Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady

“A devastating account of the sexual awakening of an English lady … An intense, fastidiously crafted and disturbing novel.”

—Publishers Weekly

“I’m happy [Brooke] wrote this book. The moments of startling observation, her granular descriptions of a blitzed internal world … If we can’t have enlightenment just yet, I’ll take the bracing experience of this novel and the singular visions of its author, a harrowing, howling report from the disintegrated self.”

—Emma Cline, from the Foreword

“Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady, Dinah Brooke’s 1971 novel about an Englishwoman’s sexual awakening, is wonderfully truthful about the delight and disgust of sex … Passages so visceral and explicit I found myself blushing on the train into the office … Brooke shows how ‘spicy fiction’ should be done.”

—Ceci Browning, The Sunday Times

“The best descriptions of the sheer illogicality and waywardness of sex and love that I have ever read.”

—The Scotsman

“[A] brilliant forgotten novelist.”

—Claire Allfree, The Telegraph

“Brooke has a limpid, assured style: cruel, yes, but not detached or apathetic … It’s frigid fun.”

—Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine

“You can only glory in her skill … Brooke [has] immoderate talents.”

—M John Harrison, The Guardian Observer

Dinah Brooke left Cheltenham Ladies’ College at sixteen to go to Paris, where she studied sculpture and Greek. She read English at Oxford, attended film school in London, briefly worked for a documentary film company, and spent a year in Greenwich Village. Back in London, she married, had twins, and, in the early 1970s, published four critically acclaimed novels, including Lord Jim at Home, which is also published by McNally Editions. In 1975, she took sannyas, was given the new name Ma Prem Pankaja by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and lived for the next six years in his ashram in Poona, India. She returned to London in 1981, where she lives today.

Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, the story collection Daddy, and The Guest. The winner of the Plimpton Prize, Cline was also named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2021, she won an O. Henry Prize for ‘White Noise’, and is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.