Gordon -
By Edith Templeton

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 BainbridgeEdith
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.