Critical Essay | Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement

Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement

The sleeping beauty of Miss Taylor's title is Emily, terribly injured in a car accident, who does not recognize the beauty of the new face created for her by plastic surgery and lives in nunnish seclusion, looking after the mentally defective daughter of her sister Rose. Emily is warmed to life again by a middle-aged Jamesian figure named Vinny who has already a wife living, but makes a bigamous alliance with Emily which is enduring happily at the end of the book. The plot of The Sleeping Beauty is grotesque: but once it has been accepted, or ignored, there can be little but admiration for the subtlety and humour with which Miss Taylor has invested her whole curious fairy-story…. [The] book is full of … moments in which the pathos and comedy of social incongruities are neatly caught. It is Miss Taylor's comic sense, conveyed through many passages of conversation...
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