[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 found nothing more sensational than loneliness, ennui, diffidence, disappointment, or simply time ticking away, leaving little to show for its passing. Commonplace things—but to her eye they were appalling, sad, funny; often (such is the Taylor chemistry) all three at once.
She evolved, over long years of "despairing struggle", a fresh, translucent style; she learned to be frugal with words, paring back until in her later work she sometimes pared to the bone. She has been called a writer's writer, and the average reader may well take her unselfassertive skills for granted, and fail to appreciate (in Robert Liddell's phrases) "the exactly chosen word, the delicately placed adverb, the admirable rhythm of a paragraph". For the most part she was well reviewed (Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis being among her champions) but it has to be said that in her novels the plums are better than the whole pudding, which is not surprising in a writer who produced some of the best short stories of her time.
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