Gordon

The original Fifty Shades of Grey, Edith Templeton's novel Gordon has been banned, pirated and published under various names for almost fifty years. 
 
Post-war London. Louisa, a smartly dressed young woman in the midst of a divorce, meets a charismatic man in a pub, and within an hour has been sexually conquered by him on a garden bench. Thus begins her baffling but magnetic love affair with Richard Gordon. 
 
Gordon, a psychiatrist, keeps Louisa in his thrall with his almost omniscient ability to see through her, and she is equally gripped by the unexpected pleasure of complete submission. Subjecting herself to repeated humiliations at his hands, but quite unable and unwilling to free herself from his control, Louisa and Gordon sink further and further into the depths - both psychologically and sexually. 
 
An extraordinary novel of psycho-sexual entanglement that was banned for indecency in England in 1966, in Gordon, Edith Templeton captures one of the most unusual and disturbing love stories ever written. 
 
 
'Templeton's characters are not passive or self-doubting. Their pleasure in sexual submission is a mark of their toughness: they can take what their men give them' The New York Times 
 
'Sexual perversion, masochistic dependency, obsession and suicide' Telegraph 
 
'An unsettling tale of sexual obsession' The New Yorker 
 
'It is unlikely that any young woman will write a book as good, as honest, as provocative as Gordon' Telegraph 
 
'Superbly written and unsettling' Beryl Bainbridge 
 
Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916 and spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s and caused a major stir because of their sexual explicitness (these stories are available in one volume entitled The Darts of Cupid as a Penguin ebook). Gordon first appeared in 1966 under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook and was subsequently banned in England and Germany; it was then pirated around the world, appearing under various titles. In 2001, Edith Templeton agreed to publish the novel, with its original title, under her own name. She died in 2006.

A fine alternative for those frustrated by the anodyne S&amp;M relationship in Fifty Shades of Grey . . . not only an unsettling portrait of psycho-sexual entanglement but also an exquisite love story

A haunting, powerfully fascinating work of bold, desolate honesty. Terrible, believeable, inexorable

Remarkable and unusual, memorable and unsettling

Reading Gordon is a chilling experience. The power of the novel lies in its determination to present a relationship that still inhabits the realm of the taboo

A compelling story which offers no easy conclusions and deserves a significant place in the history of women's writing

Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916 and spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. She was educated at the French lycée in Prague and left the city in 1938 to marry an Englishman. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s and caused a major stir because of their sexual explicitness (these stories are available in one volume entitled The Darts of Cupid as a Penguin ebook). 
 
Gordon first appeared in 1966 under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook and was subsequently banned in England and Germany; it was then pirated around the world, appearing under various titles. In 2001, Edith Templeton agreed to publish the novel, with its original title, under her own name. She died in 2006.

An extraordinary novel of psycho-sexual entanglement - banned for indecency in England in 1966. 
 
Post-war London. Louisa, a smartly dressed young woman in the midst of a divorce, meets a charismatic man in a pub, and within an hour has been sexually conquered by him on a garden bench. Thus begins her baffling but magnetic love affair with Richard Gordon. 
 
Gordon, a psychiatrist, keeps Louisa in his thrall with his almost omniscient ability to see through her, and she is equally gripped by the unexpected pleasure of complete submission. Subjecting herself to repeated humiliations at his hands, but quite unable and unwilling to free herself from his control, Louisa and Gordon sink further and further into the depths - both psychologically and sexually. 
 
Templeton's prose exquisitely captures one of the most unusual and disturbing love stories ever written.

Edith Templeton

And Other Stories

In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton gives a sweeping and intimate exposé of her century, and of the lives of women caught in the historic and personal contingencies it engendered. The unforgettable title story was celebrated upon its original publication in The New Yorker for its explicit portrayal of the relationship between a young British woman and her American superior in a provincial war office during World War II - a love affair that lasted only two nights but changed the narrator's life forever, and is still haunting today. Other stories take us from the tumbledown glamour of a Bohemian castle between the wars to an apartment on the coast of Italy in the 1990s, where a rich widow's decision to sell her husband's prized silver becomes a bewitching tale of longing. 
 
Whatever the period, Templeton addresses the truth about female passion with a forthright gaze that is rare for any age.

Edith Templeton

Books by Edith Templeton

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