Blaming (Virago Modern Classics)
Read Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) Online
Authors: Elizabeth Taylor
‘Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor’s novels and short stories many times over. As a writer I’ve returned to her too – in awe of her achievements, and trying to work out how she does it’ Sarah Waters
‘Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person’s dangerous housewife. Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail – the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life’ Valerie Martin
‘The unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction … In all of Taylor’s novels and short stories, there is subtle humour, acute psychological perception and great tenderness … But it is her unflinching dissection of what goes on beneath the surface of people’s lives that makes the worlds of her novels so magnetising. The very English art of seeming
is
both respected and satirised. Again and again, the world of objects, routines and domestic necessities is expertly drawn, and beneath that the world of half-conscious feelings, suppressed longings, denied impulses, stifled resentments … She is adept at capturing the ways people interact – and how they fail to; how words, thoughts, actions glance off each other in unpredictable directions; how even those closely related can live curiously parallel existences’ Rebecca Abrams,
New Statesman
‘Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen – soul-sisters all’ Anne Tyler
‘How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!’ Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning point in one’s own experience’ Elizabeth Bowen
‘I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time. Theirs will be an unexpected pleasure, and they will … if they read her as she wanted to be read … learn much that will surprise them’ Paul Bailey
‘Sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’ Rosamond Lehmann
‘One of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor writes with a wonderful precision and grace. Her world is totally absorbing’ Antonia Fraser
‘Elizabeth Taylor has an eye as sharply all-seeing as her prose is elegant … even the humdrum becomes astonishing when told in language that always aims for descriptive integrity, without a cliché in sight. As a result, Taylor excels in conveying the tragicomic poignancy of the everyday’
Daily Telegraph
‘How skilfully and with what peculiar exhilaration she negotiated the minefield of the human heart’ Jonathan Keates,
Spectator
MODERN CLASSICS
373
Elizabeth Taylor, who was born in Reading, Berkshire, in 1912 and educated at the Abbey School, Reading, worked as a governess and librarian before her marriage in 1936: ‘I learnt so much from these jobs,’ she wrote, ‘and have never regretted the time I spent at them.’ She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life. Her first novel,
At Mrs Lippincote’s,
appeared in 1945 and was followed by eleven more, together with short stories which were published in various periodicals and collected in five volumes, and a children’s book,
Mossy Trotter.
Taylor’s shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle- and upper-middle-class English life soon won her a discriminating audience, as well as staunch friends in the world of letters. Rosamond Lehmann called her ‘sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’. Elizabeth Taylor died in 1975.
At Mrs Lippincote’s
Palladian
A View of the Harbour
A Wreath of Roses
A Game of Hide-and-Seek
The Sleeping Beauty
Angel
In a Summer Season
The Soul of Kindness
The Wedding Group
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Blaming
Short Story Collections
Hester Lilly and Other Stories
The Blush and Other Stories
A Dedicated Man and Other Stories
The Devastating Boys
Dangerous Calm
For
JOHN
with love
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 9780748131020
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976 by John Taylor
Introduction Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Keates
Afterword Copyright © 1992 by Joanna Kingham
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
The Englishness of the English novel in the twentieth century has a great deal to do with our native fondness for hierarchies. Where, it might be asked, would our fictional traditions be without a passion for pigeonholing other people, assigning contexts to them, creating whole worlds against which to place them on the basis of features such as accent, schooling, houses, possessions and taste, good or bad? In this respect it’s not hard to imagine English fiction over the past hundred years as something like a large country house, whose inhabitants occupy very carefully defined areas, only seldom coming into contact with one another and not always relishing the experience when they do. Social realists are banished to the servants’ hall, experimental voices sometimes escape from the attic, mandarins lock themselves in the library, satirists stalk the corridors, but the summer parlour, with its chintz and fine porcelain, is reserved for one particular species – the lady novelist of good family whose works can be enjoyed, without fear of being thought too arty or clever, for their perfect amalgam of serious intentions and impeccable decorum.
Elizabeth Bowen is the obvious example here, a writer of real genius who never forgot that she was a lady, and Ivy Compton-Burnett is another, her identity as a gentlewoman perhaps more urgently underlined through an awareness that her father was in trade and her great-
grandfather a labourer. Such authors find a constituency not just among those who genuinely admire their work for its original utterance and refinement of technique, but among the sort of readers for whom the worlds they portray are mercifully devoid of anything like coarseness or vulgarity. This ‘people like us’ attitude is not confined solely to women. A certain kind of male literary enthusiast enjoys such novelists because, through whatever imaginative gender-reversal, this is the kind of artist he would rather fancy becoming.
I have no wish to be Elizabeth Taylor in this or any other life, and I resent, besides, the way in which she has tended all too easily to be lumped within this particular category of twentieth-century English writers. She was indeed a friend of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Bowen praised her work. The majority of her characters belong to the middle or upper middle classes. Their grammar is often unnervingly precise. All these things ought to label her clearly enough, but nobody familiar with her work would ever reduce it to such a level of reductive typecasting. It was nevertheless something from which she suffered throughout her professional career. It seems extraordinary, for example, that her books were generally judged middlebrow rather than highbrow, to the extent that their critical reception sometimes tended to suggest a position at the superior end of the popular women’s fiction market. There are undeniable moments throughout her work when her usual resourcefulness and self-awareness seem temporarily to have been dissipated. A sentence like ‘Separated from their everyday life, as if in a dream or on a honeymoon, Kate and Dermot were under the spell of the
gentle weather and the blossoming countryside’, from
In a Summer Season,
has a bland, generic quality which seems inauthentic to her best writing. Yet at her finest she has an unrivalled grasp of the complex workings of even the most banal emotion, highlighting the potential poignancy within the sometimes enormous space which lies between a feeling and its expression.
The point to remember about Elizabeth Taylor is that she always knew more than anybody guessed with regard to the various forms of ordinary life which surrounded her. We have only to read the hilarious yet at the same time grimly tragic
Angel
to understand this. A piquant indication of such alertness appears in her last novel
Blaming,
written while she was dying of cancer and published posthumously in 1976. The ex-sailor Ernie Pounce, Amy’s bizarre factotum, describes meeting a lady wrestler. ‘We had a cheeseburger together after the session, and she was explaining how she keeps in strict training. No spirits or potatoes, plenty of steak. She had very high standards about fair play too. “No nails,” she said. “Hair-pulling or biting; but no nails.” She was quite explicit about that.’