Porn, between elegant covers

Knowing that the 34-year-old author of this energetic first novel died tragically last year shortly after completing her manuscript makes the prologue she wrote for it all the more poignant.

Written in the form of a posthumously published memoir, the narrator of Belinda Starling’s “The Journal of Dora Damage” begs her readers’ indulgence -- she is a high-spirited woman of the Victorian age, after all -- with a few words of wisdom passed on by her late father, a bookbinder like herself.

“My father used to tell me that before we are born, St. Bartholomew, patron saint of bookbinders, presents our soul with a choice of two books,” Dora Damage writes. “One is bound in the softest golden calf and majestically gold-tooled; the other is bound in plain, undyed goatskin straight from the tan-pits.” The “nascent soul” who chooses the opulent volume, she continues, “will open it to find that the pages of the book are already inscribed with a story of an inescapable fate.” The latter’s pages “start off blank, and await inscription by the leading of a life of free will according to personal inspiration and divine grace.”

Dora’s path is heady stuff for an 1860s working-class woman coping in a society that regards most women as wives, mothers and caregivers, with little ability to rise above the numbing drudgery of domestic life.

Dora’s chance to determine her own destiny emerges by way of desperation. Her husband, Peter, is unable to work because of crippling rheumatism. A bookbinder who’d been apprenticed to her father, Peter grudgingly allows Dora to surreptitiously take over his south London shop, a risky proposition given that the city’s powerful trade unions refuse to admit women.

With an epileptic daughter to care for, an obnoxious landlady demanding overdue rent and vicious loan sharks threatening debtor’s prison, Dora’s options are few. Working with a particularly odious entrepreneur who is active in the literary underground, she begins crafting elegant bindings for highly placed aristocrats with a yen for pornographic literature. She achieves a kind of subterranean celebrity for decorating their texts with clever leather exteriors that go beyond conventional prettiness.

A few of the works she binds are Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” John Cleland’s notorious “Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” and the lewd Latin novel of Petronius, “The Satyricon.” For a copy of Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” Dora selects a dark-green goatskin with scarlet lining. “I blind-tooled the edge with hearts, stars and butterflies, and gold-tooled in the centre a beguiling Venus extracting a myrtle leaf and berries from the garland binding her hair.”

Dora is shaping the “public face” of a “very private volume,” something playful and naughty, perhaps, or “something ambivalent, sensual and evocative, which only hinted at the surprises inside.” To come up with clever designs, she must read the books, quite an epiphany for a woman reared in an era of sexual denial and repression. And as she dazzles the anonymous clients with her creations, the texts they send become even more offensive to her. “To justify my role as Mistress Bindress in the obscene underworld of the book trade,” Dora recalls, “I had to convince myself I was fashioning, at it were, the pearl around the grit in the oyster; I was making something beautiful out of something ugly.”

A theme of appearance versus reality -- what is a bookbinding, after all, if it isn’t, as Shakespeare would have it, a “goodly outside”? -- runs throughout this bustling novel and on a multitude of levels. Starling also deftly works gender, class and race into her detailed depiction of the metropolis, with London emerging as a multifaceted character, prim and proper on the surface, hypocritical, hard-nosed and unforgiving beneath its polite veneer.

Starling did an enormous amount of research for her debut effort, and it shows. More impressive, she did not let her material get in the way of telling a richly atmospheric story that is fresh, complex and credible; it is an accomplished work that augured good things for the author.

Four days after submitting the manuscript, however, Starling -- a singer and songwriter who lived in Wivenhoe, Essex -- underwent surgery to remove a cyst from her bile duct. The following morning, her hepatic artery burst, sending her into cardiac arrest. Sadly, she died seven weeks later, leaving a husband and two young children.

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Nicholas A. Basbanes is an author, most recently of “Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World.”