I was awed by Amber's courage, daring and strength.
In the background, London falls silent except for the tolling of bells and the cries of "Bring out your dead!" Nursing her lover through his vomiting, sweating, delirium, and bloody carbuncles, Amber ignores her own safety, and, what is more, her appearance. Winsor had used Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year as a major source, and made the centrepiece of her book Amber's graphic and metaphoric encounter with the epidemic. In banning the book, the Massachusetts attorney general had listed 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, seven abortions, 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men, and 49 "miscellaneous objectionable passages".īut what mesmerised me was not the sex, but the bubonic plague. In fact, I read it so quickly that I immediately reread it to be certain I hadn't missed anything." Even at 11, I must have noticed the novel's sexual frankness. My reading experience was shared by many girls, including Barbara Taylor Bradford, who recalls in her foreword to the new Penguin edition that as a teenager she "could not put it down. I knew immediately that it was contraband and I should keep my find a secret. Kathleen Winsor's story of an English adventuress who becomes one of the mistresses of Charles II had been banned in Boston as "obscene and offensive", but somehow my mother had obtained a copy, and in 1952, when I was 11, I discovered the greying and mildewed hardcover stashed away in the cupboard of our beach cottage. L ong August afternoons and lazy hours with books always remind me of the summer I read my first grown-up novel, Forever Amber, which had sold 3m copies after its publication in 1944, and went on to become a bestseller in 16 countries.
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