The Lady's Tutor

A friend gifted me with a copy of Richard Burton's translation of The Perfumed Garden one Christmas. Since I had used Tantric . . . and in a round-about way, the Kama Sutra . . . in Awaken, My Love, I thought how cool would it be to use The Perfumed Garden in a book? I immediately knew that the story must revolve around a man--half Arab, half English--who uses the book to instruct a woman in the art of sexual love. Bingo, Ramial was born! But while Ramiel came to me right away, Elizabeth was a much more difficult character to get a handle on. I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to put my finger on exactly why a respectable woman such as the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and daughter of the Prime Minister would turn to a disreputable man like Ramiel for sexual tutelage. Elizabeth finally came to me when Ramiel challenged her:

"Women who love their husbands do not ask strangers to teach them how to please a man," he said caustically.

"No, cowards who love their husbands do not ask strangers to teach them how to please a man. Cowards sleep alone, night after night. Cowards accept the fact that their husbands take their pleasure with another woman. Cowards do nothing, not women."

Whoa! Elizabeth spoke, and what a voice she had! I very much enjoyed her journey in not only learning about her sexuality, but in accepting that her needs . . . not only as a woman, but also as a person . . . were just as important as those of a man.

My editor loved The Lady's Tutor, therefore I was mightily surprised when I received the copyedited manuscript and all the Arabic terms had been deleted and or changed! It turned out that the copyeditor knew someone in Jordan, and asked him about all the Arabic sexual terms. Strangely enough (yes, I am being sarcastic), the terms used in The Perfumed Garden, a four-hundred year old book on erotology, were for the most part obsolete in modern Jordan, so my copyeditor thought to modernize my manuscript. It apparently never occured to her to check my Arabic terminology with The Perfumed Garden. As my editor said, "Imagine her phone bill!"

Needless to say, all my original text was restored. The Lady's Tutor--published August 1999--went through 2 print runs in a Zebra Splendor edition (it has a holographic heart on the front cover), and then 2 print runs in a regular Zebra edition, before finally in September 2000 being published in trade paperback, where it is now in its 8th trade paperback print.

Oh! And for those who didn't read my "Author's Notes" at the end of TLT. . . . The Uranian fellowship actually existed.