View of the Harbour

Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was an English short-story writer and novelist. Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, came out in 1945. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek (both available from NYRB Classics). In 2014, NYRB published You'll Enjoy it When You Get There, a selection made by Margaret Drabble of Taylor’s short stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker.

 

Roxana Robinson is the author of five novels, including Cost; three collections of short stories; and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. She selected and introduced The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, published by NYRB Classics. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Travel and Leisure, and Vogue, among other publications. She divides her time between New York, Connecticut, and Maine.

Blindness and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylor s great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she turns her unsparing gaze on the emotional and sexual politics of a seedy seaside town that s been left behind by modernity. Tory, recently divorced, depends more and more on the company of her neighbors Robert, a doctor, and Beth, a busy author of melodramatic novels. Prudence, Robert and Beth s daughter, disapproves of the intimacy that has grown between her parents and Tory and the gossip it has awakened in their little community. As the novel proceeds, Taylor s view widens to take in a range of characters from bawdy, nosey Mrs. Bracey; to a widowed young proprietor of the local waxworks, Lily Wilson; to the would-be artist Bertram while the book as a whole offers a beautifully observed and written examination of the fictions around which we construct our lives and manage our losses.

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