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 farfe...

If the English writer Elizabeth Taylor is not widely known in this country, maybe it's because most of her books were published back when people still spoke of "women's novels" without so much as a set of quotation marks to excuse the phrase. She did write exceptionally quiet tales—at least on the surface. She had a quiet, if excellent, reputation. And she admitted to enjoying "books in which practically nothing ever happens"—a charge leveled at her ow...

[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 fou...

Amy Henderson, the central character in [Blaming] …, is a woman of average intelligence and limited sensibility. She is 'nice' to the extent that she does her best to conceal the boredom and irritation seething inside her, but otherwise she isn't particularly likeable. She has the good manners of the thoughtless, the tact of the uninvolved. She knows only her own problems. She bears a striking resemblance to a hell of a lot of people. Blaming is largely about Amy's widowho...

Mrs Taylor is one of those novelists who look homogeneous, as if working within a single mood, and turn out to be varied and wide-ranging. There is a deceptive smoothness in her tone, or tone of voice, as in that of Evelyn Waugh; not a far-fetched comparison, for in the work of both writers the funny and the appalling lie side by side in close amity. After the fashion of Angel, her best book to date, though without any hint of self-repetition, Mrs Taylor presents to us here [in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont]...

["In a Summer Season"] is, on the surface, the most explicit of Elizabeth Taylor's fine, subtle novels. It has to do with conflict that seems more open and obvious than that in her earlier books, more easily caught and described. Kate, left a widow by a successful and rather stuffy husband, has remarried. Her choice is quite wrong, but quite understandable. Dermot is a charming drifter, ten years her junior. He did not marry Kate for her money (though he is continually expecting people ...

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 th...

A quietly perceptive friend once told me of his conviction that people who "mean well" are the most dangerous of human beings, but I never fully realized the awful implications of this twisted truism until I witnessed Mrs. Taylor's genteel flaying of Flora Quartermaine [the subject of The Soul of Kindness] model wife, daughter, and friend, as ingenuously destructive as a rabid lamb, Flora's worries were always other people's worries; her pink, smiling face creased unbeliev...

Blaming is Elizabeth Taylor's last novel, completed shortly before her death. And death is the dominant theme: not the experience of facing death oneself, but the ways in which the living face the deaths of those they know. Blaming oneself, blaming others—these are easy, available, but destructive responses. In this novel, the living are shown to be indeed responsible in some sense for two deaths; but the argument is that such responsibility must not and cannot be borne if life is to go on...

[The Soul of Kindness is] a story that holds one's interest from first to last. Yet I found it disappointing, as if I'd just finished reading brilliant notes for a novel instead of the finished product. My mind was full of questions. It is the story of a (we are told) devastatingly beautiful and charming girl…. The real weakness of the book, it seems to me, lies in the fact that though the heroine is described again and again as exquisite and charming, the reader is not convinced. One c...