The making of a literary reputation is an awkward, unfair business. "One of our foremost novelists", Angus Wilson is quoted as saying on the jacket of one Elizabeth Taylor novel; James Agate, in 1945, "chortled from the first page to the last" of another one; the TLS managed a comparison with Chekhov, Amis, Hartley, Priestley, Bowen, Betjeman—a chorus of praise from fellow-writers of various sorts fills up the blurbs of her fifteen books. Yet it would not be entirely farfetched to apply what she says about her character Martha, in this last and posthumous novel, to Martha's creator: "Her … books were handsomely printed, widely spaced on good paper, well-reviewed, and more or less unknown. Without fretting, she waited to be discovered." Except that "without fretting" suggests a tranquillity that does not suit well with the fierceness, the controlled energy that exist just below the surface of Elizabeth Taylor's stories of elderly Brompton Road widows, uneasy marriages in Thames Valley commuting villages. Under their sheeps' clothing—Boots' Lending Library, Barchester, 1950—all her books are sleek wolves.
If to some extent they do wait to be discovered, however, Blaming is not really the one with which to make converts. Her more powerful and concentrated writing is in the earlier books; in the later ones irony and polish often take the place of passion. Blaming is late, slight, even shorter than her other novels; it shows no particular sign of incompleteness or needing revision, but perhaps has suffered from being written so close to the end of the author's life.
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