Robert Liddell

Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote to her friend ET of her great and lasting pleasure in this novel. The Book Marketing Council included it on its list of Best Novels of Our Time. Nevertheless most...

British Book News judged ET to be at the top of her form in these stories, but they were savaged by Walter Allen , who used a damaging comparison with Jan Struther 's...

Liddell responded warmly to these accounts, whose detail, he felt, was really literature. Taylor began asking for letters to be destroyed when her cancer recurred early in the year of her death, and Liddell complied.

Friends said that ET was very shy, but cared very much for very few people. She was lucky in that Ivy Compton-Burnett (who was a generation older than she was, and notoriously difficult) and...

Several more visits to Greece followed from (beginning with one in 1959), on which she travelled by herself. In May 1961 she was in Athens, Paros, and the Peloponnesus. The following year...

At Mrs. Lippincote's set the tone for reception of ET by attracting very mixed reviews. She treasured praise from L. P. Hartley , Richard Church (who was reminded of Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway), and...

Like ET 's first book, this was praised by distinguished but not unanimous voices: Elizabeth Bowen found an exciting distinction about every page, and Rosamond Lehmann noted the stripped, piercing feminine wit and called ET

Julia Strachey and Pamela Hansford Johnson both slammed A Wreath of Roses.ET herself felt that it expanded her range, but that the result was not successful: that she had produced a cold...

Reviews of A Game of Hide and Seek included high praise from Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Bowen (some consolation to ET for her problems with her US publisher), but also carping which she found deeply...

Rupert Gleadow cared about BP a great deal, but their romance was an experience which she chose to downplay in her memory and writing. Her long, unsuccessful pursuit of Henry Harvey , who both attracted...

It appears that at this date BP admired (as did so many German women of analogous background) the ritual, the pageantry, perhaps the swaggering masculinity connected with National Socialism . Some of her English friends...

As for marriage, BP 's involvements with men as a student must have been to some extent influenced by social pressure to marry. She felt badly let down when Henry Harvey decided to wed another...

In many ways this novel reflects BP 's undergraduate years at Oxford , featuring characters and episodes based partly on herself, her sister, and her friends or acquaintances. Among these, Henry Harvey and the future...

BP 's father wrote to her on 3 May 1950 commending this novel, which he had not expected to enjoy since he preferred mysteries.Robert Liddell , who had been familiar with it throughout...

In a letter to Philip LarkinBP wrote that she felt she had been treated very badly by Cape , but that she was also not altogether surprised. For one thing she knew that other...