Synopses & Reviews
Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was an English short-story writer and novelist. Her first novel,
At Mrs. Lippincote’s, was published 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), four collections of short stories (many of which originally appeared in
The New Yorker,
Harper’s, and other magazines), and a children’s book,
Mossy Trotter.
Margaret Drabble is an English biographer and critic, and the author of seventeen novels, including A Summer Bird Cage, The Millstone, and, most recently, The Sea Lady. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories appeared in 2011. In 2006 she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
About the Author
AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL
Elizabeth Taylor is finally beginning to gain the recognition due to her as one of the best English writers of the postwar period, prized and praised by Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel, among others. Inheriting Ivy Compton-Burnett’s uncanny sensitivity to the terrifying undercurrents that swirl beneath the apparent calm of respectable family life while showing a deep sympathy of her own for human loneliness, Taylor depicted dislocation with the unflinching presence of mind of Graham Greene. But for Taylor, unlike Greene, dislocation began not in distant climes but right at home. It is in the living room, playroom, and bedroom that Taylor stages her unforgettable dramas of alienation and impossible desire.
Taylor’s stories, many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, are her central achievement. Here are self-improving spinsters and gossiping girls, war orphans and wallflowers, honeymooners and barmaids, mistresses and murderers. Margaret Drabble’s new selection reveals a writer whose wide sympathies and restless curiosity are matched by a steely penetration into the human heart and mind.