. In the words of Luce Irigaray, “Thus , for example, woman’s autoeroticism is very different from man’s. He needs an instrument in order to touch himself : his hand, a woman’s genitals, language. .But a woman touches herself by and within herself directly, without mediation, and before any distinction between activity and passivity is possible a woman `touches herself’ constantly without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. . .Indeed, woman’s pleasure does not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to substitute itself for the pleasure of the clitoral caress. Both contribute irreplaceably to woman’s pleasure but they are only two caresses among the many to do so. Caressing the breasts, touching the vulva, opening the lips, gently stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, lightly messaging the cervix, etc evoke a few of the most specifically female pleasures.” The depth of this anthology is immense. It includes the works of some of the greatest literateurs of the antiquity like Sappho(7th century B.C.) to great poets and writers of modern times like Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood,Jeanette Winterson, Colette, Anais Nin, Jean Rhys, George Eliot, Christina Rosetti, Angela carter, Monique Wittig, Marina Tsvetayeva,, Adrienne Rich etc.. The range of the collection is also very wide, which is clear from its compartments like Invitations, Romance, Desire, Fantasy, Taboo, Danger, Frustration, Voyeurism, Consumption, Consummation, Loving self etc. The most respectable names of the literary world linked with the anthology distinguishes it from similar works. A towering personality like Margaret Reynolds, the eminent scholar and author of the Sappho Companion, can only produce a work of such magnificence.
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