The Darts of Cupid

In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton, now eighty-seven, gives us a sweeping and intimate expose of her century, and of the lives of women caught in the historic and personal contingencies it engendered. 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, more than thirty years after the story was written. 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. In the same elegant and understated voice that brought us the extraordinary novel, Gordon, Edith Templeton presents us with a lost world in all its heartbreaking detail. This book is the record of a unique sensibility: whatever the period, Templeton addresses the truth about female passion with a forthright gaze that is rare for any age.

Genre: General Fiction