Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady

Miranda, her husband Louis, and their baby daughter are supposed to be spending the summer in a rented villa in Tuscany. He’s a self-assured young American actor. She’s a well-educated and well-bred English ingénu. Shortly after they arrive, though, Louis is unexpectedly called back to London. Abandoned in the middle of the Italian countryside with her baby, Miranda’s increasingly fraught solitude is disturbed by the arrival of a handsome young Italian. His name is Oreste—an actor from Rome, invited by her husband.

Miranda immediately falls under his spell, and into his arms. Their tempestuous, frenzied affair awakens within her a sexuality of which she was previously unaware. But it also unleashes something fateful and violent, setting events in motion that send the novel hurtling—“close, charged, brittle, heedless and headlong” (Kirkus)—toward its horrifying conclusion.

Written with the same glittering, knife sharp prose as her acclaimed novel Lord Jim at Home, Dinah Brooke’s transgressive debut remains every bit as shocking as when it was first published in 1971.

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

—Publishers Weekly 

“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.

Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341647

Nov 4, 2025 McNALLY EDITIONS no. 46

5” x 8.5” • 272 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341654