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The opening line of The Sleeping Beauty (1953) is ‘There's Vinny going in with the wreaths’. Is Vinny a loyal commemorator, staunchly identifying with the departed past? Or is he determined to be first on the scene of its interment? Taylor's 1940s writing had treated continuity and change, and the vexing question as to which of these any given event represented, in wartime and its immediate aftermath - a period with which her novels had identified so tightly that they effectively presented symptoms as well as accounts of it. The move into the 1950s seemed to bring the possibility of longer, more detached views, or of a more decisive sense of shift into new conditions - as in The Sleeping Beauty itself, with its fairy-tale connotations of awakening and sloughing-off. In a Summer Season (1961) sets sensibilities formed in the 1930s struggling to adjust to 1960, with its relentless pressures of modernization. Between these is Angel (1957), Taylor's one specifically historical novel, in which the heroine, living from 1885 to the bitter winter of 1947, does her best to ignore altogether the history, both private and public, that nonetheless shapes her existence.
A Game of Hide and Seek (1951) is the first of these new departures, a novel following its heroine from adolescence through to middle age, roughly 1929-49. It is less concerned than its predecessor novels with period mood or detail - although there is still plenty. It uses its more extended historical span to explore the relationship between slow accumulations and sudden lurches, or between inter-generational conflict and the gradual establishment of new climates of feeling and attitude. It is also the first of Taylor's novels to make passion its central subject. She had not really addressed passion at all directly until A View of the Harbour, and the lovers there and in A Wreath of Roses had a certain residual self-consciousness as to the degree to which their feelings were products of the times, of the anxiety, boredom or wounded pride accompanying them.
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