There's no doubt in my mind that Elizabeth Taylor was a really important 20th century writer. I've been slowly working my way through her novels for some time, and in fact read one, Palladian, quite recently which, though I certainly enjoyed it, I thought not one of her very best. This one, At Mrs Lippincote's -- her first published novel -- despite its rather unpromising title, happily turned out to be absolutely wonderful.
Published in 1945, the novel tells the story of Julia Davanant, wife to Roddy and mother to Oliver. Roddy, in the RAF and recently posted to a small town somewhere in England, treats his wife and child with relative affection but has absolutely no understanding of either of them. Indeed this is rather a farce of a marriage, and Julia is well aware of it, though she tries to ignore the implications. Things are not helped by the presence of Roddy's cousin Eleanor: "forty and unmarried", who "had a little money in Imperial Tobacco, a royal blue evening dress, and was in love with her cousin, for whom, as they say, she would have laid down her life with every satisfaction" and consequently has little time or affection for Julia. Bored, disaffected, sensitive, witty, deeply attached to her strange, precocious little bookworm of a son, Julia finds excuses to disappear on little expeditions to the seedier side of town or relatively innocent lunch dates with Roddy's eccentric Wing Commander. Roddy is indignant and thinks she should be at home, but his own private life turns out to be rather less than perfect. Interwoven with all this is a fascinating perspective on the war, which in one sense impinges little on everyday life but in another sense is fundamental to everything that happens.
It's almost impossible, or seems so to me right now, to give any idea of why this is such a great novel. Really not a huge amount happens -- the joy of the novel is in the telling and the tone. I was a little reminded of Barbara Pym at times by the wry wit of of the writing, which occasionally made me laugh aloud. But really the subject is a bit more serious than Pym's usually are because at its heart it is, I suppose, an analysis of a failing marriage. Julia is a truly superb character and I couldn't help wondering how much she resembled ET herself -- I rather think she must have done, though of course she may have just been an amazing imaginative creation. Anyway this is a novel of immense subtlety and it gave me a great deal of pleasure.
