The Midhurst Lashes conflates and adapts as a screenplay the only two novels written by poet Algernon Charles Swinburne: the fragmentary Lesbia Brandon and what may be the best unreadable novel in the English language, Love's Cross-Currents.

In books saturated with feeling (however perversely expressed), partly autobiographical, partly derived from De Sade and from Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, supremely subtle (and yet operatic), Swinburne creates one of Victorian literature's great characters, Helena, Lady Midhurst. Midhurst ruthlessly whips her daughter, niece, nephews and grandchildren into and out of affairs and marriages, crowning her manipulations by trying to secure-at any cost to others-the family title for her own great-grandson. Among the sufferers along the way is her grandson Redgie, who falls in love with a cousin only to find Midhurst intent on sending her away.

The Midhurst Lashes tells a devastating story of control, manipulation, pain, powerlessness, helpless surrender, ecstasy and love in a haut monde of play, rivalry and settling scores.