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] somebody both ridiculous and dignified—not just laughable and dignified, like, say, Fielding's Parson Adams.

She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.

Adams...