Gordon [Anglais] [Relié]

First published pseudonymously in 1966, Templeton's first novel was banned in England for its sexual content and found an underground following when it was picked up by the notorious Olympia Press two years later. Templeton (The Darts of Cupid) offers a compelling portrait of a woman in postwar London who falls into a submissive relationship. Louisa is the soon-to-be-divorced 28-year-old narrator who gets picked up at a pub by an imperious stranger. She isn't sure how she feels about this enigmatic, chilly, inquisitive man who shows little emotion and forgoes conventional courtship rituals, taking her to his back garden and-to her unexpected pleasure-summarily ravishing her. The stranger turns out to be-what else?-a psychiatrist, Richard Gordon, who continues to anticipate Louisa's thoughts and erotic needs. Gordon has increasingly rough sex with Louisa, holding her in his erotic thrall while remaining aloof throughout the affair. Louisa is entranced with his effect on her and increasingly obsessed with him. The unlikely erotic interludes are intriguing, and Templeton adds a delicious bit of comedy when Gordon and Louisa attend a dinner party as a couple. The idea of a coldly omniscient psychiatrist feels dated, and some of Gordon's psychoanalytic observations are bound to strike readers as unintentionally parodic; he virtually reads Louisa's mind and endlessly prompts her with his impassive "go on." Louisa's predicament, however, is believable and captivating. Templeton's study of submission is psychologically acute, and she brings the couple's oblique power struggle to a fascinating climax.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This tale of sexual obsession in postwar London was banned in England and Germany during the Sixties, so naturally it became an underground classic.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Published pseudonymously in England in 1966 and banned soon afterward, this eerie tale of sexual obsession is narrated by a young woman adrift in London just after the Second World War. She meets a "frightening, sinister, implacable" psychiatrist who, over all protest, invades her, body and mind, arousing previously unsuspected tastes for submission and humiliation. One part "Story of O" to two parts Muriel Spark, the book beautifully evokes the tightened belts and loosened morals of postwar London. By today's standards, "Gordon" is hardly explicit, but the thrill the narrator gets from non-consensual degradation and the ice-cold way she describes it remain unsettling: "There were times when he hurt me, and times when he did not, and I could never make out whether he hurt me purposely or whether it was accidental."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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.