Elliott Gish’s story “From a Mother to Her Daughter, on the Eve of Her Wedding” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 20 May 2022. 
While reading a book about Victorian social and sexual mores as research for another project, I began to think of how uninformed young women in that period were, even on their wedding nights. In such a repressed and sexually anxious society, much of the information a young woman brought with her to the bedroom would have been the result of her mother having “the talk” with her beforehand. What if that talk was not just a way for a mother to explain physical intimacy to her daughter, but to warn her about something more sinister?
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