The Lady's Tutor (54 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTES

he first English translation of
The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh
Nefzaoui
was published in 1886 in a series of small
volumes.
They did not give credit to the
translator, who is, of course, Sir
Richard
Burton. Neither did the second edition, which combined
the series into a single book that was released
later that same year.

It
is this second edition that I refer to and, indeed, quote from in
The Lady’s Tutor.
I took poetic license in the fact that my book
opens
up in February of 1886, with my hero presenting the second edition
to my heroine as a textbook for learning how
to give a man pleasure.
In actuality,
the second edition came out later that year. Also, in
order to avoid
confusion, I anglicized the spelling of ‘Cheikh’ to
‘Sheikh.’

Please remember that all Arabic names for genitalia and
or sexual
intercourse
in
The Lady’s Tutor are
derived solely from
The Perfumed
Garden.
As this Arabic
treatise on erotic love is over four hundred
years old, certain words or
expressions may be obsolete. However, a
really nifty Arabic dictionary that I
consulted for nonsexual phrases
is the
ARABIC Hippocrene Handy Dictionary.

In England, the Contagious Disease Acts were repealed in 1886 and
Mrs. Josephine Butler’s zealous campaigning was responsible.
As incomprehensible as it is to us a century
later, one of her main
premises for overriding the acts were that the
mandatory (vaginal)
examination of
prostitutes to determine the presence of sexually
transmitted diseases
deprived women of their dignity.

There did indeed exist a fellowship of minor poets who
called
themselves
‘Uranians’; they practiced pederasty in the Greek tradi
tion. It is unknown as to whether this
group of poets attended Eton.
Any
inaccuracies in my portrayal of late Victorian times are, of
course, my own. I assure you, I worked very hard
to eliminate them.

ROBIN SCHONE started her journey into erotic romance in
July 1995 with the
publication of her first book,
Awaken, My
Love.
Her third novel, THE
LOVER (April 2000) made the
USA Today Bestseller
list the very first week of its
release. But it
is this, her second novel—THE LADY’S TUTOR—that took
the publishing world
by surprise and firmly established Robin as one of today’s leading authors of
erotic romance fiction.

Robin has also written two novellas:
“A Lady’s Pleasure”
in the
USA Today Bestselling
anthology, CAPTIVATED
(Sept. 1999);
and
“A Man and A Woman”
(a story which ties in with THE
LADY’S TUTOR) in the
anthology FASCINATED (Oct. 2000).

She loves hearing from readers. Write to her at P.O. Box 72725, Roselle,
IL, 60172 (please include a SASE for a reply). Or visit
her web site for
chapter excerpts, contests, and updates regard
ing future projects at:
http://www.robinschone.com