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.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
SW
puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...
Friends, Associates
Barbara Pym
Authors BP
, Mary Renault
, and Elizabeth Taylor
attended a party in Athens given by Pym's longtime friend the novelist and critic Robert Liddell
.
Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Editors Holt, Hazel and Hilary Pym, Macmillan.
227
Family and Intimate relationships
Barbara Pym
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...
Friends, Associates
Barbara Pym
BP
wrote steadily throughout her life, regardless of changes in occupation. One of the benefits of her first publication, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950 was the introduction of various authors into her personal and...
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
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
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...
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...
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...
She went back to writing stories because the shorter form seemed more compatible with the life she was leading while in charge of a large family establishment in the country. She had also lost confidence...
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Zoë Fairbairns
Most of the novel is spent uncovering truths about these two major characters: Heather, who seeks knowledge about her birth father (and enters briefly into rivalry with her mother, Julia, over the same man), and...
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...