Introduction

Summary

‘What would you like carved on your gravestone?’ Martha asked.

After a little consideration, Amy said, ‘I think I should like “She meant well”. But I'm afraid I haven't always.’ Martha, who had her own answer ready, was not asked.

This tiny extract from Elizabeth Taylor's last novel, Blaming, written only a few months before she died, gives a glimpse of much that her admirers find so exhilarating: the instant capture of different kinds of self-absorption; the comic, desolate distances between those apparently close; the commanding poise of the narrative voice, opening horizons around the moment over which the reader could brood almost endlessly. One can find such passages everywhere in her work, examples of her ‘very best’ writing, as Hilary Spurling describes it: ‘clear, pure, almost transparent on the surface, full of ambiguities of humour and feeling below’. Yet while Taylor's novels and stories were highly regarded by other writers of her time - figures as diverse as L. P. Hartley, Kingsley Amis, A. L. Barker, and Angus Wilson - they never received much notice or acclaim from the academy or the metropolitan literary world. Reputable surveys of post-war fiction appeared in which she barely merited a mention, or was ignored altogether. For the most part, this pattern seems to be continuing, despite regular reprints of the Virago editions of her work: novelists of subsequent generations, such as Anita Brookner, or more recently Philip Hensher and Sarah Waters, express deep enthusiasm for Taylor, while the bulk of her output still appears to be waiting for contemporary criticism to discover it. This study has been written in the hope of assisting that discovery, and of encouraging more readers to explore for themselves a body of work so undervalued and so richly sustaining.

There have been some welcome exceptions to the general neglect. Some of her early novels, such as At Mrs Lippincote's and A Wreath of Roses, have featured quite prominently in recent revaluations of women's writing from around the time of the Second World War: in, for example, Jenny Hartleys Millions Like Us, Phyllis Lassner's British Women Writers of World War II, and Victoria Stewart's Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s.