Blaise Gavender is a psychotherapist with a wife and a sixteen-year-old son, living near London in a comfortable home called Hood House.

For years he has been putting off telling Harriet about Emily, but finally is forced to do so when Luca secretly visits Hood House and the truth threatens to come out.

Montague (Monty) Small, the Gavenders' neighbour and family friend, is a popular detective novelist whose wife Sophie has recently died.

[3] Blaise feels "that Harriet was his sacred love and Emily his profane"[4]: 342  He sees himself as leading "a double life" and as "a man of two truths, since both these lives were valuable and true".

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine was widely and generally favourably reviewed, and won the 1974 Whitbread Novel Award.

[10] The Time reviewer called it a "glittering examination of love's disguises in the London suburbs" and a "deliberately humorless antifarce" and compared its narrative tone to that of John Updike's 1968 novel Couples.

John Wain pointed out that Blaise's "sacred" love for Harriet is characterized by "selfishness and possessiveness", while his erotic "profane" attachment to Emily has "a depth and a purity, in some ways self-forgetfulness", making a clear moral distinction between the two states impossible.

[2]: 266  The philosopher Martha Nussbaum focussed on The Sacred and Profane Love Machine in her analysis of Murdoch's Platonic views of sexual desire.