I have not read [Elizabeth Taylor's] previous novels but familiar ghosts of thirty years of reviews flutter down. 'Formidably intelligent', 'ironic wit', 'delicate impressionism', 'penetrating psychological insights', succeeding 'quiet authority', 'nervous prose', 'exquisite touches', even 'exquisite sensitivity'. They induced misgivings, a hint of small beer in the opulent homesteads of those with too little to do. Actually, Blaming so justifies the above commendations that there is little to add. Set in the trimmed careful properties of North London, it is very personal, lacking the metaphysics that reviewers find in Iris Murdoch. The jacket aptly shows a woman hopelessly slumped at a table, a snake coiled under an elegant, sinuous flower. A cool, clear story reveals a youngish grand-mother's reactions to her husband's sudden death, the wretched readjustments, and her friends' help, at first necessary, ultimately infuriating. The normal decencies that sustain society are dissected, shown to conceal resentment, guilt, dislike, venomous heads always ready to lift soundlessly from the herbacious border. Much of life is a search for someone to blame, not least oneself. Mourning, reflects one character, seems to give the go-ahead to every sort of rudeness and selfishness. Also, to the observer, considerable entertainment. Mrs Taylor's wit can be caustic…. The book is a taut meditation not only on death but renewal from one who, in another cliché, kept her eyes skinned. (pp. 106-07)
Peter Vansittart, "Underdogs," in London Magazine (© London Magazine 1977), n.s. Vol. 16, No. 6, February-March, 1977, pp. 105-09.∗
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