She began with her first novel, At Fault, published in 1890, followed by two short story collections.  However, it is her book, The Awakening, (1899) about a woman’s separation from her husband and children, an affair and self-realization that has placed Kate Chopin in the forefront of women writers of the Nineteenth Century.

1chopinThe themes in The Awakening caused an uproar when it was published and Chopin found herself ostracized. Therefore, she decided not to add her voice to the changes that were occurring for women as the dawning of the new century. Chopin died on August 22, 1904 of a cerebral hemorrhage—an independent voice for women’s freedom and artistic rights silenced too early.

French-born writer, Anais Nin, is considered one of the finest female erotic authors. She was also a diarist, living among famous intellectual men of the 1940s and writing about her relationship with them. But, like Kate Chopin before her, it is Nin’s erotica that broke new ground for other women to write about their sexuality, especially during a time when women were not really considered sexual beings.

Nin, along with her lover Henry Miller, began writing erotica for a private collector; however, by the 1970s, with the social changes occurring, she decided to allow them to be published, now the famous Delta of Venus and Little Birds.

“Dreams are necessary to life.”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

I’d read erotica and erotic romance but my only attempt at writing it had been a short story years before, a story involving a maiden and a dragon.

And I’d had only one encounter with a younger man. As a young 50, I’d once dated a 44 year old – not that much difference. I’m normally attracted to men older than I am.

So I had to do a lot of imagining…or fantasizing. I found it fun and very interesting to pretend to be the opposite of what I was – to “live” vicariously through my heroine, also a writer.

The first publisher passed on my manuscript. But at New Jersey Romance Writers I pitched it to an editor from The Wild Rose Press. She wanted to read it and a few months later they sent me a contract.

I imagined it. I fantasized it. I dreamed it. And then I wrote it.