I just finished this book. I know it has a reputation for being erotic, but glancing at the cheesy paperback image on the cover, I had my doubts. How erotic can people have been in the 1920s when this was published anyway? Well apparently VERY! This book, with the exception of a few anachronistic comments, reads like a 21st century novel. There's really not much to the plot - talk, talk, sex, talk about sex, argue about sex, more sex, some fretting, then more sex. However, it's not some tawdry Harlequin. (Not that I, ahem, have ever read one. Oh, okay fine, I have! But I was about 13!) It's quite an exquisitely crafted discussion about the meaning of sex and its importance in life.

I read in the introduction that the author wanted to discuss sex frankly in a climate that was rather repressed and saw it as an embarrassing necessity. It succeeds at being quite explicitly graphic, yet philosophical. It traces the sexual awakening of the wife of a WW1 veteran who is permanently paralysed from the waist down. Her husband, frozen, and in some way representing Victorian pre-war ideals, is the lodestone around this young woman's neck. Will she choose familial and societal obligations or her more primal desires? What's most striking is how the book portrays sex as a very natural act, and doesn't punish the heroine à la Madame Bovary for her adulterous ways. What's also interesting is that all those dirty words you know? They've existed since the '20s. Yeah, your grandparents knew them. Maybe even THEIR parents. Weird.