The Darts of Cupid : And Other Stories

In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton, now eighty-five, gives us a sweeping and intimate exposé 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 pieces take us from the tumbledown glamour of a Bohemian castle between the first and second world 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 menopausal longing. In classic prose, Templeton delivers a lost world in all its heartbreaking detail—a continental way of life that matters more to us now that it has been all but erased by the turn of a troubled new century. Finally, 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 entirely up to date.