Forbridden Fruit

My read­ers of For­bid­den Fruit may wish to know the ori­gin of the work. It was this way, whilst I was stay­ing at an out of the way vil­lage on the Sus­sex coast, I used to take long sol­it­ary walks, and sev­eral times saw a very beau­ti­ful girl sit­ting on a se­cluded part of the downs, at­tent­ively read­ing what looked like a ma­nu­script in a black cover. Nat­ur­ally I con­cluded she was some very stu­di­ous young lady try­ing to im­prove her leis­ure, as she did not ap­pear any­thing like the frivol­ous novel about what she was so in­tent upon.

One day, on the same foot-path, I picked up what I be­lieved to be her ma­nu­script book, and look­ing curi­ously at the con­tents, was sur­prised to find it was a tale of the grossest kind, scenes of love and lust de­pic­ted in the most real­istic man­ner, with Prick, Cunt, Fuck and other things men­tioned in the plain­est lan­guage.

I sat down on the bank to en­joy this un­ex­pec­ted vo­lup­tu­ous treat, when sud­denly I was startled by a breath­less ex­clam­a­tion of: “That’s my book! Oh, give it me back, Sir; I must have dropped it as I passed along here, a short time ago, and ran back to find it.”