The Classic Olivia M. Ravensworth

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The Classic Olivia M. Ravensworth

by Olivia M. Ravensworth

ISBN: 978-1-938897-42-9

A Pink Flamingo Ebook Publication

Copyright © 2014, All rights reserved

With the exception of quotes used in reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers.

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Dear Readers,

The novels in this collection—The Mistress of Castle Rohmenstadt, The Desires of Rebecca, and Domestic Service, published by the now-defunct Masquerade Books of New York in 1996, 1997, and 1998, respectively—marked the beginning of my career as a professional writer, and I am particularly happy to have them back in print after all these years, especially with Pink Flamingo.

I look back at those days before the turn of the century, and at the plots and characters depicted here, very fondly. These novels originally were written with some sort of pre-Windows computer and saved on actual floppy disks. Back then I printed a manuscript with one of those screechy printers using accordion-type paper with sprocket holes at the edges, and I submitted it to my publisher via cardboard box through the U.S. Mail, for God’s sake. I don’t think I had the internet until ’98 or ’99, and I communicated with my editor via Grahambellophone, finally sending—again, via snail mail—a disk only at the end of the process.

To a writer, novels are like one’s children, each different and special, all lovable in their own particular ways. I had written stories and scenes and snippets for years, of course, but The Mistress of Castle Rohmenstadt was my very first book-length work, and at the same time that I was flexing my erotic imagination, I retained some of the flowery “romance”-type language. I can still remember the excitement of my first sale, the big advance check, the thrill of seeing the book in print. I whistled “Paperback Writer” on the way in to my day job.

With The Desires of Rebecca I was really starting to get in the groove. I jumped into a first-person narrative with feet, setting the story four centuries in the past and using the voice appropriate to the period. I had just taken a fencing class, and if I do say so myself, the swordfight scene in Chapter Nine is pretty nicely rendered indeed. When I reread the piece recently, I fell in love with the beautiful, flatteringly possessive, inescapably flawed Captain all over again.

With Domestic Service I hit the peak of my Masquerade days. Rather than experimenting with a castle of mysterious delights in the deep forests of Eastern Europe, or with Sapphic swashbucklers of the old Spanish Main, I brought the action back to the present-day Midwest. There was something very satisfying about the utter realness of it, the uncertainties of a happily married man trying so hard not to do the wrong thing…as temptation is dangled so slender and sly-eyed before him.

In these three novels, then, we see the seeds of notions which will flower in my more recent work with Pink Flamingo: colorful and exotic settings, as seen now in my 1930s science-fictional Slave to Six Worlds or the prehistoric The Ring of the Giants, the lusty lesbians of Sarah’s Girlfriend and others, sternly commanding ladies as in The Supremacy of Samantha and the Alyssa’s Needs saga, and the exquisitely near naughtiness of the perverts next door in works such as Rachel’s Re-education and The Magic Box.

I still love these tales from the beginning of my career, and I am so very pleased to be able to present them to readers once more. The ancient 5.25-inch floppy disks that held the original manuscripts have long since vanished into oblivion, so…well, I simply “re-mastered” them by typing fresh electronic files from the paperbacks I pulled off my shelves—a tad time-consuming, perhaps, but a labor of love. True to my art, I resisted the temptation to tamper here and there, but instead only fixed a stray typo or old printing glitch whenever encountered.

If you enjoy these books even half as much as I did, it will have been worthwhile. For your patronage, thank you—and come again…

—O.M.R.

The Mistress of Castle Rohmenstadt

Originally published by Masquerade Books, 1996