I just went out and bought myself a copy of each of the Sleeping Beauty novels by Ann Rice.

OK, Venus in the Country just arrived in the mail. It is not the book my friend remembered. It’s 95% sex with a little erotic birching thrown in . Scene 1, for instance, has 18-year-old Pamela “inspected” by her guardian and then given “injections” in all of her orifices. So, all in all, the Amazon reviewer had it just about right.

What’s the epistolary novel my friend remembers, then??

http://alexchattingplace.blogspot.com/2005/08/my-favourite-spanking-fiction-part-6.html

“Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is a classic bit of Victorian porn (though German in origin), so much so it has its own wiki entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_in_Furs

It’s a story of F/M consensual slavery as an expression of the power of love. Classic text — I took several graduate courses where it was one of the texts used.

A lost classic with a unique title like “Troy.” I might have been 11 or 12, maybe a little older, when my father brought it home from the library. At the beginning of the story, our hero’s father is the overseer of King Priam’s palace slaves. He thinks our hero is a child who should be sent away to safety with the women and babies, because the army fears the city may fall soon. Our hero wants to prove his manly courage so he can stay in Troy and fight beside his father.

So his father (who always carries a whip, in the course of his work), beats him. If he cries out, that will show he’s too young, or too cowardly, to stay. His father advises him to pull his tunic over his head and bite down on it, to help him stay quiet. He wants it to be a fair test, even as he makes the boy collapse (quietly) under the whip.

My parents always had _The Story of O_ and _Venus in Furs_ but it wasn’t until my sister found their copies of the _Sleeping Beauty_ books that I had to accept they were probably kinky.