To understand Taylor’s brilliance, consider Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), which was reissued by NYRB Classics in December. Taylor’s radicalism was more conscious than Austen’s - she was a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s - but both wrote sharply observed stories of middle-class English life that insist, unsettlingly, on the primacy of the economic.
Long described as underrated (and overshadowed by the actress who shared her name), Taylor has increasingly been acknowledged as a major writer: “Was there any better chronicler of English life as it unfolded in the 30-year period after the end of World War II?” asked Geoff Dyer in the New York Times. Take, for instance, the famous first line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” While the plot of the novel will be about finding a spouse, Austen makes it clear that the fortune comes first: beneath the soft surface of the marriage plot lies the hard kernel of economic reality.Īusten’s successor, in this respect, is twentieth-century English novelist Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75). Austen herself - a “spinster of the middle-class” - would almost certainly have feared revolutionary change, but her novels are rooted in a radically economic understanding of human relationships. “It makes me most uncomfortable to see,” Auden continues,Īs Auden realized, the most politically unsettling works of art often have little to do with politics - or their authors’ intentions. “Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.” The shocking “her” of these lines is not, surprisingly, one of Auden’s outré modernist contemporaries, but a novelist usually associated with staid domesticity: Jane Austen. “You could not shock her more than she shocks me,” wrote W.
Review of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (NYRB Classics, 2021)
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