You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 09/23/2014
ISBN: 9781590177273
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.00w x 1.00d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 07/28/2014
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2014
Booklist 09/01/2014 pg. 41