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...

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 diary of Chester Gillette, whose murder of his lover in 1906 became the basis for Theodore Dreiser's classic "An American Tragedy," has been donated to Hamilton College after being passed down for generations through his family."He truly is a different person in the diary"...

So maybe Mark Antony loved Cleopatra for her mind. That is the conclusion being drawn by academics at Britain's University of Newcastle from a Roman denarius coin which depicts the celebrated queen of Egypt as a sharp-nosed, thin-lipped woman with a protruding chin.In short, a...

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...