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Love Quartet #3

by Charlotte Bingham

Lady Georgiana Longborough has rejected a full-blooded life with her artist lover Augustus Hackettand instead has married the Scottish Lord Stranragh – who likes to address Georgiana was if she were a board meeting.Meanwhile down in Wiltshire, her fecund friend Jennifer’s marriage to the Marquis of Pemberton seems in much better shape – except that Jennifer can never quite tell what ‘Pember’ is up to.A drink or two with the butler is one thing – but why is Bloss given a bigger car than Nanny?Fulton and Elliott, Jennifer’s gay neighbours, are happily ensconced with the recently widowed ex-Bluebell girl Lady Tizzy, both of them blissfully content to play at fatherhood – always providing they know the parentage of Lady Tizzy’s children. For pedigree is what it is all about, especially in the country set.But is the emotionally insecure Georgiana too thoroughbred to survive an elopement with Gus when she finds him back in her life? Has Jennifer the ‘class’ to rise above the village gossip?One thing is abundantly certain – in this world of social snakes and ladders, most of the protagonists will get what they richly deserve.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

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.