The intention of the “Kinky Cocktail Hour” Kinky Book Club is to review literature and promote conversation around the titles and topics read. As listeners to the podcast, your comments to this writing help create a lively and fulfilling forum to reflect and engage with one another as kinksters.
BOOK #1: “Gordon” By: Edith Templeton
RECOMMENDED BY: Lordhummingbird:
“Gordon by Edith Templeton. She’s a gifted writer, and the fiction evidently draws heavily upon a personal affair. Nonconsensual. One wants to look away, yet must find out how it ends. Brilliant; and so completely forgotten it might never have been written. The Sardonyx Net by Elizabeth A. Lynn. The sadism is real rather than pretend here, but the dominance is hot if it’s your mojo. Lynn was not a brilliant wordsmith, but her world building has always stayed with me. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. I wouldn’t call it kinky per se, though some would, but it is a lyrical work of erotic literature, with some really beautiful writing by a great craftsman. I’ll never forget reading this work.”
OVERVIEW
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.
AUTHOR BIO
Edith Templeton was born in Prague, in 1916, in what used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now the Czech Republic. She died in 2006. She wrote both short stories and novels. She also used the pen name Louise Walbrook. This book is an autobiographical novel of that experience. Edith Templeton at the end of the second world war had an abusive sexual relationship with a Scotch Psychiatrist in London. In an interview with a book reviewer some 25 years on, she confirmed that she had indeed never been able to get past the experience, and it had affected her subsequent marriages and relationships. 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.
Lady Petra Playground 