Gordon

Description

The novel they tried to ban 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 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 lycee 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.

A fine alternative for those frustrated by the anodyne S&M relationship in Fifty Shades of Grey . . . not only an unsettling portrait of psycho-sexual entanglement but also an exquisite love story * Independent * A haunting, powerfully fascinating work of bold, desolate honesty. Terrible, believeable, inexorable * New Statesman * Remarkable and unusual, memorable and unsettling * Daily Telegraph * 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 * Sunday Herald * Fascinating, spellbinding -- Candia McWilliam * Evening Standard * A compelling story which offers no easy conclusions and deserves a significant place in the history of women's writing * Observer *