have read these before; perhaps in an earlier collection ( )

It doesn't look as though Margaret Drabble had a huge amount of selecting to do, as this NYRB collection manages to pack in almost all of Taylor's published short stories. But we get a nice introduction from her, anyway.

Taylor was writing at a time (1940s-1960s) when the Anglo-American short story market was incredibly competitive, but usually had no trouble at all placing her work in the top American magazines, mostly the New Yorker. And it's pretty obvious when you read these stories why that was. All the qualities that are there in her novels are still present here: the sentences that say extraordinary things in very ordinary words, her ability to engage emotionally with her characters at the same time as making fun of them, to point out the devastating sadness that lies just under the surface of trivial things. And in the short format she doesn't have to deal with the boring business of exposition and chronology: she can leap right in, show us something that we would never have spotted for ourselves, and then start again with a new set of characters.

As you would expect, most of these stories are set against the background of middle-class Home Counties life, whilst others presumably reflect Taylor's childhood experiences as the less-fortunate child who gets invited to the homes of her rich schoolfriends. And three or four mine the endlessly fertile territory of the British on holiday, most memorably one in which the viewpoint character is a woman staying in a Greek hotel who enjoys a glorious vicarious holiday through the conversations of two elderly ladies she overhears from the next room through a flimsy partition wall. Until she sneezes and the spell is broken...

A real pleasure: a book to keep on the bedside table and dip into over a period of weeks or months. ( )

Taylor is such a Good writer. ( )