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, the 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 readers will be reminded how we only partly share this "common language" of ours, for by listening carefully, as one must, to her speech, we discover differences in responses and attitudes between ourselves and a people with whom we are prone to assume a too great likeness or identity at the expense of failing to see them and ourselves as we really are.
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