Our Authors

Agnes Blackwood

Agnes Blackwood is the pen-name of one of the very earliest and most esteemed contributors to The Governess, with many essays and poems to her credit as well as Linton Abbey and In Front of the Girls . Her newest book is Trouble at Linton Abbey. Under the name "Margaret Stone" she is also the author of The Corporal Punishment of Schoolgirls.

Louise Malatesta

Louise Malatesta is the author of the highly praised The Queen of the Grove, a mixture of brilliant short stories and genuinely exquisite disciplinary poetry, as well as a peerless set of page illustrations by Sardax; Château Soumission; Across My Lady's Knee, and, most recently,The Lost Breeches.

Jacqueline Ophir

Jacqueline Ophir is one of England's foremost disciplinary theoreticians and authors, whose works include the most acclaimed series of novels of recent times—The Fellowship of the Rod, as well as The House in St. John's Wood (a dramatisation of a year in the life of Alice Kerr-Sutherland), and Tales of the Unbreeched, a manual for Mistresses on the art of "La Déculottage" (the stripping of penitents for punishment), which has been favourably compared to Miss Kerr-Sutherland's A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen as a practical manual for those ladies who wield the domestic rod. Her most recent novel is A Perfect Mistress, which the author admits is at least fifty percent autobiographical (though she does not say which fifty percent!). Her last book was The Song of the Cane, an anthology of writings and verse about this fabled instrument. She has recently retired from writing.