October 2010 Guest Editor Juliet Gardiner on At Mr Lippincote's...
Elizabeth Taylor is one of the quiet, deceptive writers who seem to be writing about ordinary lives in the home counties but has a gimlet eye for human absurdities and fallibilities. My favourite, At Mrs Lippincote’s,wryly yet very poignantly evokes the pretensions and melancholy deceptions of wartime life.
Mrs Lippincote's house, with its mahogany furniture and yellowing photographs, stands as a reminder of all the certainties that have vanished with the advent of war. Temporarily, this is home for Julia, who has joined her husband Roddy at the behest of the RAF. Although she can accept the pomposities of service life, Julia's honesty and sense of humour prevent her from taking her role as seriously as her husband, that leader of men, might wish; for Roddy, merely love cannot suffice - he needs homage as well as admiration. And Julia, while she may be a most unsatisfactory officer's wife, is certainly no hypocrite.
'A book for the epicure, who will delight in its deftness, its congression, its under- and overtones' L.P. HARTLEY
'One of the most underarted novelists of the 20th century', Antonia Fraser 'Elizabeth Taylor had the keenest eye and ear for the pain lurking behind a genteel demeanour Paul Bailey, Guardian
'Taylor excels in conveying the tragicomic poignancy of the everyday' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen - soul-sisters all' Anne Tyler
'Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person's dangerous housewife' Valerie Martin, Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction
'Sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit' Rosamund Lehmann
Author
About Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was born in Reading, Berkshire and spent much of her life in Penn, Buckinghamshire. Critically she is one of the most acclaimed British novelists of this century. Virago publishes twelve of her sixteen works of fiction.
