The Bride Stripped Bare

There is something vaguely illicit — and let it be said, powerful — about penning a book anonymously. A nom de plume suffices if an author wishes to not have a certain work identified with the rest of their work. But with the use of "anonymous" the author has a freedom — a certain blamelessness. The term is frequently enough associated with gossipy "tell-alls" of the rich and famous, such as the barely fictional Primary Colors (the author was eventually exposed as Newsweek columnist Joe Klein), or slyly accredited to erotic romps with lurid titles such as A Night in a Moorish Harem or The Misfortunes of Mary.

A successful author in Britain and in her mother country, Australia, Nikki Gemmell has ventured with rigor as well as grace into the realm of sex and relationships in her first three novels. However, when she tried to write "scrupulously honestly about sex within marriage," it wasn't working. The postscript explains: "I had fully intended to put my name to the book when I began it, but I soon found I was censoring myself. Afraid of the reactions of people close to me, afraid of hurting them."

Once she made a decision to write and publish anonymously, the words began to flow and she had soon produced a book that created a huge bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair and eventually became a much hyped bestseller that had the British tabloids baying for her identity.

Outed, or driven to self-disclosure, by the press, Gemmell ended up promoting the book in Australia and the UK in 2003. Be that as it may, if the author needed to take this confessional route in order to write this lovely novel, so be it.

The Bride Stripped Bare is presented as an unfinished manuscript found by the author's mother, the author having since disappeared. The novel is told in a series of 138 "lessons." Told in the second person, "you" are invited to be the woman who journeys from wife to mistress, from inhibited to liberated. The reader thus experiences firsthand everything the narrator feels and thinks. It is an unusual device, but it works.

The narrator is married to Cole, who she believes she loves very much. However, there are clues to marital problems in her words, and a major problem appears to be their approach to sex. While vacationing in Marrakesh, she witnesses what may be an act of betrayal (the reader is never on strong footing with the facts in this novel, the interior monologue is all we have access to) and what she has felt is her comfortable marriage is now in doubt.

She has been writing a book, inspired by a seventeenth-century, anonymous text, "a delicious catalog of unseemly thoughts: That a wife should take another man if her husband is bad in the sack; That a woman's badness is better than a man's goodness," etc. In the course of her research, she meets a beautiful young man. Their affair begins to wreak havoc with the narrator's mind, and her world is torn by the unleashing of desire and concupiscence that she had hitherto believed herself incapable.

Now, not to be confused with the aforementioned Victorian erotic works, The Bride Stripped Bare is not a work of erotica. There are sexually explicit scenes, but it is also a beautifully written and disquietingly honest exploration of sex and female desire. Gemmell explores the consequences of both secrecy and brutal honesty within a relationship, but never presents easy answers. Unlike the highly touted French memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, which cataloged sexual acts with a sociopath's distance and remorselessness, The Bride Stripped Bare probes the emotional and human aspects of sex, frequently despairing of the fact that men and women seem incapable of communicating, let alone understanding, their instincts and desires.

In an interview for the Australian TV show Enough Rope Gemmell said "Maybe we don't have sex as much as all those women on Sex in the City....maybe there are big wildernesses in our lives. I can remember reading in a magazine that Marilyn Monroe said, 'I don't think I do it properly.' When I read that, I thought, 'My God, someone like her would say that!' And it was like, 'Someone else!,' and what a someone else. That's how I felt. In a way, that was the starting point for the book."

Written anonymously or not, Gemmell's story is honest, and has proven to be one that many women can relate to. There should be no shame in that.

• Read more about this book