Country Life

Love Quartet #2

by Charlotte Bingham

Further adventures in the lives of the characters met in Volume 1, LOVE IN BELGRAVIA ~ dreary little Jennifer, now a seemingly the permanently pregnant marchiones, beautiful but vexatious Georgiana who while recovering from her affair with a world famous film director now pretends to have a husband so that Gus her new and working class artist lover won't insist on marrying her, louche and drunken Andrew Gillott now miserably married to Jennifer's dreadful social aspring mother Clarissa, and pretty Patti, ex-Bluebell Girl who calls in Fulton and Elliott, the happily married gay interior decorators to swathe her new husband's knightly stately home in orange satin - characters wonderful and ghastly at the same time, and tgruly British from the bottom of their green wellies to the top of the Hermes headscarves.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

A social satire amongst the upper classes of the UK. Some amusing asides - the author writes well - but the characters are rather flat and predictable, and the plots, such as they are, tedious. Nearer two-and-a-half stars than three, really.

[Duncan Ritchie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not her usual standard

Disjointed. Lacks depth. A trial to get to the end of the book. Riddled with typos. Really not a usual Bingham read.