Elizabeth Taylor

I've just finished reading a book by Elizabeth Taylor. You probably haven't heard of her. She wrote during the 1940s and she was never very well known. But her books are wonderful. Small, slight, dreary, English - they are nevertheless extra-ordinary. The people she writes about are always trivial people and their lives are always directionless. In her world it's always evening and it always rains. The houses are always surrounded by dark and dripping laurels. Expectations are disappointed, people fail to rise to the occasion or are forced into making cheap little compromises. The style is so light but some how it pierces the heart. That is because - beyond anything else - the world she creates is acutely and poignantly real. She is writing about all of us, although we may not want to recognise that. The best one I've read so far is called Mrs Palfrey at the Clarement. The one I've just finished is called The Sleeping Beauty. Elizabeth Taylor should be famous but she isn't.