Jane
No longer available.
Jane
by P.F. Jeffery
Publication Date: 15th May, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-907681-22-6
Paperback, 436 pages
Thousands of years in the future, the division between the sexes is entrenched, turning to warfare. Many technologies are lost and much history forgotten, but gynogenesis (by which two women may have a child) is becoming the scientific foundation for the Empire of Her Majesty, Berenice I. Amidst the haunted marshes of outlying Essex, the routine and romance of homes and offices in the Surrey heartland, and the crumbling feudal heritage of Lundin town, the action unfolds like the panorama from a stagecoach window.
Jane is a sixteen-year-old civil servant under Her Majesty. Sent to audit the spoils of battle, she falls for Captain Modesty Clay, precipitating a maelstrom of events that force her to grow up fast, and in which she catches the eye of the Empress herself.
The first novel in the Warriors of Love series, a projected twelve volumes of intertwined stories told by three female narrators, Jane is a beguiling evocation of a memory-haunted future, combining erotic picaresque, breathless narrative in the best tradition of British adventure yarns, and poetic delineament of place and person.
About the Author
P. F. Jeffery was raised in the part of Southend-on-Sea that is furthest from the beach, and claims to have been consigned to bizarre wilderness realms – both physical and psychic – ever since. The author’s day jobs have mostly been in under-valued, ill-paid fields largely associated with women – including care work and data input. This experience has proved both grist and grit to a novelist’s mill. Professionally published work has also tended to be ill-paid, including factual articles, short stories, role playing material and at least two erotic novelettes. (The writer had three erotic novelettes accepted for publication, but doesn’t know whether the third one ever appeared. The rascally publishers didn’t bother to inform or pay the author when issuing the second.) Much of this output has appeared under a variety of pseudonyms, including Martine Bell, Fiona Duncan and others long since forgotten. Phoenix-like, from this unpromising mulch, arises The Warriors of Love, a series of twelve novels, of which Jane is the first.
What People Say
“…a bombardment of incidents and names, evocatively conveyed through passages of honed prose and dialogue. After a tearful farewell to Modesty, I could actually sense with many senses the sea trip, the sea battle, the sea-sickness, the subsequent ceremony. I wallowed in the emerging Imperial politics, the description of the Empress who takes more than just a simple fancy to our fiscal inspector heroine.”
D.F. Lewis
Online Reviews