Beautiful tempestuous Fanina's dangerous surrender to love

One of my bad habits is a fondness for 1960s translations of racy French historical novels. Today I found one called Fanina in a secondhand bookshop in London. The cover has a helpful tagline "Epic novel of a Vestal Virgin in decadent imperial Rome!" which is a fair synopsis.

I picked up this unexalted literary taste because as a child, up to about the age of 12, I would read absolutely anything, and I read very fast. Also, I've always been a bit scared of my extended family, and when we visited aunts and uncles my defence was to find the bookshelves and hide there. My wider family's reading tastes are decidedly demotic. Over time I discovered that Jeffrey Archer's books and the Reader's Digest make me feel like I've spent too long in an underground carpark, so I stopped those, and that Catherine Cookson and her ilk have some appeal until you've read more than one of them. I once burnt a Barbara Cartland (The Taming of Lady Lorinda) page by page, it made me so angry, and though book-burning has unfortunate Nazi overtones I still stand by that action. I read old children's adventure stories, like The Children of the Forest, and nasty horror books like Jaws, and books which came free with tokens cut from coffee jar labels. Forever Amber is very unsympathetic, and the North and South series by John Jakes is seriously twisted.

The ones I still love are the multi-volume historical adventures, like those of Catherine, by Juliette Benzoni, and Angélique, by Sergeanne Golon. Catherine spends her time pursuing her husband Arnaud through fourteenth-century France, while a series of unpleasant adventures -- the death of Joan of Arc, Arnaud's leprosy, the lust of the sultan of Morocco's sister -- contrive to separate them. The Duke of Burgundy is so besotted he names his new order of chivalry, the Golden Fleece, after her (she's a natural blonde). Arnaud frequently takes against her and has to be repersuaded of her charms, often rather graphically. Angélique's husband is executed as a sorcerer in the Place des Grèves and she has to work her way from poverty at the Court of Miracles to fight Madame de Montespan for the love of Louis XVI, before realising that maybe her husband is not so dead after all, and seeking him in (where else?) the harem of the sultan of Barbary. (Is sold to a mysterious pirate in the slave markets of Crete; becomes sultan's favourite concubine; escapes with tall handsome Christian slave; returns to France to lead Huguenot rebellion; all in one volume.) There are 13 Angélique adventures, and the last three haven't been translated. I have read and recommend the rest. Their escapism is of the best kind, optimistic without being sentimental -- these women don't beat themselves up about doing what is necessary to survive -- they'd rather be faithfully by their husband's side but if that's not possible there's no harm in enjoying themselves. I can't see how anyone could think that Lady Chatterley's Lover did more for women's liberation than these huge bestsellers.