Twenty years ago, I read Blaming, Elizabeth Taylor’s last novel, published soon after her death, in 1975. I immediately began to read as many of her books as I could find. I finished one and promptly started the next, one right after the other.
Recently I had a similar experience rereading one of Taylor’s books and then going on to read a half dozen more, making my way, a bit gingerly, through the landscape she portrays: an enthralling but unsettling minefield of misdirected passion, marital disaffection, social embarrassment, and the bad behavior that can occur when people are being their most authentic selves. This time I started with A Game of Hide and Seek (1951) and finished with the Complete Short Stories, published by Virago, which has been heroic in keeping Taylor’s work in print.
Born in Reading, England, in 1912, she worked as a librarian and governess before marrying John Taylor, a businessman. Together they settled in Buckinghamshire and raised a family. Taylor’s first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, was published in 1945, when she was thirty-two. She wrote twelve novels and four volumes of stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker. Her literary friends and admirers of her work included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Elizabeth Bowen, and Angus Wilson.
The best of her fiction is extremely funny, incisive, sympathetic, and beautifully written, but it can also make us squirm with uneasy recognition and tell us more than we might choose to hear about ourselves and our neighbors. Awful things happen in these narratives, not in the sense of violence and gore but of characters realizing awful truths about the lives in which they are hopelessly mired. Many of the relationships—most often between spouses but also between traveling companions, co-workers, neighbors, relatives, and friends—deliver all of the pleasures and satisfactions of the Ancient Mariner’s relationship with his albatross.
One story in the collection, “The Rose, the Mauve, the White,” so accurately describes being in one’s early teens and not being asked to dance by any of the boys at a party that, reading it, I again felt the agony that time had mercifully dulled. After I had recovered, my dismay was supplanted by awed respect for Taylor’s ability to exhume the buried but obviously undead past.
Let me suggest that readers begin with “Hester Lilly,” the first story in the collection. To say that it is “about” a young woman who comes to stay at a boys’ boarding school with her older cousin Robert and his wife, Muriel, and who, armed only with the weapon of youth, nearly blows apart their marriage, is to misrepresent it. For any summary runs the risk of making the story sound more familiar and less original than it is.
Here, as in Taylor’s novel Palladian, we watch a hapless orphan girl live out her Jane Eyre fantasy. Stoked by romantic notions, determined to fall in love with the first Mr. Rochester who can fog a mirror, Hester Lilly succeeds in snagging the attention of the bored, middle-aged Robert.
As the story opens, Muriel has been fuming about Hester Lilly’s arrival at the school where Robert is headmaster. “Muriel’s first sensation was one of derisive relief. The name—Hester Lilly—had suggested to her a goitrous, pre-Raphaelite frailty . . . danger to any wife.” But Hester Lilly’s “jaunty, defiant and absurd” wardrobe instills Muriel with “injudicious confidence.” “I will take her under my wing, Muriel promised herself. The idea of an unformed personality to be moulded and highlighted invigorated her, and the desire to tamper with—as in those fashion magazines in which ugly duckling is so disastrously changed to swan before our wistful eyes—made her impulsive and welcoming.”
Muriel is a glorious invention, improbably but believably combining the repressed propriety of a headmaster’s wife with the self-dramatizing theatrics of the diva. She has a friend, Beatrice, with whom she has mordantly humorous and depressing conversations about how to endure the tediousness of sex and weighing the relative advantages of childlessness versus having children. Even as we’re reading scenes of high comedy and following sly turns of plot that suggest art imitating life imitating soap opera, we may be surprised to find ourselves deeply moved by the dreams and disappointments of characters who are not necessarily likable, and who all want opposite things. We’re tossed about by grief and anxiety for all of them at the same time.
Some of the stories in the collection are slighter, more anecdotal than others; others seem more like sketches than developed narratives. I especially liked “The Devastating Boys,” “You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There,” “A Red-letter Day,” and “The Letter-writers,” but readers will have their own favorites. The informative introduction, by Taylor’s daughter, Joanna Kingham, is excellent.
I’ve read descriptions of Taylor’s work that make it sound like yet another rainy tea time among the cabbage roses. But her fiction is much more fun than that, more wicked and subversive. No one writes more honestly about the way the “wrong” emotions can surface at inconvenient times; no one has created a more appalling gallery of narcissistic, controlling mothers-in-law, nor has anyone written quite so knowingly about the ways in which married couples, thrown together on holiday or at a social event, perform for, and compete with, each other. And no one is less afraid to monitor the intensity with which our insecurities can inspire a jolt of hatred for an innocent stranger whose only crime is to have evaded the self-doubt that plagues us.
Were I new to Elizabeth Taylor’s work, I’d read “Hester Lilly” and a dozen of the stories, then go on to the novels. Then I would still have the rest of the stories left to parcel out, savoring them, one by one, until enough time had passed so that I could go back and begin again, rereading one book after another.