Gordon: A Novel

Originally written under a pseudonym, this thrilling novel of passion in post-World War II London was banned upon its publication in the late 1960s, and is only now being republished under the author’s real name. Edith Templeton creates an indelible character in the smartly dressed Louisa, a savvy young woman in the midst of a divorce who 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, and virtual enslavement to, Richard Gordon.

Gordon, a psychiatrist, keeps Louisa in his thrall with his almost omniscient ability to see through her and she, in turn, is gripped by the deep, unexpected pleasure of complete submission. As they venture further and further into the depths—both psychological and sexual—she begins, for the first time, to understand her troubled history and the self that has emerged from it.

In her clean, precise style, with every social nuance and motive exquisitely observed, Templeton delivers a tightly wound drama, unsparingly forthright in its description of how this form of love can bring incomparable rapture. Louisa’s unsettling story has more than the ring of truth to it: it is told with urgency and
relish, and its outcome, which leaves Louisa enlightened and changed forever, is profoundly satisfying.

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 a French lycée in Prague and left that city in 1938 to marry an Englishman. During her years in Britain, she worked in the Office of the Chief Surgeon for the United States Army in Cheltenham and then became a captain in the British Army, working as a high-level conference interpreter. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the fifties, and over the next several decades she published a number of novels, as well as a popular travel book, The Surprise of Cremona, in the United Kingdom.

Mrs. Templeton left England in 1956 to live in India with her second husband, a noted cardiologist and the physician to the King of Nepal. She has since lived in various parts of Europe, and now makes her home in Bordighera, on the coast of Italy.