Elizabeth Taylor – She Reads Novels

This is a fascinating collection of short stories, all written by women and originally published in the 1940s and 50s. When I saw the list of authors included in the book, there were several I’d already read, others I’d heard of but never read, and a few that were completely new to me. There are eleven stories in total and as always when writing about collections like this, I’ll have more to say about some of them than others!

There’s only one story in this collection that I’ve read before – and that’s The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. As she’s one of my favourite authors, I decided to read it again and found it just as wonderful and atmospheric as I did the first time. Rather than discuss it again here, I’ll direct you to my previous review and will just add that even if you’ve seen the Hitchcock film, I would still recommend reading the story which is quite different in several ways.

Elizabeth Jane Howard is an author I’m familiar with through her Cazalet Chronicles (I’ve read the first two books in the series and am planning to read the others) and she is represented here with Three Miles Up, an eerie story in which two men are taking a trip through the countryside on a canal boat when they encounter a young woman called Sharon. Once Sharon joins them on the boat, things begin to go wrong and they find themselves sailing up a canal that doesn’t appear on any maps. I loved this one, although I wasn’t aware that Howard wrote ghost stories so it wasn’t what I’d expected at all.

The other two authors I’ve read previously are Stella Gibbons and Elizabeth Taylor. The Gibbons story, Listen to the Magnolias, is set during the war and involves an elderly widow nervously awaiting the arrival of five American soldiers who will be billeted in her home, while Taylor’s The Thames Spread Out follows a woman who is trapped upstairs in her house during a flood while swans swim at the bottom of her staircase. I liked both of these, particularly the second.

Apart from The Birds, my favourite story in the book turned out to be The Skylight by Penelope Mortimer, in which a woman and her young son rent a house in a remote area of France but arrive to find the doors all locked and no sign of the owners. The only point of access is an open skylight in the roof and the mother makes a decision she quickly comes to regret. Mortimer creates a real sense of fear and tension in this story and I couldn’t wait to reach the end to find out if everything was going to be okay!

Considering the publication dates, the Second World War naturally plays a part in many of these stories – I’ve already mentioned the Stella Gibbons, but another is Diana Gardner’s wonderful story, The Land Girl, about a young woman placed on a farm as a Land Girl who takes an instant dislike to the woman whose home she is staying in and decides, out of spite and jealousy, to cause trouble for her.

The stories above are the ones that really stood out for me in this collection, but I enjoyed all of them to some extent, apart from maybe Elizabeth Bowen’s Summer Night which I found well written but confusing due to the structure and changing perpectives. I was also slightly disappointed by Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Scorched Earth Policy about an elderly couple preparing for a wartime invasion, simply because it was too short for any real plot or character development. It was nice to discover some authors I’d never come across before, though: Frances Bellerby, who in The Cut Finger tells the story of a little girl learning some important lessons about the world; Inez Holden whose Shocking Weather, Isn’t It? follows a woman who visits her cousin in various different places over the years; and Attia Hosain who explores the feelings of a newly married woman struggling to fit in with her husband’s friends in The First Party.

I can definitely recommend this collection; I found something to interest me in every story, even the ones I didn’t enjoy as much. I also now have a list of authors I need to explore further!

Thanks to Pushkin Press Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Elizabeth Taylor is the next author to be featured in Jane’s Birthday Book of Underappreciated Lady Authors, a project which has been running throughout 2018 and which has already introduced me to some wonderful new books and authors. Elizabeth Taylor is an author I only became aware of after I started blogging and following book blogs; before that, if you had mentioned her name to me, I would probably have thought you were talking about the actress of the same name. Over the last few years, though, I have seen other bloggers reading her books and have been meaning to try one myself, so I decided to put A Game of Hide and Seek on both my Classics Club list and my 20 Books of Summer list to ensure that I got to it sooner rather than later.

Published in 1951, this is a beautifully written novel about love and loss. It begins in the summer – a long, hot summer between the two world wars. Eighteen-year-old Vesey is staying with his Aunt Caroline and Uncle Hugo and has become reacquainted with his childhood friend, Harriet, a girl of the same age. Harriet’s mother and Vesey’s Aunt Caroline are good friends, having once been suffragettes together, so Harriet and Vesey have known each other all their lives. As they spend more and more time together that summer, going for walks and playing hide and seek with Vesey’s young cousins, Harriet falls passionately in love.

When the summer comes to an end, Vesey goes off to university and Harriet is left behind. Over time, their lives drift apart and Harriet gets a job in a shop selling ladies’ gowns until, following the death of her mother, she agrees to marry Charles Jephcott. As a thirty-five-year-old solicitor, Charles provides Harriet with a nice home and a comfortable lifestyle; she could have been happy, except for the fact that she doesn’t love him. And then, fifteen years later, Vesey walks back into her life, reawakening old passions and leaving her more confused than ever.

A Game of Hide and Seek is one of those books which seems quite simple on the surface – there’s not much more to the plot than I’ve already described above – but which is much more complex than it sounds, because it is written with so much insight and wisdom and depth of emotion. It’s such a poignant story; there’s a sense that Harriet’s whole life has been a compromise and that her regret at things not turning out the way she hoped has made it impossible for her to move on. Here her friend Kitty sums up what she thinks is the explanation for Harriet’s enduring love for Vesey:

‘Our feelings about people change as we grow up: but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I expect you thought: “Vesey wouldn’t have done that.” But an idea can’t ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain.’

I liked Harriet from the beginning. I sympathised with the position she was in – as the daughter of a former suffragette, being expected to take advantage of the opportunities and freedoms for which her mother’s generation had fought, yet lacking the talent or ambition to live up to expectations. I found the appeal of Vesey harder to understand, but I did warm to him eventually; there was something very sad about his reappearance later in the book, lonely, dejected and still in love with a woman he can’t have.

There are little touches of humour too, mainly provided by the other sales girls who work in the shop with Harriet and, later, the Jephcotts’ servants, the Dutch maid Elke and the cleaning lady Mrs Curzon. Other memorable characters include Julia, Charles’ mother, a former actress who dislikes Harriet and would love to see her marriage to Charles break down, and fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Betsy, who is infatuated with one of her teachers. But this really is Harriet’s story and Vesey’s – and throughout the novel, Taylor keeps the reader wondering whether there will be a second chance for them and, if so, whether they will take it. The ending, when it comes, is ambiguous and left me with a lot to think about as there are probably a few different ways it could be interpreted.

I’m sure I will be reading more books by Elizabeth Taylor. If you have read any of them, which one do you think I should read next?

This is book 2/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

This is also book 5/50 from my second Classics Club list.