Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Taylor
-
Standard Name: Taylor, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Coles
Married Name: Elizabeth Taylor
ET
published, during the mid to late twentieth century, twelve novels, four collections of short stories, and a handful of essays. As a writer of high calibre whose favourite effects are built on understatement and irony, she has been persistently undervalued by commentators.
EMD
published The Top of the World, a novel later quoted by Elizabeth Taylor
in her Angel, 1957.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Taylor, Elizabeth. “Introduction”. Angel, edited by Paul Bailey, Virago, p. v - ix.
vi
Textual Production
Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph
as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jane Howard
EJH
collaborated with Arthur Helps on Bettina: A Portrait, about Elizabeth von Arnim
, in 1957. Helps, a professional translator, had drafted this biography, but it badly needed shaping and structuring. Collaboration was difficult...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her ten anthologies edited during the 1920s (some of them under pseudonyms such as Leonard Gray) had some significance for the writing of that decade, since they incorporated contributions from, for instance, Marghanita Laski
Textual Production
Ivy Compton-Burnett
The BBC
did a pre-publication adaptation by Christopher Sykes
: before the book appeared ICB
's friend Elizabeth Taylor
called it the new short BBC novel.
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen.
63
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
244
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jolley
Mr. Scobie's Riddle is a black comedy set in a nursing home: one of EJ
's only two novels to have a male narrator-protagonist. Its ironically humorous tone salvages a story whose dark topic had...
Textual Features
A. S. Byatt
Her selection (limited to English, not merely British, writers) determinedly eschews the well-known. She seeks the startling and the satisfying, selecting both lesser-known writers like Leonora Carrington
or Elizabeth Taylor
, and unexpected stories...
Reception
Samuel Beckett
Novelist Elizabeth Taylor
boldly took her older friend Ivy Compton-Burnett
to this play, and was rewarded with Compton-Burnett's pronouncement, Not a play to miss.
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen.
96
For her part Taylor thought it as much as one...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jenkins
The novel was criticised by some for its exclusively upper-middle-class reach—a view which was energetically countered by Rose Macaulay
on a radio programme.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson.
107
The Times Literary Supplement welcomed with joy a novel where the...
Literary responses
Olivia Manning
This book evoked a double-edged response from Ivy Compton-Burnett
who, writing to Elizabeth Taylor
, said: It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don't know if you care for descriptions...
Literary responses
Betty Miller
Her Times obituary might be regarded as damning her novels with faint praise. It called her essentially a feminine novelist—using the epithet with no derogatory connotation—applying her talent to sensitive explorations of feeling.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(27 November 1965): 10
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Printed praise came from Stevie Smith
and Raymond Mortimer
among others. Elizabeth Taylor
noticed how the reviewers' imagery harped on weapons: rapiers, axes, stilettos, knives and grenades.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
213
Literary responses
Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively
wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Elizabeth Taylor
detailed the interest that attended this book's appearance. Published on a Monday, it was broadcast as a radio play on Wednesday, discussed on radio on Thursday by Daniel George
(who called the author...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Whipple
DW
was an unacknowledged favourite of Ivy Compton-Burnett
and evidently of Elizabeth Taylor
too, since Taylor borrowed for her novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont from the opening of a story among Whipple's papers, which...
Timeline
1 January 1916: The British edition of Vogue (an American...
Building item
1 January 1916
The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast
in Hanover Square, London.
21 February 1924: The first issue appeared of the New Yorker...
Writing climate item
21 February 1924
The first issue appeared of the New Yorkermagazine (still going strong in the twenty-first century).
Borne Back Daily. http://borneback.com/ .
21 February 2011
26 November 1945: The film Brief Encounter, starring actress...
Building item
26 November 1945
The film Brief Encounter, starring actress Celia Johnson
, directed by David Lean
, based on a play by Noël Coward
, had its English premiere.
8 May 2008: Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago...
