Elizabeth Taylor (novelist)

Born in Reading, Berkshire, the daughter of Oliver Coles, an insurance inspector, and his wife Elsie May Fewtrell, Elizabeth was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and then worked as a governess, tutor and librarian. She married in 1936 John Taylor, owner of a confectionery company, after which they lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire for almost all their married life. She was briefly a member of the British Communist Party, then a consistent Labour Party supporter.[2]

Taylor's first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945. It was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book. The English critic Philip Hensher called The Soul of Kindness a novel "so expert that it seems effortless. As it progresses, it seems as if the cast are so fully rounded that all the novelist had to do was place them, successively, in one setting after another and observe how they reacted to each other.... The plot... never feels as if it were organised in advance; it feels as if it arises from her characters' mutual responses."[3]

Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of everyday life and situations. Her shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle-class and upper middle-class English life won her an audience of discriminating readers, as well as loyal friends in the world of letters. She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell. Her long correspondence with the latter forms the subject of one of her short stories, "The Letter Writers" (published in The Blush, 1951), but the letters were destroyed, in line with her general policy of keeping her private life private. A horror of publicity is the subject of another celebrated short story, "Sisters", written in 1969.[4]

Anne Tyler once compared Taylor to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen – "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words.[5]

Taylor was also a close friend of Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was asked by Taylor's widower to write a biography following Elizabeth Taylor's death. Howard refused due to what she felt was a lack of incident in Taylor's life.[6] See Slipstream, Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir, for more details on their friendship. Taylor's editor at the UK publisher Chatto & Windus was the poet D. J. Enright.[2]

Elizabeth Taylor died of cancer in Penn, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 63.[2]

Perhaps the first film adaption of one of her works was on the television series "Tales of the Unexpected", in September 1980, of the short story "The Flypaper." This broadcast became one of the infamously dark and sinister episodes in British TV history.[7] In the 21st century a new interest in her work was kindled by film-makers. Ruth Sacks Caplin had written a film screenplay based on Taylor's novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in the 1970s,[8] but it languished for decades until her son, Lee Caplin, purchased the rights to the film in 1999.[8] Ruth Sacks Caplin's film adaptation, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, directed by Dan Ireland, was finally released in 2005 with British actress Joan Plowright in the title role.[8]

The New York Review of Books reissued Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in 2021 in its Classics series. In his introduction to this edition, Michael Hofmann noted that the novel was nominated for the Booker Prize, but that the novelist Saul Bellow, a "celebrity judge, thought he heard a lot of tinkling teacups in Mrs. Palfrey, and there went her chances" – with V. S. Naipaul having won that year instead for In a Free State. Set in 1968 or 1969, with frequent references to popular culture (ranging from the Beatles, to the novels of C. P. Snow) and changing social tastes, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a post-imperial novel with the lead character herself having spent most of her adult life in Burma, where her late husband had his job. "The whole country seems to be in a bit of a pother," Hoffman observes, "but oddly, there are Union Jacks everywhere."[9]

French director François Ozon made a 2007 film of Angel with Romola Garai.

• "The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel."

• Nicola Beauman, The Other Elizabeth Taylor (Persephone Books 2009)
• Elizabeth and Ivy, ed. Robert Liddell (1986). Memoir of Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett with correspondence

• Elizabeth Taylor at IMDb

• From England, A Belated Gift: Elizabeth Taylor's Fiction at Rain Taxi