Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (24 page)

And there the manuscript ends. To this date my daughter’s whereabouts are unknown. My grandson’s pushchair was also found by the cliff, but no bodies were ever recovered.

Author’s Note
,

You may be wondering why I originally chose to write this book anonymously. It’s the only way I could write it: as a mother, a daughter, and most of all, a wife.

I loved the idea of diving under the surface and exploring a woman’s secret life. All the better if she was a seemingly good, contented wife. I had fully intended to put my name to the book when I began it, but soon found I was censoring myself. Afraid of the reactions of people close to me, afraid of hurting them, and not quite having the courage to expose myself.

It’s hard, in a relationship, to be completely honest: to show your partner your secret self. Vita Sackville-West described herself as an iceberg, and said her husband could only see what was above the water’s surface. She speculated it was the reason their marriage worked. What relationship can survive the harshness of absolute candour?

That doesn’t mean this book is a memoir; it’s many things to me, fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and fact, a quilt that is pieced together not only from my own stories but those of my friends.

And then there was the book that inspired my own: the mysterious seventeenth-century text called
Woemans Worth.
Its author chose anonymity and, in responding, I wanted to also. I was writing some four hundred years after its author, basking in the freedoms of so many feminist advances, and yet, bizarrely, I felt something of the same constraints as I’m sure she did when it came to writing truthfully about what women want. That fascinated me.

So once I accepted the idea of keeping my identity to myself, everything clicked. I was suddenly like a woman on a foreign beach who’s confident she doesn’t know a soul and parades her body joyously, without worrying what anyone thinks of her. I had opened a door to a reckless, exhilarating new world and could say whatever I wanted. All those secret things a woman may think but never talk about, and no one would ever know it was me.

Dear reader, I would like you to understand something of the spirit of secrecy in which this book had to be written. – ‘I would like you to understand why I might feel uncomfortable putting my name to this work, even though I felt compelled to write it and I’m so glad I did. One reader wrote, ‘I would never have had the courage to have said what you did – it’s so raw, so open. You’re very brave.’ I laughed when I received this for, of course, I would never have had the courage to say what I did either if I’d thought my name would be attached to it.

The Bride Stripped Bare
is about a woman finding her voice. I’m glad it is now out in the world, on its own, and perhaps – who knows – encouraging other women to find that voice within themselves.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge some books I used as I was working on
The Bride Stripped Bare.
There are two Victorian texts I found in the London Library, which provided my lesson headings: the Rev. J.P. Faunthorpe’s
Household Science: Readings in Necessary Knowledge for Women
, and Mary Scharlieb’s
A Woman’s Words to Women on the Care of their Health in England and India
, and of course, the intriguing, cheeky, anonymous text which inspired my book,
Woemans Worth
, otherwise known as
A Treatise proveinge by sundrie reasons that Woemen doe excell men
, a manuscript of which is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

N.J. Gemmell