By Invitation

Love Quartet #4

by Charlotte Bingham

The beautiful Lady Georgiana Longborough, and her friend Jennifer Parker-Jones, now the seventh Marchioness of Pemberton, are finding life in Wiltshire altogether too quiet. The answer, it seems, is for Jennifer to give a summer ball.

But social life in Wiltshire is rarely, if ever, simple. While shopping for her ball gown Lady Georgiana re-meets her first lover, the famous film director Kaminski, at the same time as her aunt the Countess, who is helping Jennifer with the arrangements, finds out that Jennifer is intent on double-crossing her.

The Countess plots to teach the young Marchioness a lesson, but will she carry through her revenge? Will Jennifer find out the true identity of her neighbor's children? Will the buxom Lady Tisbury's husband ever stop her from straying? Will life in this particular part of Wiltshire ever settle down? Not, it seems, while Charlotte Bingham's cast of characters are living there.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

The Honourable Charlotte Mary Thérèse Bingham was born on 29 June 1942 in Haywards Heath, Sussex, England, UK. Her father, John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, wrote detective stories and was a secret member of MI5. Her mother, Madeleine Bingham, née Madeleine Mary Ebel, was a playwright. Charlotte first attended a school in London, but from the age of seven to 16, she went to the Priory of Our Lady's Good Counsel school in Haywards Heath. After she left school, she went to stay in Paris with some French aristocrats with the intention of learning French. She had written since she was 10 years old and her first piece of work was a thriller called Death's Ticket. She wrote her humorous autobiography, called Coronet Among the Weeds, when she was 19, and not long before her twentieth birthday a literary agent discovered her celebrating at the Ritz. He was a friend of her parents and he took off the finished manuscript of her autobiography. In 1963, this was published by Heinemanns and was a best seller.

In 1966, Charlotte Bingham's first novel, called Lucinda, was published. This was later adapted into a TV screenplay. In 1972, Coronet Among the Grass, her second autobiography, was published. This talked about the first ten years of her marriage to fellow writer Terence Brady. They couple, who have two children, later adapted Coronet Among the Grass and Coronet Among the Weeds, into the TV sitcom No, Honestly. She and her husband, Terence Brady, wrote three early episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs together, Board Wages, I Dies from Love and Out of the Everywhere. They later wrote an accompanying book called Rose's Story. They also wrote the episodes of Take Three Girls featuring Victoria (Liza Goddard). In the 1970s Brady and Bingham wrote episodes for the TV series Play for Today, Three Comedies of Marriage, Yes, Honestly and Robin's Nest. During the 1980s and 1990s they continued to write for the occasional TV series, and in 1993 adapted Jilly Cooper's novel Riders for the small screen. Since the 1980s she has become a romance novelist. In 1996 she won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association.