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The Other Elizabeth Taylor by Nicola Beauman

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Miss Moppet
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The Other Elizabeth Taylor by Nicola Beauman

Post by Miss Moppet » Sun August 23rd, 2009, 11:17 pm

No, not that Liz Taylor...this is a biography of novelist Elizabeth Taylor whose first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's, was published in 1945, the same year actress Elizabeth Taylor appeared in National Velvet. As both women rose to fame and success in the 1940s and 50s confusion ensued. Elizabeth (the writer) complained that: 'Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini.'

What interested me in Elizabeth Taylor was reading her 1957 novel Angel. Angel Deverell is an Edwardian working-class girl whose shopkeeper mother aspires to better things for her. But even she is taken aback by the extent of Angel's ambitions. Angel wants to become a bestselling author and nothing on God's earth is going to stop her. Here is Angel's response when her aunt, who is a lady's maid at nearby Paradise House, suggests Angel should go into service there:

'Angel stared at her. "Do you really dare to suggest that I should demean myself doing for a useless half-wit of a girl what she could perfectly well do for herself; that I should grovel and curtsy to someone of my own age; dance attendance on her; put on her stockings for her and sit up late at night, waiting for her to come back from enjoying herself? You must be utterly mad to breathe a single word of such a thing to me. Go back and tell your damned Madam what I think of her insult, ask her what she would say to someone who spoke of her own daughter so degradingly, and tell her that one day she will blush with shame to think of what she has done."'

Angel ignores her schoolwork in order to write a novel, The Lady Irania, while her mother waits on her hand and foot: 'She was at Osborne, wearing red velvet, when her mother brought in some bread and milk for her supper.' (Suffice it to say I could relate to this). She sends it off to Oxford University Press, who are unimpressed by this tale of an heiress's love affairs, but another publisher loves The Lady Irania and so, eventually, does the public. The novel follows Angel through two world wars, the highs and lows of her writing career and her rocky marriage to a charming but unreliable artist. It was made into a film directed by Francois Ozon in 2007, which divided the critics (personally I loved it).

When I went on to read more Elizabeth Taylor I discovered that Angel is very untypical of her work. As her biographer Nicola Beauman points out, ET was a miniaturist whose talents were best displayed in the novella or short story. She was also a modernist whose focus was on scenes rather than narrative. Her greatest influences were Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, who became a close friend. Having begun to read my way through her oeuvre, I have found her style and her powers of observation are pretty much second to none: anyone interested in middle-class life in wartime and postwar Britain should read At Mrs Lippincote's and her second novel Palladian (reprinted by Virago along with the rest of her work). Unfortunately her focus on women's lives and on domesticity meant that she was dismissed as a 'lending-library author': the critics didn't think her subject matter was "important" enough.

Nicola Beauman is a very sympathetic biographer who gets irate over ET's bad reviews and makes the best case she can for ET to be considered one of the best women writers of the C20. So it's rather surprising to read in the Acknowledgements that ET's children were '"very angry and distressed" about the book and have asked to be dissociated from it.' Presumably they weren't happy about the revelation of Taylor's wartime affair (she married a Buckinghamshire sweet manufacturer on the eve of the war). She gave up her lover at her husband's request (even though he also had been guilty of infidelity) and led a very quiet life after the war, writing, looking after her children and shopping once a week in the town where Brief Encounter was filmed (Beaconsfield). So compared to the Other Elizabeth Taylor she looks like a saint!

A very readable biography with lots of lit-crit - 4 out of 5 stars. Published by Persephone Books http://www.persephonebooks.co.ukwho reprint neglected C20 fiction, mostly by women, a lot from the interwar period.

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