All Comments on 'The Lady Charlotte'

Love this story. Your writing is beautiful.

Different!

5

Did a Frenchman take over your soul?

The writing deserves a five, but I’m sorry I can’t give it that, so I’m not scoring it.

Perhaps if I visit it in a day or two the emotional toll would’ve lessened and then I could score it the five.

Typical LW story, the wife messes up, the husband leaves her, finds success, finds another woman, and maybe a child and is happy. The cheater wife becomes a recluse, ostracized by society, and is left alone and lonely.

Unlike most LW stories though, here the MC is the wife (though in this story they are not married). We find out she has self-exiled. We find out how deeply her lover’s loss has impacted her. We find out how fiercely she had loved him, and how loyal she has been to him. She had not cared about his status, and fiercely defended her love for him to her peers abs parents.

The mistake (the cheating) we are, I believe purposely, not given too many details about, but hinted that it was likely a drunken mistake. So, the moral of the story to me does one drunken night, deserve her losing everything, including her life? After all she self-exiled. She had money, status, fame she earned through her writing, but because of her love she self-exiled, and when all hope for the future with him was lost she chose to end her life.

As they say there are two sides to a story, and typically we are told his side in LW stories. Here we are told the other side of the story.

I can now give it the five stars it truly deserves.

Never read anything like this on this platform, way to go!

Well, that was sad, haunting and excellent.

They all got massively drunk and she awoke in a rivals bed. Her boy flees and stays away for seven years, never attempting to forgive and only coming back with a new family. Of course she offed herself, her one true love destroyed her over a single drunken slip. I like BTB, but this was tragically sad.

Thank you. I've grown so weary of poorly constructed, English-as-a-5th-language, machine translated, non-punctuated, illiterate, incoherent, and trivial, stroke stories and Cuck-drivel, that I had just about given up on "Loving Wives". What a breath of fresh air to read something written by a real author. Granted, it wasn't really 'Erotica', and it wasn't about cheating wives and BTB or even RAAC. But the vocabulary was colorful & interesting, and the literary development of the story to a surprise ending was masterful! I gave it a 5. Maybe the author should consider writing real stories. I think I'll go back and read it again, just to help cleanse my mind. If I do, can I give it another 5 ?

You're a much better writer than this. Leave the teenage angst behind!

You used to be better. Not lately. You lost something somewhere.

A very good story.

A very well-written modern take on Tennyson's classic (which I had to re-read to give myself the proper context). Your considerable skills continue to grow, and we benefit from you broadening your reach.

Thank you, this was wonderful.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........

So many outcomings, so mani possibilities, so so many other moments lost while the courage missing sealed her fate.

I’ll quote and mix;

All the memories that could have been remembered, lost in time like a teardrop in the rain.

WTF was that?

cheating whores deserve nothing less

Great writing. But it's not fair of you to raise the bar of quality to unreachable heights for us amateurs. Five bright stars, of course.

A sad tale, maybe for non erotic or romance but nonetheless it was good.

Only thing missing for me, but not needed, was a few words of how she got in the bed with the other guy. Did he rape her? Did she willingly do this? or as in some stories she "thought" it was her guy and not a stranger? All I read is they all got really drunk and when she woke up she did remember the sex.

This was a stunning short story, filled with great images. One part felt off, and that was the ritual challenge to be the leader's woman. Why would a leader be forced to accept the winner of a fight? They choose his own partners. Challenge rules requiring you to defeat your opponent is a trope foisted on us by movies and television, even if the idea of a bare knuckled, bare breasted brawl stirs the imagination.

This is definitely worthy of 5 stars.

Brings to mind the great J. W. Waterhouse masterpiece inspired by the poem of the same name. I’m picturing the redheaded beauty, hands spread on handlebars instead of gunwales. What sad and beautiful pieces - the poem and the painting as well as your tribute story. Thanks very much.

Elegiac, original, interesting and ingenious.

It captured some of the feeling of the poem too. I felt that more could have been made of the big impact of the poem at the end where Lancelot, the unwitting cause of her demise, says 'She has lovely face, may God in his mercy grant her grace'.

As for the comments...'teenage angst'! There's nothing quite like the ignorance of LW commenters. Imagine what they would have written about 'Hamlet'.

Lovely to read...Thank you SJ that was a refreshing change from the bastardised Americanese or very common Estuary English or whatever it's called. Well done.

Well Written

But yes, I hated the ending. Real life is depressing enough. I come here to feel better, not worse. Thanks anyway. Any chance for a little something to cleanse my palate, something with a HEA? Pretty please?

This was not written for us to feel good about, or even to like very much. It was very different from most of what I read every day in LW, and a little difficult to follow at first. But once I caught the rhythm of the story, it flowed perfectly, right on to it’s tragic and sad end. SJ, you are an amazing talent.

...could not be won. She ended her life. The Lady Charlotte.

The only part that rang untrue, was, "many shed a tear at her passing," she seemed to live a life solitude.

Why these bikers returned, we don't know. Perhaps he only came to show her the baby. Cruelty, nothing more.

And the ending was just god-awful. But you know that. Try again. Not your best work.

Not what I expected. A romantic modern parody of past storytelling. Would I have read it if I had known its content? No. Was it well written? Certainly. But can I rate it against my personal standards of LW stories? Impossible. I'll leave it at that.

The reader was supposed to hate this story. That was the point! If you didn't you don't have a soul and are a truly damaged human being. It was to get the LW reader, who loves BTB, to see the other side of coin. The woman that has long term pain, and eventually loses everything for a mistake. SJ was purposefully vague regarding her "mistake." We don't know if it was a drunken night, we don't know if she had really been attracted to the other guy so wanted him, etc. But it wasn't done to hurt her lover, that we know for sure. So, to me a drunken night or not, it was still in the category that it was done without malice, and thus didn't deserve the fate she got.

This was one of the best stories I've read on here that lets us see and deeply feel the damage BTB does on the recipient; so it ends up being an epic anti-BTB tragedy. And it was done subtly and beautifully, without preaching to the reader. It allows the reader to come to that conclusion himself; although, I worry that most readers haven't seen the story for what it is (unless I am wrong of course lol).

Controversy.

This is not the first time SleeperyJim has written for us

a story on a sensitive and conflicted subject.

I see no less than three such subjects in this story.

The responsibility of a drunk person's actions.

The suicide.

And the reason for a dark story to be heard.

I'm not going to comment on the first two.

Just send out a reminder

of the need to respect not just our opinions,

but the opinions of others.

But I'd like to comment on the third subject.

The dark stories.

We've had them through the ages.

Some collected by the Brothers Grimm and H.C.Andersen.

Some we heard from the mouth of our elders.

Most of them meant not just to entertain, but to teach.

And some meant to scare.

We were scared, as children, from going to dangerous places

or doing dangerous things.

Fear was needed on some of us dumb ones.

But don't vorry, I have forgiven my elders.

Mostly ;).

I don't know where "The Lady Charlotte" fits, as a dark story (dumb, remember),

but I know I enjoyed reading it.

It may not have been a top shelf story,

but I thank the writer for introducing it to us.

4 out of 5 from me.

Hm, I'm not sure I understand this story: When she commited suicide?

Was it immediately after the drunken one-night-stand and her ghost was in the shed and was "released" when he came back after 7 years with a new wife and a child?

Or was after 7 years when he came back?

This work was very thought provoking. I really liked the complete story.

Thank you.

Dark...5*

It's quite a bold assumption Sir, of crocodiles as being superstitious creatures, but I won't shed their tears about that implication ;-)

Truly sad. Tragic actually. The worst cost for drunken betrayal.

You have to feel sorry for the state she wound up in. Ending her life, given where her mind resided, was her only option.

She burned herself to a tragic ending.

Really sad. No way I could hate her; she paid for her transgression with a sentence far worse than any individual could inflict.

Dark and depressing. She paid a huge price for an unintended, barely remembered, drunken indiscretion. Lance, hee shining white knight, cut and ran.

Dark and depressing. She did not deserve her fate. Yes Lance was hurt because he profoundly loved her. But he also had zero empathy and cut and ran away. Yes she erred buy it should have warranted forgiveness and reconciliation. And screw the BTB crowd that thinks she got her just desserts. Lance was her shining white knight who turned out to be something much less: a coward with no courage and no forgiveness. Thr Lady wad not the villain of this story. But she paid a terrible price. Well written but hard on the soul.

Modernization of an old English tale. Sad but such is life. She had the means to track him down and apologize and beg forgiveness. Her choice.