Mark Twain's Vibrator: Five Other Bits Of Possible Literary Kinkiness

If you hear a humming, Mark Twain's a-coming

​As ordered in his will, the three-volume autobiography Mark Twain wrote as he was dying is being published 100 years after his 1910 death.

First reports note that the book note that it includes talk of a "vibrating sex toy" his mistress gave him as a gift.

Mark Twain going all "Bend Over Boyfriend"? Not an image we had hoped to experience. And  certainly one we never imagined we would.

As it turns out, Twain's proto-Rabbit may not be the only example of literary marital aids in surprising places. We fully expect to hear similar discoveries:

1. Jane Austen
The original opening for Pride and Prejudice? "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a 18-inch, two-headed dildo, must be in want of a wife."

Oddly, there were no vampires or zombies in it, a development it would take until the 21st Century to rectify.

2. Charles Dickens
Into snuff films. Surprising, since film per se had not yet been invented in his time, but Pip in Great Expectations displays an alarming sado-masochistic streak: "I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death." Unto her death, as captured on yet-to-be invented film, according to the author's first draft. Sick.

3. Charlotte Bronte
Hey, Jane Eyre is all about the kink: "In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it groveled, seemingly on all fours: it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair wild as a mane, hid its head and face."

It's Rochester's wife, of course. Funny thing, though: Her safe word was "Charlotte Bronte."

4. Leo Tolstoy
As with Bronte, Tolstoy's kinkiness was on full display. Anna Karenina, according to this actual excerpt, deals exclusively with a masturbating cross-dresser: "I see a man who has serious intentions, that's Levin; and I see a peacock, like this featherhead, who's only amusing himself."

We haven't read the book, so we assume it just continues along in that twisted vein.

5. William Shakespeare
For the longest time, scholars thought that when Hamlet says "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" was an indictment of mankind.

Now we know it was just an invitation to let the fetish orgy start.