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conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled The Crimson Petal and the White about Sugar, Crimson, Petal with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
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conversations.value: Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. The story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, the author's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192833642/${0}">The Mill on the Floss</a> and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore the author's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is the author's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler
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conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book titled The Crimson Petal and the White about Sugar, Crimson, Petal with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Crimson Petal and the White: The novel details lives of two very opposite Victorian women, Agnes and Sugar, and the linchpin on whom they revolve: William Rackham.\nWilliam, the unwilling and somewhat bumbling heir to a perfume business, is a businessman of moderate success and little self-awareness.\nHe married the exquisitely doll-like Agnes, who embodies the Victorian "female ideal" of naive femininity, for her beauty though he barely knew her.\nKept completely in the dark on sexual matters, Agnes\' diaries express utter confusion over events like menstruation (she believes a demon returns periodically to "bleed" her), pregnancy, sex, or childbirth: she does not even acknowledge her young daughter, Sophie.\nSophie, who takes after her father, is very carefully kept far from her mother\'s sight by the household staff, who otherwise disregard Agnes\' desires and ignore her.\nOutside of the house, few know of Agnes\' madness (though knowledge of it spreads during the length of the story), who presents herself as an inveterate hostess and socialite to the world during each season.\nWilliam soon becomes obsessed with a worldly young prostitute named Sugar, an unconventionally intelligent and strong-willed young woman who uses the affair with William to climb to a higher perch in the rigidly stratified class system of the time.\nWilliam purchases Sugar from her madame (Sugar\'s own mother) and sets her up in a luxurious flat of her own, where he regularly visits her on his terms.\nSugar has been a prostitute since the age of 13 and views sex as a living, not a pleasure, with no physical act too taboo.\nShe is resentful of her reliance on William\'s (and men in general\'s) favour and indulges her fantasies about harming her and her fellow prostitute\'s clients in an explicitly gruesome novel of revenge erotica she pens in her spare time as she works to maintain William\'s continued interest using both her body and her mind.\nAs William\'s fortunes climb from Sugar\'s excellent business acumen, Agnes becomes increasingly eccentric.\nWilliam eventually decides to move Sugar into his household, hidden as a member of his staff.\nSugar is designated as Sophie\'s governess and grows to genuinely love the girl as her own even as Agnes\' mind begins to spiral into hallucinations of angels and William retreats to the man\'s world of his business dealings.\nAgnes catches sight of Sugar around the property and becomes convinced that Sugar is her angel come to take her to the Convent of Health.\nThe book culminates in William losing all after having long and obliviously neglected the needs of the two women.\nThe day before Agnes is to be moved to an asylum on the orders of William, she runs away in search of the Convent of Health on the advice of Sugar who indulges Agnes\' fantasy that she is her angel.\nA body is later found in the river Thames, which William believes is Agnes but that Sugar has reason to believe is not that of Agnes.\nAfter Agnes\' supposed death, it is implied that William is considering courting another woman of his station rather than marrying Sugar.\nSugar discovers that she has become pregnant by William and before she is able to end the pregnancy by jumping down the stairs of the house, the doctor (the same doctor who was implied to be sexually abusing Agnes) discovers the pregnancy and reports it to William.\nWilliam dismisses Sugar from the household in a letter.\nSugar, having grown fond of Sophie and convinced William will not care for her, takes Sophie with her when she leaves.\nThe end implies that William never finds Sophie, Sugar or Agnes.\nOther characters include Henry Rackham, William\'s pious brother who wants to be a clergyman, and his obsession and obstacle to the cloth, Emmeline Fox, a widow who works in the Rescue Society which tries to reform prostitutes.