Oh, Gulliver!: Mary Burton-Gulliver's Diary and Her Memoir of Gulliver's Travels
Erga Netz
April 4, 2023 / 296 pages
ISBN 9798218148904 Paperback / $18.99
What really happened to Gulliver in his famous travels? And what did his wife do in the meantime?
In this satirical novel, laced with a bit of eroticism, Mary Burton-Gulliver recounts her life as a "widow-of-the-sea" and the events that her husband didnât dare to publish in his 1726 Gulliver's Travels.
"Reading the memoir of Mrs. Gulliver was a wonderful surprise. So witty, subversive, and yet, arousing. It tickled my mind as well as inspired my G-spot. Highly recommended!"
â Xaviera Hollander (author of The Happy Hooker)
Oh, Gulliver!: Mary Burton-Gulliver's Diary and Her Memoir of Gulliver's Travels
Erga Netz
April 4, 2023 / 296 pages
ISBN 9798218148904 Paperback / $18.99
What really happened to Gulliver in his famous travels? And what did his wife do in the meantime?
In this satirical novel, laced with a bit of eroticism, Mary Burton-Gulliver recounts her life as a "widow-of-the-sea" and the events that her husband didnât dare to publish in his 1726 Gulliver's Travels.
"Reading the memoir of Mrs. Gulliver was a wonderful surprise. So witty, subversive, and yet, arousing. It tickled my mind as well as inspired my G-spot. Highly recommended!"
â Xaviera Hollander (author of The Happy Hooker)
Mary Burtonâs Diary
and her Memoir
of
Gulliverâs Travels
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Part One
Gulliverâs Voyages to Lilliput
Chapter One
The sad Life of the Married-Widows-of-the-Sea; how the Author passes her days while her husband is at sea; the reasons she decided to write a diary.Â
(Wapping, Wednesday, May 6th, 1699)
BEING married is fine, but being married to a ship-surgeon hardly feels like being married at all. We last saw our Papa[i] two days ago, as we were waving our good-byes at port. The Antelope was carrying him away from us, and we were all in tears. As I was hugging my sobbing children, I couldn't help shed tears as well. Will we ever see him again? Will my poor children still have their father when they grow older?
â
         I sometimes lament the misfortunes of my children, having a father who is in love with the sea and with adventure, more than he loves his family. But on the other hand, I am fortunate to have my two surviving children to comfort me and to fill-up my days with cherished duties. I might consider myself lucky not to be heavy with child every year, like my neighbours, the shopkeepersâ wives. But on the other hand, while my man is at sea for the next two years or so, I have no one with whom to share my bed[ii].
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I am a dexterous worker and my chores are quickly done. What a better way to fill-up my lonely hours, than to write the story of my life? Not that there is much to tell, but perhaps, if I will start writing, something exciting, surprising, titillating, shaking -- might happen to me?
[i] A linguistic note: I find it interesting to note how human selfishness is reflected in our languages: the words for Mama and Papa derive from the sequences of sounds ma/, mama/ pa/, papa/, which are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies. Â
  Proud parents tend to associate these sounds with themselves.
  The exception, curiously, is the Japanese Mamma, which is altruistically interpreted to mean "food".
  Come to think of it, die-hard Feminists could use this example to demonstrate again, how women are being used and abused.
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[ii] By the 17th century children no longer shared beds with their parents. There were laws against it, and they were the results of incidents of poor parents confessing to their priests that one of them had accidentally rolled over on their infants while sleeping.
  Suspecting that those poor, desperate parents actually strangled their children in this way, because they couldnât afford to feed them, was the cause of these laws, which were enacted to stop this infanticide.
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Oh, Gulliver! from author Erga Netz is the first of four installments retelling the story of Jonathan Swiftâs Gulliverâs Travels. Netz writes from the perspective of Mary Burton Gulliver, one of many âwidows-of-the-seaâ as Netz so charmingly puts it. Volume one of Maryâs story begins a bit before the events of Swiftâs work, witnessing Mary and Lemuel Gulliver as newlyweds, picks up after Gulliverâs return to Lilliput, then our storylines diverge. As Gulliver puts to sea once again, Mary experiences her own troubles at home. With each journal entry, she also tells a bit of Gulliverâs adventures in Lilliput which were not appropriate for public consumption within the pages of the classic travelogue.Â
    Like a bottle of wine, Oh, Gulliver! ages well, but travels rather less smoothly down the readerâs gullet at first. Eventually, Netz gets the hang of her dual storylinesâ dramatic tension, but it was a chore going through the first third of the book until Netz hits her stride. The footnotes, which number more than one hundred, are essential when reading. They, most of the time, supplement the action of the Gulliversâ lives with important historical context and additional commentary which Mary, would not have added to her main journal. These comments range from the academic to the absurd and make the reading experience more complete.
     The humor infused into the book is hit or miss. One or two comments had me laughing out loud. A few more zingers wrung a wry smile from me, but for the most part, Netzâs writing registered as smart, though not necessarily humorous. I do look forward to reading the other three installments of Oh, Gulliver! and have every faith that once Netz finds her rhythm, Maryâs story will be as entrancing to readers as it clearly is to the author whose delight in writing it lends the story great credit.