Complete Short Stories

by Elizabeth Taylor, Joanna Kingham (Introduction)

Elizabeth Taylor, highly acclaimed author of classic novels such as Angel, A Game of Hide and Seek and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, is also renowned for her powerful, acutely observed stories. Here for the first time, the stories - including some only recently discovered - are collected in one volume. From the awkward passions of lonely holiday-makers to the fresh-faced anticipation of three school friends preparing for their first dance, from the minor jealousies and triumphs of marriage to tales of outsiders struggling to adapt to the genteel English countryside, with a delicate, witty touch Elizabeth Taylor illuminates the nuances of ordinary lives.

This is the first time Elizabeth Taylor's short stories have been collected in one volume. This publication is to mark the centenary of Elizabeth Taylor's birth.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club

626 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2012

About the author

Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was a popular English novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1912. She was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and worked as a governess, as a tutor and as a librarian.

In 1936, she married John William Kendall Taylor, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.

Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.

Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle class and upper middle class English life won her an audience of discriminating readers, as well as loyal friends in the world of letters.

She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell.

Elizabeth Taylor died at age 63 of cancer.

Anne Tyler once compared Taylor to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen -- "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words . In recent years new interest has been kindled by movie makers in her work. French director Francois Ozon, has made "The Real Life of Angel Deverell" which will be released in early 2005. American director Dan Ireland's screen adaptation of Taylor's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" came out in this country first in 2006 and has made close to $1 million. A British distributor picked it up at Cannes, and the movie was released in England in 2009.

Reviews

[Antoinette · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

Elizabeth Taylor has fast become one of my favourite writers. I have slowly been reading this edition of all her short stories since February.

What I loved about this book:

1) Her writing- not a word or thought out of place. Her writing is sublime.

2) Her Characters- her development, even in a short story, is exemplary.

3) Her range- 65 stories and I can’t say any ran into another. Each was unique and perfectly formed.

4) Her topics- people navigating through life; loneliness, grief, death, marriage- all slices and stages of life. Some were quite dark- but then again, she, as an author, has never shied away from looking at the evils in the world and the darker side of people.

Of the 65 stories, I gave 5 stars to 22. Only 8 got 3 or less. The rest were 4-4.5. Overall, the book left me feeling content and fulfilled.

Lines I appreciated and had to pause and reread:

“ Beside her, his mouth closing upon, then relinquishing, his bent knuckles, the baby turned his eyes with a look of wonder to the light outside.”

“ In the fog, the leaves dripped with a deadly intensity, as if each falling drop were a drop of acid.”

“ Let me show you something true for one moment. Let me help you look into your son’s heart, or your own even.”

“ Her heart had been twice ambushed in this house and now she was desperate to escape.”

“ She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he had gone. If he spoke the truth, she could not bear it; if he tried to muffle it with tenderness, she would look upon it as pity.”

An excellent collection. Highly recommended!

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Any woman novelist who writes grammatically, it sometimes seems, will sooner or later be compared to Jane Austen..." Thus Philip Hensher in his piece on the 'other' Elizabeth Taylor in the Telegraph. A left-handed compliment (and Mr Hensher dismisses it himself as inappropriate in this case), for although it might appear generous to mention any name alongside one of the greatest writers in English Lit, nevertheless it does at the same time box the writer off, dismissing her into a convenient category of tinkling teacups and polite social satire. But Ms Taylor escapes those confines, she erupts, spills out of her pink corsets with a faint rip of coarseness, with a decorous vulgarity that puts Jam Fart and Custard onto the menu, mentions constipation at tea, names that small operation as 'my hysterectomy' and overhears the remark that Mr Wharton makes as Pat stoops down in front of him to retrieve the front door key from under the dustbin (Could be a nice view on a nice day).

One of her favourite themes in these 65 stories that cover her whole 30 year publishing career, is to take rather comfortably off, complacent people and land them with something they have to contend with, something that will catapult them out of their cosy self-satisfaction. Sophy returns from Finishing School in Switzerland to her father married to her own best friend from school - fifty three and eighteen and all plotted and planned with me safely out of the way in a foreign country; Muriel has to battle the wraith that is her husband's young cousin, come to live with them and expose the chasm that has opened between the couple; families take on a Spanish war refugee, or two devastating boys from the East End; water invades in The Thames Spread Out or from a burst pipe in Ever So Banal; Catherine has to deal with the treacherous visit of a lover from years ago, come to her as she sits amongst her many children on the beach.

Taylor's children are unnerving. Sensitive, beady-eyed children. Little Timmy who tastes on his own tongue the bitterness of his snobbish mother's thwarted social ambition. Grave, timid Deborah, taken to buy bronze kid dancing slippers (with rosettes) by an exasperating mother, takes vicious revenge on this paragon of selfishness by pinching someone else - oh yes, how the cruelties we inflict on our children have to be paid for by others.
And Kitty.
In and Out the Houses goes prancing Kitty Miller, chattering to the gallery, passing on the news. She is orderly in her habits, never visiting in the afternoons for then she had her novel to write. The novel was known about in the village, and some people felt concerned, wondering if she might be another Daisy Ashford. Their concern at how they might appear in possible print turns into competitive one-upmanship in the kitchen department, an escalating war that eventually results in Mrs Glazier's housekeeping allowance always seeming to disappear by Wednesday. But no need, no need to be so concerned, for Kitty's book was all about little furry animals, and their small adventures, and there was not a human being in it, except the girl, Katherine, who befriended them all.
Irresistible, that gentle self-mockery.

And yes, that gently mocking tone. It's a voice I could listen to for hours, warm, witty and generous. She is always so careful and protective of her comic characters, they are never ridiculed. Not even in Flesh which treats of a laughably abortive attempt at middle-aged holiday romance (read: sex). Phyl and Stanley come together over what Phyl likes to call her aperitif, although that is a ritual which, in reality, amounted to two hours' steady drinking. Stanley joins her at the bar, where they converse and stare at the jokey set, brash and loud.

By now, he and Phyl had nicknames for most of the other people in the hotel. They did not know that the same applied to them, and that to the jokey set he was known as Paws and she as the Shape. It would have put them out and perhaps ruined their holiday if they had known. He thought his little knee-pattings were of the utmost discretion, and she felt confidence from knowing that her figure was expensively controlled under her beaded dresses when she became herself again in the evening. During the day, while sun-bathing, she considered that anything went - that, as her mind was a blank, her body became one also.

And if you only read one of her short story collections, let it be A Dedicated Man, And Other Stories. Or The Devastating Boys.
Well, two then.
Two at the very least.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

While perhaps not a master of the short story in the same way that Eudora Welty (she was a big fan of Taylor’s work, by the way) and Flannery O'Connor are, I will put Taylor high up on the echelon anyway, perhaps right under but as close as can be to both.

Only one of Taylor’s impressive techniques is the passing off of thoughts from one character to another—who said short stories should stick to one viewpoint? If it can be done as well as Taylor has done it, there goes another ‘rule.’ Her range of topics is wide, though superficially it may not seem so. Her endings can be quirky, but are all the better for that.

Of interest to me in the introduction, written by Taylor’s daughter, is that my William Maxwell, in addition to his relationship as Taylor's editor at The New Yorker, became a good friend to her and her family (as he did with Welty). And I agree with daughter Joanna that, even though Maxwell asked Taylor to consider altering the end of “The Fly-Paper”, without that chilling ending, there is no story.

See ·Karen·'s review for details; I can’t improve on it one bit.

Added 2/10/17: Alice Munro also belongs at the top of the short-story echelon.

[J.C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was proceeding nicely through these stories when one of them completely overturned my reaction to the book, and to the writer. More of that in a minute. For most of the way through this fat volume I followed the intimacies and insights of Ms Taylor’s pen with happy admiration. She writes with acute observation and finesse. There are many stories here, varying in length, and she sustains this throughout.

The last book I read before this was William Trevor’s Last Stories, tales that to me were all about shadows, the past reaching forward, the private darknesses of our innermost being stalking us. This book seemed all about light, not in a superficial kind of way but as if a light beam had suddenly intervened in the characters’ lives to bring to the surface the moments, the small occurrences, that culminate in an exquisite agony, underlined by a sort of quiet desperation. At times the characters seem to spiral downwards in what used to be called a 'dervish' dance, and they can do this with full consciousness, with an almost fatalistic awareness of where their own character, context and choices will lead them.

I can’t give an opinion on whether, overall, there is a movement by the author to foster this near-stultifying redemption of acceptance; I can’t retain all the stories in my head, but the first story, Hester Lilly, remains with me, as the character Muriel steadily destroys the life she has so far sustained, and the inevitability of this gathers momentum throughout, to be upheld at the end. The circumstances do not require this destructive meddling, this inherent dissatisfaction; Muriel’s personality does.

Many of the stories depict the social context of middle-class England in the twentieth century, when the indestructible in English middle-class society caved inwards like a black hole. The tales nearly all remain, however, within the limits of social acceptability, so that even when the stories got a bit darker I was inclined to focus on mundanity, on a meticulously controlled structure, rather than on any jarring note. The first little shock came when one of the stories ended with a dramatic suicide, which I thought was poorly handled, as if Ms Taylor herself was out of her comfort zone. Nothing so far had been melodramatic, or even dramatic beyond the small events of peoples’ lives that can reveal so much, bring all into focus in that searching beam of light. The stories did get darker, becoming part of a tense agony brought to bear upon a conversation in a pub or hotel room that painted a life, starkly, pitilessly. This she can do superbly.

The story that upset me went beyond all these bounds, very suddenly and with an implied horror that was enormous, unspeakable. I exclaimed aloud when I got to the end – although, now I have written about this, even without giving the name of the story away, you will probably see it coming. It seemed to burst out of someone else’s pen, someone whose brain had dug deep for something worse than had previously been possible for them to write about. It gave me a nightmare, from which I have still not recovered, several hours later.

After this shocking insertion the remaining stories held less interest for me, and I found the last one rather hard to take in. I don’t know if the stories are in chronological order, but it’s as if something in the author had altered, or fallen flat. I hadn’t read the introduction at this point, but the author’s daughter mentions the disturbing story by name as one that her mother found “rather horrible”. It does seem to me surprising that Ms Taylor sent it off to The New Yorker just as she usually did with these stories. She remarked herself that people would not like it. She was right – I felt betrayed by her. Apparently, however, it was made into a film, which I will be certain to avoid if it ever comes my way.

Psychologically some of these stories seem to indicate a concern, or wonder, in herself, about where they came from, how they arose in her. Some of them, her daughter says, were drawn from real incidents and characters, such as some of my favourites, Spry Old Character, or The Devastating Boys; but others depict elderly spinsters who have lived their lives alone, stifled by parentage and circumstance, which were not her lot, but which were certainly very representative of her milieu, in a period where many men had been lost to the country in wars. It is the darker stories that make one reflect on her art, its source and expression. For Thine is the Power reaches sad, world-weary, cynical depths. Perhaps her artist’s soul painted so many of these stories in the bright colours of summer, in tremendous gardens, to heighten the intensity of the shadows, which, after all, were there, where I didn’t expect to find them.

[Sarah Batterbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually do reviews...who cares what I think? ...and so many people don't review they write a synopsis!
Finishing this book has left me bereft...no more of her dazzling short (and medium) stories to read ..ever...all I can say is the woman was a genius and I am in awe of her talent.This is a box of delights. At least there are some novels to read now..

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Taylor is heralded as ‘one of the best novelists born in this [the twentieth] century’ by prolific author Kingsley Amis. Her work is enjoying a sudden surge in popularity, and every short story which the author wrote over her career – 65 in all – has been placed together in this volume, recently published by Virago. The majority of the stories printed here have previously been published in other books of Taylor’s collected work – Hester Lilly (1954), The Blush (1958), The Dedicated Man (1965) and The Devastating Boys (1972). Complete Short Stories also includes several stories which have only been published in magazines to date.

The volume has been introduced by Taylor’s daughter, Joanna Kingham. She states that ‘many of the stories have an autobiographical streak’, and echoes of Taylor can be found throughout.

Complete Short Stories is rather impressive merely in terms of the large number of stories it contains. Some, like ‘Hester Lilly’ are relatively long, and others fill just two or three pages. These shorter stories are certainly the most impressive, merely for the atmosphere which Taylor is able to build up in just a few sentences. Such vignettes really show her skill as an author.

Many of the stories are rich in detail and the majority launch straight into the story from the outset. Taylor’s descriptions work well with the stories she has fashioned. In the garden in ‘Hester Lilly’, ‘the leaves were large enough to look sinister, and all of this landscape with its tortured-looking ash trees, its too-prolific vegetation, had a brooding, an evil aspect’, and in ‘Spry Old Character’, it is explained how the protagonist views his surroundings: ‘country to him was negative: simply, a place where there was not a town’.

A host of different settings and storylines can be found throughout Complete Short Stories. They take place within, for example, a retirement home, a hospital room, a journey in rural France, a relatively neglected garden, and feature such subjects as birth, death, bereavement, couples growing apart, shifting relationships and ageing. This varied subject matter and the ordering of the stories allows them to be read continually, or in short bursts over a longer period of time.

Taylor’s stories are, essentially, glimpses into lives. We as readers meet many different characters in a whole host of varied situations and time periods, and feel that we grow to know them well for the most part. The characters themselves are relatively easy to empathise with. They are built up well and the details which Taylor includes about them make them seem like realistic individuals. In the first story ‘Hester Lilly’, Hester, whose name ‘had suggested to her [cousin Muriel] a goitrous, pre-Raphaelite frailty’ wears clothes which make her look ‘jaunty, defiant and absurd’. In ‘Poor Girl’, the young protagonist is described as an ‘alarmingly precocious’ child, whose teacher ‘thought that he despised his childhood, regarding it as a waiting time which he used only as a rehearsal for adult life’.

The stories do not all follow the same structure. Whilst the majority are told from the omniscient third person perspective, several do use the first person narrative voice of their protagonist or overseer. The prose itself is carefully written and most every word holds importance within the story, and Taylor makes rather original comparisons between objects. A good example of this is when she describes bracelets as ‘warm and heavy, alive like flesh’.

The book’s only downfall is that it does not cite where the stories were originally published, or the years in which they were written. This information would be incredibly useful in such a large collection of stories, as it would allow the reader to see how Taylor grew as a writer over the span of her career. The stories are all engrossing and the majority of them intrigue, making the reader want to read on.

[Pat Morris-jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't, usually, write reviews. It's all been said before. However, despite this being true on this occasion as of the rest I feel obliged to do so. This was my book club read. My heart sank when I saw it was over 600 pages long AND short stories. How wrong I was. I now realise why I dislike most short stories. I've never read a whole book of them of which I disliked none. I have read a couple of collections that were good, but not every story. This collection is that exception. I feel saddened that this is the complete collection, otherwise I would have looked for more.
They are subtle, clever, not too clever and I don't think she has written a wrong word. Any criticism? I didn't like the last story as much as the others. One has to be pedantic. Nothing better than a small flaw to make the rest seem perfect. I may look at her novels soon. I am worried though, in case they don't come up to same standards as her stories. Fabulous. Thank you Ms Taylor. You have broadened my outlook and changed my mind. Here's to short stories.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this type of understated writing. Stories are crafted and unfold subtly. Perfect for short stories.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A grave is no place for self-expression, though."

With a sad heart I come to the end of Taylor's splendid fiction. Without hyperbole, I can say with ease that she was and is one of the great 20th century writers, in English or any language. For the Taylor initiate, this volume (there is a shorter NYRB one I reviewed last year), which collects all her short stories, would be a great place to start, for she wrote scads of them and largely gained her fame, at least in America, from them being published by the New Yorker. Unusually, perhaps, every single one of these stories are precious, precocious prisms to which Taylor puts her dry but not pitiless eye, so it is difficult to recommend any one over the others. A few stand out for me personally, I guess, as extraordinary examples of Taylor's incredible gifts: "Madame Olga", "The Letter-Writers", "Girl Reading", "The Excursion to the Source", "Poor Girl", "Miss A and Miss M"...these are representative little slices of genius if you're feeling tentative about testing your toes in Taylor's waters; try those first.

[Geertje · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This book is big, both in length and dimensions (good quality paper), and as such it feels as if I've really accomplished something now that I've finished it, when, really, all I did was finish reading a book.

Taylor always leaves me in awe. The way she conjures up scenes, the way she establishes settings and characters is so deft that I'm always left wondering how exactly she did it. I must say that the stories I enjoyed most in this collection generally were the longer ones, but this also holds true for me for her novels, so that is not unexpected.

My favourite tales were 'Hester Lily', 'Spry Old Character', 'The Ambush' (I think this one has to be #1, it was so unbelievably beautiful and touching), 'Goodbye, Goodbye', 'The Thames Spread Out', 'The Excursion to the Source', 'Sisters', 'Miss A and Miss M', and 'Husbands and Wives'.

The one thing I would've liked for this edition was to have the date of composition published along with each story (and perhaps I would've liked a longer introduction, but those truly are minor issues).

[kp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this book for two years, portioning it out between other reads, for I have read all of Taylor's novels and thus knew that when I finished it, that well was dry. "The other Elizabeth Taylor," as she liked to call herself, is, oddly, most known for being neglected in the annals of literature. She was, but time sometimes has a way of evening things out, and Taylor is less tied to her cultural milieu than, say Kingsley Amis, who was a literary star at about the same time and whom few people I know still read. Taylor's stories range from vignettes to more substantial tales. They are all excellent and many are exquisite. Sometimes, reading Taylor is like turning over a soft pillow to find a blood stain on the other side, and the best of them, like "A Dedicated Man" and "Miss A and Miss M" are haunting. Jealousy, regret, tenderness, courage, longing, rage, spite, loss, loneliness--it's all here, and in prose so fluent and precise that you sometimes forget you are reading at all and feel as if the stories have just emerged, somehow, in your mind and heart.

[Banbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of these "short stories" seem more like portions of an unwritten novel, or even just a working out of some ideas. However, some of the stories are just brilliant. "The Little Girl" is a perfect short story. I will not say why, because a reader should approach this story with no preconceived ideas about its course.

[Kurishin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a case where 'selected' should be preferred to 'collected'. Taylor's output was too large for all of this to be brilliant, so the reader gets the pleasure of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Taylor is not a moralist. She does create suspense but not normally through clear pro and antagonists. Rare is the character that is nothing but human. Rural English village life, observed, and what can be learned.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4:
Witty and acutely observed stories of ordinary life, broadcast to mark the centenary of the author's birth.

[Luci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read so far:

The Beginning of a Story (114-118)
As If I Should Care (390-401)

[Jess]

Loved these intense short stories.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Added two more stories June 28, 2023

Hester Lilly

Feeling uncertain about her position within her marriage, Muriel is alarmed about the consequences arising from the arrival at their school of her husband’s very young cousin , especially as her husband and the girl appear to have a special relationship. Fearing the worst, she decides to preempt any possible problem, which is not always the best course of action. Hester Lilly is the longest short story in the book, possibly better embarked upon as if it were a novella. I just love the emotional depth Taylor manages to give her characters and how she is always able to get the reader to have sympathy for even the most flawed of people. Taylor is always a great read and even her most serious work still includes the author’s gentle touch.

'Hester, in clothes which astonished by their improvisation – the wedding of out-grown school uniform with the adult, gloomy wardrobe of her dead mother – looked jaunty, defiant and absurd. Every garment was grown out of or not grown into'.



Following added June 28 2023

‘Taking Mother Out’

Mrs. Crouch is eighty-years-old but seems younger, and seems obsessed by drawing attention to her age. Her son, Roy, is a cynical type who appears to know everything and yet comes over as the henpecked son. There is also an elderly bird-watcher who constantly bores the company with his sightings. Very short offering that didn’t knock me out, but I am amazed how Taylor brings these three together with such perceptiveness. You feel you have experienced this whole interplay many times. (3 stars)

Spry Old Character

Only by pleasing could he live; by complying – as clown, as eunuch – he earned the scraps and shreds they threw to him, the odds and ends left over from their everyday life.

An elderly blind man is trapped in a home, but suddenly ‘escapes’ on an adventure where he meets people and they take him to the fairground. As always with Taylor, we are given insight into the unfortunate and also, unfortunately, how they are treated. Harry’s day out, however, is not exactly the wonderful adventure he might have imagined but a realization of how the world is. A great read that reaffirms Taylor’s brilliance. (5 stars)

[Till Raether · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection contains about 10 to 15 stories which are not available in Hester Lilly, The Blush, A Dedicated Man, and The Devastating Boys. Unfortunatly, one can only guess, because this (the only) edition of Taylor's complete stories comes without any bibliographic notes, no dates, no places of publication, nothing. It seems the stories are collected chronologically, with the uncollected ones mixed in with the collected ones, but one can only guess. Not even an editorial note is provided. Sometimes the Virago minimalism seems misplaced, or cheap.

On the plus side, the collection features a perfect foreword from Taylor's daughter Joanna Kingham. It's brief, but it contains just the right amount of personal anecdote, biographical background, and literary analysis. A gem, really, I don't recall reading a more delightful introduction.

The uncollected stories are interesting (where I could identify them), because some of them are more modernist than Taylor's work for The New Yorker (take the violently shifting focus of It Makes A Change), some are more benign and kind, with characters being granted a satisfaction she so often withholds (The Blossoming), and it's remarkable that the book closes with a couple of the strongest stories Taylor has written. It would be interesting to know whether these were the kernel of the next collection she was working on when she died, or whether they are to be filed under miscellaneous. Who knows. Not readers of this book, unfortunately.

(I will now consult her biography.)

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading this massive collection of Elizabeth Taylor's short stories for most of the year, interspersing a story between each book I've read. It's a stunning complete collection of this much underrated author's short fiction and probably takes the prize as my book of the year. Sixty-five stories, over six hundred pages and not a dull sentence among them. Taylor's way of conjuring up an intense atmosphere in few words (try the last story in the book, 'Violet Hour at The Fleece' as an illustration of what I mean) is remarkable as is her way with character and place, all underpinned by a dry sense of humour, an eagle eye for human frailties and a certain hard-edged wistfulness. I cannot recommend this highly enough, but if such a comprehensive collection is off-putting, then as an example of just how good a short story writer Elizabeth Taylor was, read In and Out the Houses; I can guarantee that once you have you'll be hooked and want to read more.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having finished reading her novels years ago ( I liked them all and loved 'Mrs Palfrey' & 'Angel'), I suppose it was inevitable that one day I would find this second hand and not be able to stop myself buying it.

I usually only read short stories when I'm being a completist for favourite authors . When are all those Anne Tyler stories going to be anthologised ?

It took more than 100 pages before I found anything worth more than 2 or 3 stars and then a piece magic happened, I put it down and read a stark pretentious novel which I hated but which most goodreaders gave 5 stars. When I came back to this I found it wonderful, every story a delight. Arch, wry, human, humane, humerous and very mid 20th century English middle class.

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL OF ENGLISH SHORT STORIES OR ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES
Man the British are a passive aggressive lot. Gotta love 'em in their toothless post imperial splendOUr!
Anyhoo, buying the collection is one of the best things you can do for $2/99 because PRICELESS. Hundreds of tales transport you to anal retentive Albion (or Brits bothering others abroad) in the twentieth as they looked around spitefully at each others toothless splendOUr. It is amazing the things these people say out loud but even worse what THEY THINK WHEN THEY SAY IT.
The author seems hot if in a pent up sexually frustrated way and that only endears her to me more because I know she's a libertine. Ive tried to DM her but unscuccessfully. She doesn't even have FB
Seriously, the stories are gems. Unforgettable. Highly recommended!

[William Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Taylor’s short stories, like her novels, are wonderful. Moody, odd, very British mid century vibe—Barbara Pym adjacent perhaps? A good many of her stories are collected in a single volume by New York Review of Books, but this Virago edition has all of her short stories, about twice the number.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories read for the Virago group. Very poignant and revealing of human nature all from a female pov. Of its time but race and class covered plus motherhood, fertility, sex, domestic violence, family secrets and lies plus much more. Wonderful writing.

[Karin · Rating 5 out of 5]

After e-reading 72% I had to slow down and open Goodreads because I am dreading the moment when I finish this book. Goodreads helps to continue enjoying this book without actually spoiling new stories :-)
Thank you @Karen for writing the excellent review.

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stories. Excellent writer. You can see why the New Yorker liked her.

[Melanie Etchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories are excellent! Difficult to understand how I have not discovered Elizabeth Taylor before now!

[Gowri N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of stories by a fine writer. Sensitively written. Beautiful prose. Stories with real atmosphere that cast lingering shadows. I will definitely re-read these.