Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916. She was educated at the French lycée in Prague and left the city in 1938 to marry an Englishman. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s.Over the next several decades she published a number of novels as well as a popular travel book, The Surprise of Cremona. Edith Templeton left England in 1956 to live in India with her second husband, a noted cardiologist and the physician to the king of Nepal. Her novel Gordon first appeared in 1966 under a pseudonym and was subsequently banned in England and Germany, and was then pirated around the world. The author has lived in various parts of Europe and now makes her home in Bordighera, on the coast of Italy.