The concern in [The Sleeping Beauty] (which the reader instantly shares) is with people in transition, moving from one pattern of life to another: Isabella drifts from a conventionally settled marriage through bereavement into the frivolities of the Turkish baths; her son, Lawrence, escapes from the servitude of his inarticulate adolescence and a deep-bitten inferiority toward some capacity for independence, pleasure and happiness which, with unerring instinct, he looks for through a simple servant girl; Vinny is the romantic, dallying bachelor whose mauve masculinity takes on deeper, surer tones as he moves toward his first genuine experience of love; and Emily, Elizabeth Taylor 1912–1975 © Jerry Bauerthe strangely beautiful recluse, hiding in the refuge of her sister's possessiveness, must be lured back to life.

Mrs. Taylor possesses a fine sense of the interplay of feeling. She also possesses so fine an ear for the English idiom that her American...