A nameless woman  let's call her "you"  lives in a large draughty house in the Cotswolds with her husband and three boys. The marriage has run dry, perhaps because looking after boys and their washing really is a deadening chore after one's been a top-notch lawyer from Oz, or because hubby, sweetly protective and inattentive as he is, never did "reach the core" of her and learn to kiss her, or because she's nearing 40 and all the local mothers are hideously competitive. Whichever the case, "you" is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. This particular "body" never quite entered the wedded state.

So she/you goes down memory lane deep into her past and back to that teenage summer of love which made her a woman. It all happened not far from her antipodean hometown out in the bush, in a country mansion worthy of gothic romance. Neglected Woondala has big skies, a padlocked drive, and one locked door, behind which a reclusive writer is busy not writing: he's heartbroken and blocked.

Tol (short for Ptolemy) is a cross between René and Sir Stephen in The Story of O, though DH Lawrence's Mellors is there as well to add "tenderness" and occasional spontaneity to the sexual initiation our everywoman is to undergo at his skilled hands. She needs the tenderness. Though she's a vibrant, energetic, adventurous lass, she lost her mother while a babe and her stepmother is cruel, her father an inarticulate labourer who's given her up. Alongside the lessons in love which will teach her in stages about the raptures of (willing) submission, she's also curious about how the cultured classes live and what they know. That kind of education will mostly have to wait until later, when she, too, will write.

In 2003, Nikki Gemmell created a stir with The Bride Stripped Bare. The book came out under the banner "Anonymous", but Gemmell was revealed as its author, apparently scandalised by what her own pen had produced in its depiction of the hoary mystery of what everywoman wants: here, the thrills of secrecy, Wife of Bath-style control and extra-marital excitement.

With My Body is The Bride version two. There is the same Victorian woman's handbook  mysteriously found in Woondala  to draw "lessons" in life and the erotic arts from. Each lesson with a citation beneath again constitutes a chapter: there are 225 in the book, taking our everywoman on a journey from alienated wifehood, back to the past and reimmersion in bodily bliss, then round again to greater self-knowledge and the romance of reborn domesticity, all in bursts of rather breathless prose.

Gemmell's use of the second-person singular implicates the reader, hauling her by the collar to be initiated into the secrets of sexuality. It can also turn her heroine into a speciman stretched on a slide beneath a pornographer's microscope. It's a slightly uneasy, arch voice in English  somewhere between guidebook and literary experiment. The romance languages, with their stricter grammars, can use it to good lyrical effect; consider Marguerite Duras and Michel Butor, to name two. Gemmell is good at sensuous detail and body language, but the "you" voice, with its gesture at literary fiction, sometimes makes the action teeter at the edge of comedy: "Now you're wandering his house, agitated, the air laden with its coming storm  you can read the sky. His sky. Yours. You are nervy, skittery, you take off your flanelette shirt and wipe your brow with it; bathing your skin in coolness, God knows when you'll get rescued from this place. You return to the bedroom and lie like a Goldilocks on the mattress, your head in the hollow of the pillow."

This may well be one of those fictions it's better to read than to review. It zips along, providing sexual and romantic thrills, as well as a happy and well-intentioned end. What it doesn't do is quite reach the heights of Colette or Nin, who are invoked. The racy naturalism of the domestic chapters sits uncomfortably with the far longer and all-but self-contained erotic novel. Despite our engagingly exuberant heroine, the erotica rehearses only secondhand sexual motifs. Can De Sade-lite and the supposed delights of submission still provide "lessons" for women when they're repeated almost daily in TV thrillers? Maybe sex, so rampant in our popular culture in these decades, is better without too much text. Sometimes you wish writers and film-makers would just turn out the lights.

Lisa Appignanesi's All About Love is published by Virago.