Edith Templeton

Edith Templeton (7 April 1916 in Prague, Austria-Hungary – 12 June 2006 in Bordighera, Italy) was a Bohemian novelist,[1] who also wrote under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook.

Life and career

Templeton was born Edith Passerová in Prague in 1916, to wealthy Bohemian parents.[2] She spent the first four years of her life in Vienna,[1] before moving back to what had become Czechoslovakia with her mother, to the home of her grandparents in Jirny.[1] She was educated at the French Lycée in Prague,[2][3] and left the city in 1938 to marry an English aeronautical engineer named Templeton.[1][3] The marriage was violent and short-lived,[1] and by 1946 she had settled in Bayswater, London,[3] and was a captain in the British Army.[3][2]

Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s,[3] starting in 1957,[2] and were later published as a collection entitled The Darts of Cupid in 2002.[2][3] Over the next several decades she published a number of novels as well as a travel book, The Surprise of Cremona. Edith Templeton left England in 1956 to live in India with her second husband,[2] a cardiologist and the physician to the King of Nepal.[1] Her novel Gordon was first published by Olympia Press in 1966 under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook. An autobiographical work based on Templeton's relationship with a Scottish psychiatrist,[3][2] it was banned in England and Germany for indecency,[1][3] and then grew in popularity and was pirated around the world,[2] before eventually being republished under the author's real name in 2003.[1]

She lived in various parts of Europe and made her final home in Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera.[1] She died on 12 June 2006, aged 90.

Works

Novels

  • Summer in the Country (1950) (published in the U.S. as The Proper Bohemians)
  • Living on Yesterday (1951)
  • The Island of Desire (1952)
  • This Charming Pastime (1955)
  • Gordon (1966; republished under her real name in 2003)
  • Murder in Estoril (1992)

Collection of stories

  • The Darts of Cupid (2002)

Travel

  • The Surprise of Cremona (Eyre & Spottiswoode 1954, Pallas Editions 2001 ISBN 1-873429-65-7)

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Vincent, Sally (26 April 2003). "The joy of hurt". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 April 2017.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Merritt, Stephanie (6 April 2003). "Obscene and now heard". The Observer. Retrieved 21 April 2017.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Thompson, Laura (22 April 2003). "An appetite for submission". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 21 April 2017.