Gordon: A Novel(Vintage International)

Louisa is a clever, self-reliant woman who has just been discharged from her duty as an officer in the British Army during World War II. In a London pub one afternoon she meets Gordon: a slight, peculiar psychiatrist with queer eyes and a strange charisma. Within an hour, Louisa has been sexually conquered by him on a garden bench. So begins an affair in which Gordon compulsively violates Louisa’s body and psyche, while Louisa matches his onslaughts with an insolent submission. As their entanglement deepens, Louisa finds a heady emotional satisfaction beneath the humiliation that Gordon inflicts, and comes to a new understanding of her troubled history and the self that has emerged from it. Originally published under a pseudonym in 1966, Gordon was banned in England and Germany for its frank sexual content, and even today it remains provocative in its fearless probing of the boundaries of consent and submission.

About the Author :
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 U.S. 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 enxt 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 celebrated 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.

Review :
“Riveting, intelligent, delicately written. . . . Templeton is an extraordinarily gifted and acerbic observer of the weirder reaches of love.” –The Seattle Times “Imagine Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence sharing an engrossed conversation about social snobbery and the wolfish pursuit of obsessive sex and you have something of Templeton’s atmosphere.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review “[An] eerie tale of sexual obsession. . . . One part Story of O to two parts Muriel Spark, the book beautifully evokes the tightened belts and loosened morals of postwar London.” —The New Yorker “Gordon is one of the great classics of erotic literature.” –W Magazine