The Blush – Elizabeth Taylor (1958)

I started reading these lovely stories the evening before I went to the Elizabeth Taylor day at Battle library in Reading. I had a lovely read of it going down on the train and finished it on the train coming home after a lovely day talking and listening to others talk, about Elizabeth Taylor. I will write another post about that though.

There are 12 stories in this collection – I enjoyed all the stories, they are beautiful, minutely observed and intuitively drawn. Her characters are so immediately recognisable, as Taylor was such a faithful chronicler of people, ordinary middle class people particularly – although she also observes servants and their like with absolute understanding and sympathy. I am not going to try and describe each story – but there are a few I wish to draw attention to, as particularly good examples of Elizabeth Taylor’s stories. In “The Letter Writers” we have a middle aged woman meeting the man to whom she has written to for years – as Taylor describes it…

“the crisis of meeting for the first time the person whom she knew best in the world.”

It is almost inevitably a meeting that is far from what it might have been. The whole is a wonderfully devastating snap shot of a sad lonely woman and the enormity of a meeting which could only ever be disappointing.
“The Ambush” is a touching examination of grief, as a young woman goes to stay with the woman who might have become her mother-in-law had her son not been killed in a car accident.

“Her irritation suddenly heeled over into grief and she dropped her brush, stunned, appalled, as the monstrous pain leapt upon her.”

In “Summer Schools” two middle-aged sisters, who share their home, each take a holiday. One sister visits an old married school friend; the other attends a summer lecture course. They each find their experiences to be unsatisfactory, and they are forced to recognise the lives they are leading for what they are.

“Of recent years she had often tried to escape the memory of two maiden-ladies who lived near her home when she and Melanie were girls. So sharp-tongued and cross-looking, they had seemed to be as old as could be, yet may have been no more than in their fifties, she now thought.”

Other stories are darkly comic, such as The Blush – the title story – which is very short – Mrs Allen a sensible middle-aged lady finds she become an unwitting alibi for her domestic’s extra marital carryings on. In “Perhaps a family Failing” a young woman marries a man who like his father is possibly a little too fond of the drink – and although it is blackly comic, it is at the same time subtly devastating.

I am continually impressed by Elizabeth Taylor’s writing, I know I can’t possibly do it justice in my reviews. I think it an enormous pity that she is still so under-read – so many people haven’t heard of her. She is often compared to Jane Austen – and I wish that in this her centenary year – her already famous name, can start to become better recognised as that belonging to an amazing writer.