The Darts of Cupid
And Other Stories
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
The highly-acclaimed short story collection by the author of Gordon, the erotic novel banned for indecency in 1966
In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton gives a sweeping and intimate exposé of her century and the lives of the women who lived in it. The unforgettable title story was celebrated upon its original publication in The New Yorker for its explicit portrayal of the relationship between a young British woman and her American superior in a provincial war office during World War II - a love affair that lasted only two nights but changed the narrator's life forever, and is still haunting today. Other stories take us from the tumbledown glamour of a Bohemian castle between the wars to an apartment on the coast of Italy in the 1990s, where a rich widow's decision to sell her husband's prized silver becomes a bewitching tale of longing.
Whatever the period, Templeton addresses the truth about female passion with a forthright gaze that is rare for any age.
'[Templeton's stories] make the flesh tingle' Observer
'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
'Dark, compelling and invigoratingly unsettling' Sunday Times
Edith 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rain dripping on cobblestones, the strains of violins in caf s, sexual games concealed beneath sophisticated conversation this is the European atmosphere of these seven exquisite stories by Prague-born Templeton, still active at 85. Though her characterizations are as sharp as her vision, she is a tantalizingly enigmatic storyteller, and the delicate tales on display in this first collection of her work gracefully evade categorization. In "Equality Cake," a woman revisits the Prague castle where she had grown up, and the effect is appropriately Kafkaesque: the Communist government has reversed the shabby gentility she recalled and restored it to a beauty she has never seen. The long title story was published in 1968 in the New Yorker, where her work had been appearing since the '50s, and achieved notoriety for its frank sexuality, although it is tame by current standards. The heroine is employed in a medical office of the U.S. Army in London and has a one-night sexual encounter with a married major, without further consequence. Though the story's gossiping women respond with giggles to teasing at the hands of male superior officers, they slyly "reveled in the knowledge that it is embarrassing for a man to be the head of a female staff." In other stories, sex, however brutal, is only implied, as when a mentally disturbed in-law attempts to rape the heroine, but clumsily breaks one of her ribs ("The Blue Hour"). And in "Nymph & Faun," an older widow disposes of unwanted possessions long stored, at one point observing, "Marriage is the tomb of love." These are elegantly written stories, small gems each.
