You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor

by Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Drabble (Introduction), Margaret Drabble (Selected by)

Overview

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL

Elizabeth Taylor is finally beginning to gain the recognition due to her as one of the best English writers of the postwar period, prized and praised by Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel, among others. Inheriting Ivy Compton-Burnett’s uncanny sensitivity to the terrifying undercurrents that swirl beneath the apparent calm of respectable family life while showing a deep sympathy of her own for human loneliness, Taylor depicted dislocation with the unflinching presence of mind of Graham Greene. But for Taylor, unlike Greene, dislocation began not in distant climes but right at home. It is in the living room, playroom, and bedroom that Taylor stages her unforgettable dramas of alienation and impossible desire.

Taylor’s stories, many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, are her central achievement. Here are self-improving spinsters and gossiping girls, war orphans and wallflowers, honeymooners and barmaids, mistresses and murderers. Margaret Drabble’s new selection reveals a writer whose wide sympathies and restless curiosity are matched by a steely penetration into the human heart and mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590177273
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	09/23/2014
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	635,035
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was born into a middle-class family in Berkshire, England. She held a variety of positions, including librarian and governess, before marrying a businessman in 1936. Nine years later, her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, appeared. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek (both available as NYRB Classics), four collections of short stories (many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other magazines), and a children’s book, Mossy Trotter, while living with her husband and two children in Buckingham­shire. Long championed  by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Taylor’s novels and stories have been the basis for a number of films, including Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), starring Joan Plowright, and François Ozon’s Angel (2007).

Margaret Drabble is the author of eighteen novels, including The Needle’s Eye, The Peppered Moth, The Seven Sisters, The Sea Lady, and most recently, The Pure Gold Baby. Among her works of nonfiction are biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. She has edited the fifth and sixth editions of the Oxford Companion to World Literature and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

From Hester Lilly (1954)

Hester Lilly 3

Gravement Endommagé 72

The Idea of Age 80

Shadows of the World 86

Oasis of Gaiety 95

Plenty Good Fiesta 105

From the Blush (1958)

The Blush 111

The Letter-writers 119

A Troubled State of Mind 133

The Rose, the Mauve, the White 159

Summer Schools 174

Perhaps a Family Failing 198

You'll Enjoy It When You Get There 208

From a Dedicated Man (1965)

Girl Reading 217

The Thames Spread Out 237

The Prerogative of Love 251

The Benefactress 265

In the Sun 280

Vron and Willie 297

The Voices 510

From the Devastating Boys (1972)

The Devastating Boys 319

Tall Boy 339

In and Out the Houses 348

Flesh 361

Sisters 379

Hotel du Commerce 388

Miss A. and Miss M. 399

The Fly-paper 416

Published in Dangerous Calm: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor (1995)

Violet Hour at the Fleece 424

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/28/2014
This captivating collection of 29 stories by Taylor—a British novelist who wrote 11 novels (including At Mrs. Lippincote’s) and four story collections—includes an introduction by Margaret Drabble, who edited the book. Most of the stories revolve around female protagonists in unremarkable English settings. The title story is about a young girl named Rhoda, who attends a ball with her father. Her glamorous mother is sick and unable to attend, but she advises awkward Rhoda not to be shy. Their dynamic is emblematic of the tension between expectation and reality that affects many of Taylor’s characters. In “The Letter Writers,” spinster Emily finally meets a famous novelist she’s admired from afar through a decade of epistolary friendship. Unfortunately, the meeting is awkward and strained, leaving Emily feeling ashamed. In “The Prerogative of Love,” young, beautiful Arabella floats through her aunt’s lunch party, filling the elder guests with a longing for their youth and levity. In “Flesh,” a middle-aged pair on vacation strike up a brief adulterous romance, but are ultimately foiled. Taylor’s vulnerable characters are simultaneously touching and heartbreaking. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

For years, Taylor’s short stories—painfully smart,  hilarious, dark—have been entirely out of print in the United States.” —Britt Peterson, The New Republic

“I find the writing of Elizabeth Taylor fresh, and inevitably hitting the right nail on the head in every sentence. In fact I find her so unbelievably good, kind, stimulating, catty and subtle that I forget I’m a critic.” —John Betjeman

“Passion at cross-purposes with respectability—passion at cross-purposes, even, with happiness—is  a great theme in Taylor’s fiction.” —Caleb Crain

"Taylor’s vulnerable characters are simultaneously touching and heartbreaking." —Publishers Weekly starred review

“The short story [is] a form in which Taylor, a gimlet-eyed miniaturist, fully exploited her talents.” —Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic
 
“Taylor’s stories, like her novels, are also filled with interesting and original ideas about life that are presented with almost no emphasis, ideas that other novelists would practically underscore and print in bold.” —Financial Times

"Taylor was ahead of her time in so many ways. She wrote about women’s lives with a keen eye for what goes on beneath the surface and behind the curtains.” —The Booklist Reader

“In all the stories there is a peculiarly satisfying mixture of wit and generosity. Their human depth is such that they can be read again and again.” —Margaret Drabble
 
“Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning point in one’s own experience.” —Elizabeth Bowen
 
“There is a deceptive smoothness in her tone, or tone of voice, as in that of Evelyn Waugh; not a far-fetched comparison, for in the work of both writers the funny and the appalling lie side by side in close amity.” —Kingsley Amis

From the Publisher

2014-07-12
A newly selected volume of short fiction by a much-admired but not widely known English writer showcases her subtle insights. Taylor's (1912-1975) reputation has ebbed and flowed in both her native England and in the U.S., where recent reissues of two of her 11 novels, Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek, have helped return her to the public eye. This book of 29 stories, edited and introduced by Drabble, reflects the breadth of her creative life as well as her nuanced grasp of human interactions. The tales are often located in a finely detailed, middle-class domestic setting where the tone and minutiae are very English: gardens, glasses of sherry, village pubs, marmalade, class differences, Austen-ish wit. Frequently noting the weather, the seasons, flora and fauna, Taylor considers, usually from a female perspective, questions of marriage, isolation, love and aging. The collection opens with a novella, Hester Lilly, which charts the strains imposed on an established marriage by the arrival of the husband's young cousin. This theme of individuals struggling within an existing relationship recurs often, as in "Gravement Endommagé," a glimpse of a couple that has survived wartime separation but is not at peace together. The title story, one of several featuring younger women outgrowing their youth, captures the exquisite discomfort of a daughter deputizing for her mother at a formal dinner. Among the most memorable is "The Letter-Writers," a model of unarticulated intensity in which two long-term correspondents come together for the first time and fear their "eyes might meet and they would see in one another's nakedness and total loss." Sensitive souls are scrutinized with delicate English understatement.

Kirkus Reviews