Daddy Reissues

Dinah Brooke’s 1971 debut novel ‘Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady,’ newly reissued, explores a young woman’s journey to realizing that ‘we should give up the charade’ of ‘heterosexual relationships and the bourgeois family structure.’

By Sophie PooleJanuary 17, 2026

• Fiction

A 20TH-CENTURY WOMAN, in despair, will shop. Take Sasha from Jean Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) or Cléo from Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962): both try on hats in Paris. Miranda, a dissociative Oxford graduate and the central figure in Dinah Brooke’s 1971 novel Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady, tries on dresses in London. First, she eyes a white one with a low back, then a red frock with puffy sleeves. “While […] I’ve still got my waistline,” she thinks to herself, “I might as well.” The second dress reminds her of blood, a punctured womb, compelling her to faint in the dressing room. After she comes to, Miranda purchases the former, its color a sign of purity.

Miranda’s period is late. Nearly five weeks before, she slept with a tepid Jewish American actor named Louis Hahn. Captivated by his portrayal of the thwarted prince Segismund in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th-century play Life Is a Dream, she agrees to meet him for a date. The sex—it’s her first time—is okay. After the fact, she decides that she prefers her solitude, with her “body numb, mind a blank, inert in her lair, protected from the possibilities of love and rejection.” Miranda, who was a lonely child and frowned at motherhood, cannot believe she has become pregnant. Despite her options, and her mother emphasizing that she would “have given her the money for an abortion,” she carries the child to term. A year later, Miranda is on holiday with her husband Louis and their baby girl in Tuscany.

Like many debut novels, Cheltenham Lady is semi-autobiographical. Brooke, like Miranda, attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Oxford, married a middling American actor, and bore his children. Brooke’s four novels—her second, and arguably most well known, Lord Jim at Home (1973), was reissued by McNally Editions in 2023—were all published in a five-year span, throughout her short-lived marriage. Brooke’s work addresses the emotional morass between men and women, a prevailing theme then and now with a contemporary reading public largely skewing female. Cheltenham Lady’s reissue five decades after its debut says as much about the dismal state of heterosexual relations as it does about the novel’s literary verve.

On the fringes of London’s feminist milieu, Brooke divorced her husband in 1975 and fled to India, forgoing England, her children, and her writing career. For six years, she lived at the ashram of the controversial philosopher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “A lot of my psychoanalytically oriented friends think that a guru is a sort of father figure,” Brooke wrote in an essay from the 1985 anthology Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, “and that the reason I went to Poona is because of obsessive ‘fatherlessness.’” Indeed, Brooke’s father, a steelmaker and army pilot, “became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.” While she spent much of her youth attempting to save him, Brooke credits him with her career: he gave her something to write toward. Indeed, the father figure, or the lack of one, stalks her novels.

In Cheltenham Lady, Miranda’s father receives brief mention. Through photographs, she recalls an early childhood in Oslo, Norway, where her father served in the Foreign Office. As she enters puberty, his presence diminishes, which she blames partly on herself. “She herself could no longer charm her father, and he and her mother drank gin and shouted at each other,” Brooke writes. Miranda only learns the reason for her parents’ separation during her first term at university, when her aunt clumsily reveals that her father prefers boys to girls. Miranda, accepting that his distance was born out of “the loathing and terror he felt at these female extensions of his own body,” does not expect to hear from him. Rumored to reside in the sexual hinterlands of the Middle East, she concludes that “Daddy retired to the world of fantasy where he had become so much at home.”

To Miranda, a father can be anyone or anything, existing in a real world or a made-up one. Although her father did his best to inhabit the traditional role of husband and patriarch, it was an act, effectively creating distance between himself and those closest to him. It seems no coincidence, then, that the love triangle Miranda finds herself embroiled in involves not one but two actors, both attempting to play the parts of husband, father, and lover.

At its core, Cheltenham Lady is a novel about daddy issues, a theme Emma Cline, who wrote this edition’s introduction, has also explored in her fiction. In her propensity for self-destruction, Miranda does resemble the narrator of Cline’s buzzy summer novel The Guest (2023), whose protagonist also navigates a vacation gone wrong. The choice of Cline to write the introduction points readers in a particular direction, her name on the cover intimating that Cheltenham Lady will also feature a woman in crisis, depicted in sparkling, readable prose. But Cheltenham Lady’s prose indulges where The Guest restrains—a dynamic that is mirrored in the books’ respective plots.

Cheltenham Lady begins like a nursery rhyme, with repetition and nature: “Gently, gently, the afternoon shadows of the cypress trees flipped across the baby’s face.” In Brooke’s hands, the quiet scene of a mother watching her baby fall asleep turns expansive and laborious. She compares the baby’s eyelids falling to “small waves which spread themselves at your feet like a fan opening.” The scene unfolds as if Miranda has never seen her baby fall asleep before, as if her offspring were at once an alien and a miracle. The eyelids’ movements summon a memory from her own childhood: “the sensation […] of running my hand along the railings of the park, on my way home from the afternoon walk, in my neat grey coat and round hat, beside the silent and anonymous nanny, to the empty house.”

This will not be the last instance where the mother’s focus reflexively darts back to herself. Miranda’s close attention surely comes from love, but she also carries a fundamental suspicion of her baby, whose lashes are “at one moment golden and full of light, dark and secretive the next.” Where Cline’s prose skims like a rock skipping over water, creating a frictionless reading experience, Brooke’s prose is a stone that skips once before sinking to the bottom, balancing the pithy with the profound.

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While the family is in Italy, Louis is whisked back to London for a week to shoot a movie, and Miranda is left alone with the baby and a couple servants. It is her first brush with independence since the dress shop, and she revels in her freedom. With ease, she prepares the baby’s food, takes her on a long walk in the pram, changes her diaper, and puts her to bed. She enjoys a glass of wine and a novel at the end of the day, wondering, “What on earth do I need a husband for?” But comically, by the next morning, she has reversed course, “a sense of doom” setting in. She is alone, she remembers, feeling the acute pinch of solitude. That evening, like a particularly sadistic episode of the reality TV series Love Island, Oreste Mira, a handsome Italian man and aspiring actor, arrives at the villa.

With the air of a con man, Oreste claims that Louis had invited him to visit after their meeting on a Roman film set. Despite Louis’s conspicuous absence, Miranda invites Oreste to have a drink, then asks him to stay for dinner, which he offers to prepare. His name references a character in Greek mythology who commits matricide, but he also embodies the stereotypical qualities of an Italian inamorato: misogynistic but good in bed, and gifted at making spaghetti.

That night, with Oreste, Miranda experiences a carnal desire that fundamentally alters her constitution. During an intermission, Miranda notices that “Oreste had become a small, thin man with a few spots on his shoulders, hairy legs beneath his rumpled blue shirt, and clownlike feet that splayed outwards.” The description invokes the moment an actor breaks character. Suddenly, her lover is a normal man, no longer imbued with the illusory power that lust and theater can arouse. Meanwhile, Oreste senses Miranda’s relative inexperience, capitalizing on her untapped sensuality to dominate her senses. When Miranda suggests that Oreste will sleep on a cot in another room, he spits at her, “You are a stupid, ignorant little girl. We are lovers, we will sleep together. […] Change the sheets.” Through tears, she duly strips the bed. As their weeklong tryst commences, his masculine bravado, which started out as irresistible, turns oppressive.

In a review of the novel’s first publication, The New York Times gamely compared Cheltenham Lady to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Published over four decades before Brooke’s novel, that work similarly depicts an erotic relationship between an upper-class Englishwoman and a blue-collar man. Like Lawrence’s erotic passages, which caused the novel to be banned in England until 1960, Brooke’s depiction of sex is dynamic and anatomical (“Oreste was nothing to her but eyes, lips, tongue, hands, penis”). She also yields to the languorous and lyrical (“Her body became so liquid that she could not even tell when Oreste entered her, time neither stopped nor changed but remained forever, motionless in their bed”). “My agent said to me he’d never seen anyone write about sex like that,” Brooke recalled in a 2023 interview with The Telegraph.

Even for the contemporary reader, more accustomed to graphic detail, the frankness shocks. In one particularly abject scene, Oreste persuades Miranda to explore a new frontier of lovemaking. “She was flipped over onto her stomach like a pancake; wet and dripping with vaginal lubrication, cock and balls slapped her back, buttocks, thighs, hands seized her buttocks, pried them apart,” and it goes on, explicit and rhythmic, until the baby screams. Extricating herself, Miranda checks the child’s diaper; the putrid yellow color inside indicates that she is seriously ill. Soiled by lovemaking and mothering, “Miranda quickly washe[s] the crap off her arms, breasts and stomach, and the sperm off her thighs.” In bed, the father figure is already fast asleep.

In spite of the scene’s ugliness, Miranda finds that sex with Oreste provides a needed escape from her reality. The affair leads her and her child away from her comfortable Tuscan pied-à-terre and toward Oreste’s place of origin, an impoverished coastal village, left behind by postwar politics, industrialization, and urbanization. As the make-believe family drives south in the Fiat, Oreste asks her for money, silences her, and takes her whenever he likes. She hates his patriarchal airs, and tells him so, but makes no move to dump him on the side of the road. If she does that, the curtain falls, and she’s not ready to bow, change out of her costume, and greet reality at the stage door.

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The three arrive at the ramshackle house by the sea, where Oreste’s mother and an orphan maid, Immacolata, care for his ailing father. While the world around the family had moved forward—factories closing, residents leaving the village for nearby cities—they had stayed put. That the prodigal son has now returned, with a wife and baby in tow, is their deepest pleasure. Miranda grudgingly agrees to join in this domestic farce, the baby a pliant prop. Everyone coos over the child, Oreste reprimands Miranda for her withdrawn attitude, Miranda yields to his sexual demands. Her sole comfort, and only tether to herself, remains her clothing. She gazes at her suitcase, filled with red, green, brown, and mauve dresses, nylon nightgowns, a matching negligee, and colorful undergarments from Marks & Spencer. Eventually, encouraged by Oreste, she gives a few of her dresses to Immacolata, and in doing so, she fully loses her grip on these final pieces of herself.

Oreste’s family trusts in the veracity of the couple’s performance. As they say their goodbyes, Miranda’s faux mother-in-law hands her a cherished portrait of Oreste. “I am truly your daughter-in-law after all,” Miranda thinks. Moved by this gesture, she earnestly envisions a future as Oreste’s wife. It would be a “simple life of love based on family loyalty and physical passion,” she imagines. Despite herself, she yearns to impart to her child something of the old world, where you take a chicken from the yard, kill it, cook it, and enjoy it for dinner. Louis is of the new world, where you can purchase “frozen, battery-bred, plastic-wrapped” chicken at any hour from the grocery store—a decidedly less erotic option.

Miranda’s dueling actor-lovers pose different models of masculinity. The former is American, bland, middle-class, and egalitarian; the latter is European, sexually potent, working-class, and domineering. Both fail Miranda, and, more importantly, they fail her baby girl, who endures the most violence of all.

To read Cheltenham Lady is to wait for the baby to die. Miranda, spiraling over her maternal obligation, reasons that “there are always more of us to scramble on, if I lose or forget this child, or kill her inadvertently or intentionally. What’s a life here or there in the endless procession of millions of dead and nearly dead?” In addition to being Miranda’s dependent, the baby is also her witness. Once Louis returns, the baby says her first word: “Dada.” She knows who her real father is. “This was the one who had seen everything,” writes Brooke. “The mother looked with horror at her daughter, suddenly sprouting syllables.”

Amid the glut of plotless novels, Cheltenham Lady stands out for its marked climax. It is bold to kill off an innocent figure, such as a dog or child. But Brooke does just this. At the end, Louis returns and Miranda confesses to her affair. As they argue, Louis holds onto the pram, the baby swaddled comfortably within. Distracted, Louis loosens his grip. The carriage rolls down the driveway and into oncoming traffic. Vulnerable to her mother’s desire and her father’s absence, the baby stood no chance, had no future.

And, the book hints, neither do we. In its pessimism toward heterosexual relationships and the bourgeois family structure, Cheltenham Lady argues that we should give up the charade—or, at least, leave our marriage, run away to an ashram, and stop writing novels. There will always be other writers waiting in the wings, prepared to take up the subject of what goes on between men and women, much as there will be expectant readers, shopping for these very books and seeking deliverance within.