They're a testament of quality to a woman whose life was considered so devoid of incident that her friend Elizabeth Jane Howard turned down a request to write her biography.
Of course they are, and this is their beauty, but it has taken a long time for this style of low-key writing to come back into fashion, and Taylor's books are once more appearing on shelves. Her plots involve artists and their exploiters, affairs and marriages, small betrayals, intellectual alliances, respectability and disappointment, and fall so naturally into place that they don't feel plotted at all. (The writer once received fan letter requesting a photograph of her in a bikini – with customary wit she remarked this was not possible since she did not own one.) The centenary of Taylor’s birth last year has helped to rehabilitate her work, including her twelve novels – one shortlisted for the 1971 Booker prize – and dozens of short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker magazine.This most English of writers had the ability to create richly populated worlds. Taylor’s early success, beginning with the publication of At Mrs Lippincote’s in 1945, coincided with the rise of her more famous namesake, making it difficult for her to attract due recognition. are my only adventure and I hope never to have any others.”ĭespite these rather prissy sentiments, she was in the words of her contemporary, Rosamond Lehmann, “sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit.” Her nuanced prose could ridicule a character’s folly and then subvert the reader’s response with a poignant twist of sympathy.
“I hate ‘adventure,’ ‘experience,’ can never make any use of them or assimilate them," she said. Herself to the domestic dramas of middle England, much in the tradition of JaneĪusten.
An excerpt from the jacket of her novel A Wreath of Roses shows an author who confined
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