If you haven’t read any Elizabeth Taylor, I couldn’t recommend her more so. She’s got a very similar profile to writers like Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, and Barbara Comyns. The biggest difference among all of these is that there’s a variable amount of irony and sarcasm involved in each and the tones shifts dramatically throughout each. For Taylor, she does have a deeply ironic and sardonic novel about a hack writer (Angel) which is wonderfully, but not prototypical to her other novels. Her best known novel is probably Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont because it became a movie a few years ago.
This novel is from 1964 and is about a small group of friends, cohort, family are circulating around a central queen bee figure named Flora. Flora is the first to get married, and while it’s not entirely clear whether or not her marriage is a successful one, it IS successful in the sense that it happened. That’s the central idea here, a group of friends jealous of their friend who seems to have it all together. But her focal point also becomes an unraveling point for those around. There’s the friends who are jealous, there’s the man infatuated with her, and there’s the artist, independent figure deeply suspect of her–who becomes outwardly hostile to her. And of course, there’s the question: is she who she seems to be, and if not, who is she?
This book really breaks down the assumptions we make around those around us, but also forces us to consider the assumptions we make in our choices.
In a Summer Season
In this novel, we are again treated to a small group of middle-class folks living their ordinary lives in the ordinary times, but dealing with curious and queer circumstances.
We start off with Kate, recently widowed and mother to two adult children. She has recently married a man about ten years her junior, and as you can imagine, this being 1960 or so, there are lots of opinions floating around. The first half of the novel involves us finding out about and better understanding the relationship between Kate and Dermot (yes that’s his name). As the novel progresses into the second half, we get to a section called “The Return of the Thorntons” and we meet Richard and his daughter, the aforementioned Thorntons. This family becomes quick friends with Kate and her family and it becomes readily obvious to everyone that Richard and Kate would otherwise be quite well matched.
This novel spends a lot of time exploring the questions raised by many British and American women authors in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and still gets discussed today: are middle aged women people? And if so, who gets to control them? And what if they’re not married? Are they still allowed to have a life?
Other Taylor novels and Barbara Pym as well like to explore the sex lives and romantic lives of older women, but this middle ground is interesting because it’s more immediately present and there’s probably more women like Kate who find themselves the subject of a lot of opinions.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Kindness-VMC-Elizabeth-Taylor/dp/1844086569/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1555069391&sr=8-1)