It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good riding crop must be in want of a pair of bare buttocks to thrash. At least, that is how it seemed to Elizabeth Bennet. Tied to the bedpost in Mr Darcy’s boudoir, her stays unlaced and her bloomers in a state of disarray, trembling in anticipation of the first thwack of leather upon her unblemished skin, she pondered upon the circumstances that had brought her to this most indecorous pass. If Mr Bingley had never come to Netherfield and set his heart upon her sister Jane, then she, Elizabeth, would never have encountered his close friend, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy. And that one chance meeting was all it had taken for her to be lured into his secret world of hot and horny perverted sex, like a helpless moth drawn towards a candle flame.

Worst of all, she was the mistress of her own undoing. Mr Darcy had made no protestations of love. In fact, he had made his intentions plain from the outset. ‘I do not make love, Miss Bennet,’ he had told her. ‘I bonk. I have it off. I get my end away, I rodger, I boff.’

Could she save this wonderful, sensual man from his own dark desires? Surely if she could but show him how pleasurable genteel nineteenth-century pastimes could be – how a game of backgammon could rival the thrill of nipple clamps, and bonnet-trimming delight the senses as much as the insertion of an XXL butt plug – then he would renounce his S&M ways for good.

But as the first blow fell upon her quivering behind, causing her to cry out in both excitement and pain, that thought was far, far from Elizabeth’s mind.

‘Oh my!’ she gasped. ‘What would Lady Catherine say?’

‘My dear Mr Bennet,’ said Mrs Bennet to her husband, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?’

Mr Bennet, his head buried in A Gentleman’s Repository, merely grunted in reply. Unlike Mrs Bennet’s first, second, third and fourth husbands – whom Mrs Bennet had bonked into an early grave – Billy-Bob Bennet was not a man fond of repartee. In short, his sole purpose within the pages of this book is to act as a cipher, to represent an ideal of manliness based on hunting, fishing and DIY, in order to form a striking contrast to the kinky, brooding, slightly prissy anti-hero. Therefore the author couldn’t be bothered to give him many words.

‘Do you hear me, Mr Bennet?’ Mrs Bennet cried impatiently. ‘It is to be let to a young man from the north of England, Mr Elliot Bingley, who comes hither in the company of his great friend Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy.’

Mr Bennet sat taciturn, staring at his magazine and waiting for the invention of television.

His wife was in no way discouraged by lack of an audience. ‘I have heard,’ she continued eagerly, ‘that both men are considerably well endowed. Both have huge packages, I’m told, and now they are come here, to Meryton, with a view, no doubt, to meeting young ladies upon whom they can blow their wads.’

Elizabeth, the second eldest – and arguably hottest – of the Bennet daughters, inwardly winced. Her mother’s inappropriate use of street slang and general lack of modesty were often a source of mortification to her and her virtuous elder sister Jane. For instance, why, Elizabeth asked herself, could Mrs Bennet not sit demurely with her hands folded in her lap like any other nineteenth-century matriarch, instead of slumping upon the chaise longue with her legs wide open, so everyone could see her vulgarity?

‘Well endowed?’ Mary, Mrs Bennet’s middle daughter – and arguably the least hot – looked up from her Latin primer and gave her mother a disapproving look. ‘It is not seemly to talk thus of gentlemen’s fortunes, Mama,’ she chided.

‘Who said anything about fortunes, girl?’ Mrs Bennet replied. ‘I am not talking about the size of their incomes.’ She rolled her eyes in exasperation. Why were her daughters so hopelessly strait-laced? Although her two youngest, Kitty and Lydia, were starting to display signs of interest in the young officers in Town, no doubt she would be in her grave before any of them got laid. Mother to five virgins! It was a torment almost too great to be borne!

‘Silly goose,’ she scolded Mary. ‘A few of their manservants have been talking to the dairymaids in Meryton, and the word is that both gentlemen have simply enormous co ...’

It was a matter of felicity that at the very moment Mrs Bennet was about to utter a word that would have made a courtesan blush, Elizabeth’s wayward hair chose to make a dash for a hole in the wainscoting.

‘After it, girls!’ shrieked Mrs Bennet, as the thick, hugely attractive yet unruly brown mane slithered hither and thither about the floor in a bid to avoid Elizabeth and her sisters, who leapt about, jabbing at it with hairbrushes and ribbons. For a few moments the scene in the drawing room was one of chaos, until Elizabeth – who, like many a romantic heroine, was hopelessly accident-prone – caught her foot on a leg of the card table, and landed upon her lustrous chestnut-tinged curls, wrestling them into a scrunchie.

‘There,’ she declared, panting, sprawled upon the Aubusson rug, ‘I have it under control at last!’

Mrs Bennet looked admiringly at Elizabeth’s long, stockinged legs, which had been exposed by her exertions. ‘A fine pair!’ she thought proudly. ‘Just apt for wrapping about the waist of a lieutenant in the Dragoons.’ What an irony it was that her daughter was so well shaped for the act of lovemaking, yet displayed precious little interest in the subject. It seemed she would rather be occupied in reading books, wearing hopelessly frumpy clothes and going for bracing walks in the countryside. Mrs Bennet sighed discontentedly. ‘Mr Bennet, you will, of course, be paying a visit to Mr Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood.’

Mr Bennet raised his eyes at last. ‘If he shoots, plays pool or has a shed, I shall. If he is one of those newfangled metrosexuals, I shall not.’

‘Consider your daughters!’ Mrs Bennet continued. ‘Jane is twenty-two and Lizzy past twenty, and no one has so much as groped them. If it weren’t for Lydia, who I suspect has at least had her fancy tickled by Dick the stablehand, I would lose hope entirely!’

‘I do not know why you take on so,’ her husband replied. ‘Were this the twenty-first century, I agree that it would be preposterous that a twenty-one-year-old, stunningly attractive girl had never so much as held hands with a young man. In fact, I would think it some sort of contrived literary device to make her eventual deflowering all the more salacious. But this is 1813, and it is quite acceptable for a young lady to remain chaste until marriage.’

‘Chaste? Chaste? It is easy for you to say, Mr Bennet,’ exclaimed his wife. ‘You do not have to suffer the neighbourhood talk of “Mrs Bennet’s Dykey Daughters”!’ Mrs Bennet fanned herself with her copy of Britain’s Hottest Hussars. ‘You will go to see Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy at the earliest opportunity, and ask if either of them fancies a go on one of your daughters. I insist upon it.’

And with that, the matter was settled.