This is the first biography of one of the outstanding English writers of the last century. Betty Coles became Elizabeth Taylor upon her marriage in 1936 when she was 23. Her first novel appeared in the same year, 1945, as the actress Elizabeth Taylor was appearing in National Velvet and began her ascent to stardom. Meanwhile, over the next thirty years, ‘the other Elizabeth Taylor’ lived and worked in Buckinghamshire and published eleven more novels and four volumes of short stories. Nicola Beauman’s biography draws on a wealth of hitherto undiscovered material, which includes the wartime letters Elizabeth Taylor wrote to her lover.
I have been meaning to read this ever since I recieved it for my birthday in May. I had wanted to read more of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels before reading this biography (having read only 3) but the lure of this book by Nicola Beauman founder of Persephone books proved too great in the end. It is an utterly compelling work, detailed, and written with a great deal of sympathy for all the parties involved. As she explains in the acknowledgements, Nicola Beauman had John Taylor’s Permission for the book, but had felt it more sensitive to wait untill after his death to publsih it. However Elizabeth’s son nd daughter were very angry about it and asked to disassociated from it. Although a great friend of Elizabeth Bowan, Ivy Compton Burnett and Barabara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor didn’t really move in literary circles – she didn’t attend the sort of events that many of her contempory writers did. She mainly stayed at home, and was a wife and mother first, a writer second. Nicola Beauman asks the inevitable question, had Elizabeth Taylor been a writer first, would she have been a greater writer than she was? And did her name play a part in her having been so overlooked. For she has been overlooked, both by the literary establishment of the time – despite many really excellent reviews by other well thought of writers – and as a great English novelist since her death. For example Olivia Manning inexplicably loathed her work (as did others) and was often quite vicious about her. The Elizabeth Taylor that ermerges from this book is of a woman who put her family first. She “did the right thing” when it came to it – although the other man suffered for that. She was a truely gifted writer, but maybe she could have been a truely great writer – we will never know now. Loved it.
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