The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences is a Victorian erotic novel written anonymously in four volumes during the years 1873–1876 and published by William Lazenby.
Scholarship on this novel is limited, although it is mentioned in passing in a number of historical works on the literature of the Victorian era.
Steven Marcus discusses The Romance of Lust in some detail in his book The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966), as does John Alfred Atkins in his historical survey, Sex in Literature (1970-1982).
Because of the often unrealistic description of sexual activities and positions in The Romance of Lust, Marcus uses the word vector to describe the mechanical sex acts.
He also speaks of emotional deprivation in conjunction with the work, because the characters do not interact with one another as real, thinking, and feeling persons would do.