Elizabeth Taylor (1)Rezensionen

The novelist Elizabeth Taylor is quietly cunning, devastatingly precise in her anatomy of the human mind The smallest sentences 'Sometimes, optimism briefly unsettled Mrs. Secretan" - provide so much. I will say that the modern re-releases of these books have the most atrocious covers: a glamorous woman's face in artful black-and-white, as if this were an advertisement for Chanel. I know "novels about slightly weary, deluded mid-20th century British people" is a tough sell, but making them look like upscale romance novels aimed at young urban types who work in marketing...well, that just seems irresponsible!

Other reviewers have said everything required about this novel, so I will just leave you with a longer quote below.
“A quiz programme. Two rows of people facing one another. A pompous, school-masterly man asking the questions. Those answers that Percy knew he spoke out loudly and promptly; when he was at a loss he pretended (as if he were not alone) that he had not quite caught the question, or he was busy blowing his nose to make a reply, or had to go to help himself to whiskey.”

A bit slow off the mark, this novel rewards the reader's perseverance with Taylor's usual cold-blooded portrayal of human nature. Her ordinary people are so full of common quirks, uncommon eccentricities, pettiness and occasionally a dash of generosity that one almost has to squirm with recognition as they play their roles out on the page.

Rereading this for my RL book group. Probably read about 10 years ago, didn't remember it a bit.

For me one of her least engaging novels, over the years I have read all bar 1. I really didn't warm to any of the characters, except maybe Lou (Louise) the 19 year old daughter. I didn't feel I really knew the central character Kate, but maybe that was the point, and her annoying younger 2nd husband Dermot ... why, I kept asking myself.

The older characters: Edwina, Aunt Ethel (I hate when writers give characters names beginning with the same letter) and Charles were more fully drawn. Not the novel to start with I'd suggest.

My favourite of hers is [A View of the Harbour] which I have read several times (I love the tone), and started me reading her work.

My second Elizabeth Taylor novel, I enjoyed it as much as the first (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont), it is more character study and less plot. I love her character's dialogue saying one thing but their thoughts say the complete opposite...can be quite funny at times. Her dinner table conversations are numerous and she switches between conversations so smoothly I was never confused as to who was talking.

I listened to a podcast about Taylor, her grandson revealed that she would go to restaurants alone so she could eavesdrop on conversations as part of her research. She definitely honed that skill....

The intoduction (I usually read those after I've read the book as I think sometimes they spoil the story) was confusing and added nothing to my enjoyment of the book.

Recommend...

Excellent character study of a totally self-absorbed "Edwardian" novelist who unaccountably inspired great loyalty in a number of people who saw her flaws and loved her anyway, through thick and thin.
2008½

Just a wonderful almost-gothic read. A sort of 20th century Jane Eyre without the crazy woman in the attic. Perfect characters---waspish women and pain-ridden men. Crumbling mansions. And ghosts of a sort. Loved it.
Read in 2012

Overall, I give it 4 stars - my favorites were Flesh, about two people at a seaside resort who decide to have a fling, and Sisters, about a widow who gets a visit from an author asking about her sister. I enjoyed my time with Elizabeth Taylor in this collection.

Poc després d'enviudar, la senyora Palfrey decideix anar a viure a l'hotel Claremont, al carrer Cromwell de Londres, ciutat on hi viu el seu net, en Desmond. La senyora Palfrey espera que el net el visiti, però aquest no ho fa. Això és tema de conversa entre els altres hostes i motiu de vergonya per ella.
Un dia coneix en Ludo, un jove que està intentant escriure una novel·la. I el farà passar pel seu net. Però ¿què passarà el dia que es presenti el net de veritat?
Reflexions sobre la vellesa. La solitud de la vellesa ¿Què significa arribar a vell? Tot són rejudicis i aparences ¿Què diran?
"Aquí no ens hi deixen morir" pàg. 43
A la pàgina 76 es descriuen els antecedents del fenomen de la "botellada". Ja passava al Londres dels anys 70 entre els seguidors dels partits de rugby:
"És una cursa molt curta amb molts punts d'avituallament".
La dependència dels vells:
"Això que et treguin a passejar, és que Déu n´hi do...com si fossis una nena petita". pàg. 136
"Era un afer d'homes. Dels diners se'n feien càrrec ells. La dona només tenia ocasió d'ocupar-se'n quan era massa tard" pàg. 149
La pèrdua de la memòria:
"En la vellesa les coses es tornaven complicades. Era com ser un infant, però a la inversa. Per una criatura, cada dia que passa representa un petit aprenentatge; per a un vell, un petit oblit... Són edats cansades, tant la infantesa com la vellesa". pàg. 192
Banda sonora. Some Enchanted Evening (1949), cantada d'entre d'altres, per en Frank Sinatra.½

best line in review: for Roddy, merely love cannot suffice - he needs homage as well as admiration

have read these before; perhaps in an earlier collection

When newly-orphaned Cassandra Dashwood arrives as governess to little Sophy, the scene seems set for the archetypal romance between young girl and austere widowed employer. But conventions are subverted. Cassandra is to discover that in real life, tragedy, comedy and acute embarrassment are never far apart.

Very poignant & well-observed.

Mrs. Palfrey is an admirable woman who does the best she can in her circumstances: she is now a widow, after a perfect marriage, with enough money and mobility to stay at a residential hotel in South Kensington. A handful of other aged residents also live there.The comparison of the author to Jane Austen is spot on. Even Mrs. Palfrey, admirable as she is, is also deceitful, and claims that Ludo, a stranger who helped her, is her grandson come to dine. (He is a better choice.) Ludo is an aspiring writer who writes at Harrod's---in a room that no longer exists---so that he doesn't have to heat his small apartment.

I felt distant from the characters; I don't know if this was a decision by Ms. Taylor or a failing on her part or mine. The hotel's long-term residents work at keeping a sense of distance from each other; perhaps it's the British stiff-upper-lip attitude of this part of society. But even family relationships are awkward and strained. I think Mrs. Palfrey makes the widower of their group a better person; growth is always possible.

I read the reviews on IMDB of the Joan Plowright movie; it was widely described as lovely. People who adapt Jane Austen's stories frequently make them sweeter. The book is not lovely; it is sometimes humorous, sometimes brutally honest but sympathetic, sometimes sad. My first reaction to the ending was outrage; I calmed down and now feel the ending is perfect. It's not only that we don't truly know anybody; we don't really want to know anybody.

(My family used to vacation at a residential hotel in Lakewood, NJ, in the 1960s.I remember the older women would sit by the deep end of the swimming pool and complain that the children splashed too much when they jumped into the water. And that they insisted the hotel's television show The Lawrence Welk Show on Sunday nights.)

This book started off strong, with an antagonistic main character, Angel, who is so full of herself you can't help but be amused. After all, she is only fifteen. She has a bad day at school, and takes to her bed, pretending to be sick. She prolongs this by deciding to write a novel - in bed. She's convinced she is a genius, despite the fact she has little life knowledge, no background in reading any books at all, and a horrific vocabulary full of big words she uses incorrectly.

And she gets published. And a certain segment of the population loves her books. And she becomes rich.

And then I got bored. Angel's adult life didn't really interest me at all, so the second half of this novel didn't really work for me. For me, this was one of the less interesting books that NYRB has published.

I do not know why I was not exposed to reading Elizabeth Taylor in school. Her depictions of everyday life and how she makes these so special is phenomenal. Her writing is captivating. Her dialogue is realistic, and her descriptions are thorough. I would have gained so much more from reading her prose than that which I was forced to read. This author is definitely underrated. This is the second book I've read of Ms. Taylor's and it won't be the last.

Why wasn't this required reading when I was in high school?

not as overtly dark as previous read, brilliant writing of slow decay

"I can’t imagine how anyone can know that marriage will be that. The very idea of wanting to be with the same person, day in, day out, the same bed even, shut up together for a lifetime; well, even for half a lifetime. Just imagine, as a child, being told that some day one will have to belong to some other person, so finally that only death could put an end to it. You couldn’t blame the child for bursting into tears at the idea. To be under the same roof till kingdom come."

(4.5 stars rounded up. This is really a 5-star book, but a slightly less impressive 5-stars than Taylor’s knock-‘em-dead masterworks.)

A slight, almost sadly inconsequential Taylor that explores the familial ties that shape us, bind us, and yet from which we long to be free. The way Taylor explores this across two characters—Cressy and David, both from totally different worlds—is skillfully done, but the writing here feels flat, awkward, and is riddled with sentence fragments that are atypical of Taylor’s usual elegance; the characterization is a bit forced, too, almost two-dimensional.

Recommended only for those seeking to complete their journey through Tayloyr’s oeuvre. I still have one more of her novels to read (The Soul of Kindness), and suspect The Wedding Group to be the dud of them all. It was followed by the hilariously morbid Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and then topped off with one of Taylor’s finest novels, her last published, Blaming.

I wrote at some length for Full Stop on Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, where I also place that novel in the context of several of her others, finding common threads across what is interestingly a very robust, versatile body of work.

For those new to Taylor, I would eschew Angel for your first read, which was the most popular of her novels during her lifetime (why, I’ll never know, as it’s an outlier). Instead, I would highly recommend either beginning with something like A View of the Harbour or In a Summer Season to get a sense of her breadth and scope, or even heading straight for her masterpiece, A Wreath of Roses.

To enter into Elizabeth Taylor’s world is always unsettling: I’ve written a bit about some of her work—especially A View of the Harbour—after reading some of the “bigger hits” of her writing career. However, as I’m making my way through some of the other novels of hers that I haven’t yet gotten to, I’m continually astonished at her unique vision of England, of marriage, and of (especially female) subjectivity.



Taylor’s vision is comedic but also bleak and often dark; here, in her first novel, she is as assured with her subject matter and her own voice as Elizabeth Bowen was in her own debut, The Hotel, which I also just recently read. While Taylor uses numerous intertextual elements in At Mrs. Lippincote’s to situate her own thematic concerns as well as her characters’ reactions to World War II—e.g., allusions to the Brontës abound—her voice is all her own.



Forced to live in a home that is not her own, Julia Davenant tries to maintain order in her life as mother to an ill, book-obsessed seven-year-old son, Oliver; as wife to the egotistical, career-driven RAF officer, Roddy; and as surrogate sister-in-law to Roddy’s spinster cousin, Eleanor, who lives with them. Yet order is difficult to maintain when one is resistance to conformity and when one balks at the constraints of life as they become apparent: we witness Julia’s difficulty balancing her own independence with her various roles, juxtaposed darkly and comedically—in a way that only Taylor can pull off—with men straying from their wives, with those who have come down in the world due to the war, and with the pull toward different kinds of affinities in a world made somehow smaller and scarier by the threat of bombs, even though Roddy’s post is in part an attempt to get his family out of the danger zone of London.



Brutal and honest in its portrayal of marriage and wartime disappointment, At Mrs. Lippincote’s takes a subtle pacifist stance to question notions of patriotism, the allure of socialism (some of the novel’s finest scenes see Eleanor’s seduction by the socialist ideal, as much out of politics as out of loneliness), and the trappings and cruelties of daily life that war intensifies just as it magnifies.



Those new to Taylor would do well to start here, and perhaps then build their way up to her magnum opus: A Wreath of Roses.

I reviewed this for Full Stop: http://www.full-stop.net/2015/07/06/reviews/k-thomas-khan/a-view-of-the-harbour-...

Brilliant slow story in boarding during the war. marriage breakdown½

Not your typical heroine, then. Mrs. Palfrey is a refined widow who needs a place to live but is not welcome or opposed to living with her daughter in Scotland. She settles up at the Claremont Hotel on London's Cromwell Road, where she joins a select group of senior citizens. On this group, Mrs. Palfrey used deception. A young writer named Ludo saves her when she tumbles to the ground in the street. Desmond, her grandson, has not come to see her at the Claremont. Ludo, who is also lonely and drawn to the excitement of pretending to be someone else, volunteers to portray Mrs. Palfrey's grandson. He can also use the chance to conduct some study. Mrs. Palfrey gains a grandson, receives a guest, and gains respect from the locals. How Mrs. Palfrey and Ludo handle the dangers and challenges that this deceit brings about, including a visit from le vrai Desmond, is one of the novel's charming elements.

Haunting, bleak, accurate, very dated and brilliant½

Set in 1950s England, Taylor’s novel revolves around Kate Heron, a well-to-do widow in her early forties who has quickly remarried after the death of her children’s father. Her new husband, Dermot, is ten years her junior. He’s a ne’er-do-well who’s managed to coast through life on looks and charm. Edwina, his mother, has swept in periodically to rescue him financially. Now he’s got Kate to keep him . . . though he finds it humiliating to ask her for money. Dermot’s charisma is wearing thin, while his phoney Irish brogue is just wearing. He’s drifted along purposelessly, never settling down to any sort of gainful employment. His latest scheme is growing mushrooms in a shed full of manure on Kate’s property. Yes, Taylor retains her sense of humour in depicting his character.

Kate and Dermot live with Kate’s 22-year-old, restless son, Tom—a bit of a Dermot himself—who’s employed by his irascible self-made grandfather at the factory business the old man spent his life building. There’s also Kate’s 16-year-old daughter Louisa (“Lou”) who’s home for school holidays; Ethel, an elderly spinster aunt, former teacher, and hanger-on; and their cook, Mrs. Meacock, an avid scrapbooker. They all live a comfortable life in a Thames Valley London-commuter-belt village. The ease of their existence is courtesy of Kate’s deceased husband, Alan, who appears to have been a successful businessman. If anyone still grieves Alan, it’s not in evidence. (It’s unclear how long ago he actually died or from what.)

There’s lots of speculation as to why Kate married Dermot—and plenty of community disapproval. Her mothering role now mostly ended, she likely felt empty and at loose ends, conjectures the young curate, Father Blizzard. It’s due to sex, writes Aunt Ethel to her old suffragette friend, Gertrude. Ethel gives the marriage five years, by which time the “physical side” will have certainly subsided. No, it’s all down to jealousy, Louisa opines to the curate: Tom had been off having fun with one girlfriend after another, paying little attention to Kate, so she went for a combo boyfriend/son figure who’d take her out and about and make her feel young again. Taylor leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that Dermot satisfies Kate’s womanly desires, perhaps in a way her first husband did not. Having married her, Dermot’s given her a boost—but also made her anxious about her age. The grey hairs coming in are worrisome.

This being Taylor, In a Summer Season is an ensemble piece: the reader is privy to the stories, small challenges, and mundane miseries of a supporting cast of characters. Louisa has found religion via her infatuation with the young Anglican clergyman who’s too high-church for most in the village and plans to leave—to join the Catholics, heaven forbid! Tom falls for Araminta (“Minty”), the pretty flibbertigibbet daughter of Charles and Dorothea Thornton, his parents’ old friends. (Dorothea died around the same time as Alan, and her bereaved husband and daughter who’d left the Thames Valley to go abroad for a time have now returned.) Aunt Ethel, spends her days sending written reports to her friend down in Cornwall on the petty drama of Kate and Dermot’s relationship. When not preparing her less-than-savoury American-inspired meals, Mrs. Meacock dreams of overseas adventures and culinary responsibilities elsewhere.

While Taylor’s writing is reliably fluent, this novel is, on the whole, a rather bland one, very light on incident. Kate is a dull and occasionally exasperatingly stupid woman; unsympathetic Dermot the drifter’s plight is less than compelling; Tom and Minty’s love neither convinces nor interests. I found Lou and Ethel mildly engaging, but not enough to actually save the book. I really didn’t care what happened to any of these people. This is not a good thing in a character-driven novel.

The significant event upon which the novel turns is Charles and Minty’s coming back to the village . Mature, gentlemanly, kind Charles is, of course, a stark contrast to Dermot. His ditzy daughter in her ridiculous garments is training to be a model. She becomes Tom’s obsession. A “tragedy”—can one even call it that when none of these characters evokes much sympathy or even interest?—occurs in the eleventh hour, hastily clearing out inconvenient characters so that all may resolve tidily.

A few years ago, I took part in a reading group that worked its way through Taylor’s novels. While I admire the author’s perceptive, sometimes sardonic writing and do like two or three of her novels, reading several in a row was too much of a muchness. I left the group before reading In a Summer Season. The long break from Taylor allowed me to finally take on the only novel of hers I hadn’t read. Unfortunately, I can’t summon up much enthusiasm for it.½