The lack of attention given to Elizabeth Taylor's work seems especially remarkable when one examines the number of novels and short stories she wrote. In twenty-seven years Taylor published eleven novels and four collections of short stories (her final...

DEBUT NOVELIST ELIZABETH GAFFNEY METROPOLIS RANDOM HOUSE. $24.95 Elizabeth Gaffney, advisory editor for The Paris Review, published her first novel, Metropolis, this month, and it's not what one might expect from someone at such an echt-Modernist literary journal. Neither confessional nor especially angst-ridden,...

Age 68 Appearance Varies almost week by week. Her weight has been known to fluctuate by 40lb within the space of a year, so she can look like a drop- dead gorgeous entrant in a grab-a-granny contest one day and an over-made- up,...

Elizabeth Taylor returned to the stage Saturday night, after persuading striking TV and film writers to briefly put down their picket signs.The Writers Guild of America agreed not to picket the Paramount Pictures lot when actress and AIDS activist Taylor gave a benefit performance of...

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit demanding that Elizabeth Taylor turn over a Vincent van Gogh painting once confiscated by Nazis.Four descendants of the late Margarete Mauthner, whose possessions were seized by the Nazis after she fled Germany in...

The making of a literary reputation is an awkward, unfair business. "One of our foremost novelists", Angus Wilson is quoted as saying on the jacket of one Elizabeth Taylor novel; James Agate, in 1945, "chortled from the first page to the last" of another one; the TLS managed a comparison with Chekhov, Amis, Hartley, Priestley, Bowen, Betjeman—a chorus of praise from fellow-writers of various sorts fills up the blurbs of her fifteen books. Yet it would not be entirely farfe...

If the English writer Elizabeth Taylor is not widely known in this country, maybe it's because most of her books were published back when people still spoke of "women's novels" without so much as a set of quotation marks to excuse the phrase. She did write exceptionally quiet tales—at least on the surface. She had a quiet, if excellent, reputation. And she admitted to enjoying "books in which practically nothing ever happens"—a charge leveled at her ow...

[Elizabeth Taylor] wrote twelve novels and produced four volumes of short stories, many of the latter reprinted from the New Yorker magazine—in itself a sign that she was rather more than the comfortable chronicler of domesticity that she was sometimes taken to be. In fact, she scrutinized the people around her with a peculiarly cool, detached eye, though with her gift of deadly observation went a deep and compassionate human sympathy. Probing beneath the surface of life in comfortable homes, she fou...