mrs palfrey at the claremont by elizabeth taylor

It even manages to sound a little zestful. I find Amis’s description to be true, candid, and economical. What we like is “relatable,” whatever that means, while what we dislike or makes us uncomfortable is “depressing.” What hope is there for our species if narcissism governs us even when we are reading? In Angel, her historical novel about a popular historical novelist, Taylor writes of her heroine’s reading habits: “She had never cared much for books, because they did not seem to be about her.” This surely is “relatability” in all its stupid glory, and fifty years before it was even invented. One can hear in it the whine of mingled plaintiveness and balked self-adoration, the authentic who-needs-this huffing of our Tripadvisor-y times, the Age of Experian, or the New Irk. Kingsley Amis described Mrs Palfrey in his New Statesman review as a novel about “loneliness, old age and approaching death.” In terms of brute fact, his message is about the same as that of a standard contemporary reader’s review, which sees a “detailed description of old people, slow, and a little depressing.” That, though, comes with a steady subcutaneous drip-in “detailed,” in “old,” in “slow” and “little” and “depressing.” Even “description” strikes me as disingenuous and wrong. But sometimes Anglophobia, or perhaps the unbearable imputation of gentility, only has to harrumph to get its way. Bellow’s crude point would have been better made by complaining about the presence in the book of pounds and pence, or the references to medium sherry. There are a handful of other references to tea, as it were unconsummated, and all of them non-tinkling. By my reckoning, just one cup of tea is drunk in the entire novel-the one in Ludo’s basement pad-and that doesn’t tinkle.

The story goes that a jet-lagged Saul Bellow, acting as celebrity judge, thought he heard a lot of tinkling teacups in Mrs Palfrey, and there went her chances. Naipaul’s (I think rather messy book) In a Free State.

Students of the prize will tell you that a good big one-or sometimes only a moderately good big one-will usually defeat a good-or even a very good-little one, and that’s what happened this time too. On its first appearance, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, then in its third year. It takes its place in Robert McCrum’s 2015 Guardian list of the one hundred best novels in English. It has claims-I don’t know the numbers-to being her most popular book. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was first published in 1971, the eleventh of twelve novels by the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor.

Mrs palfrey at the claremont by elizabeth taylor