YOU’LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
YOU’LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE
The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor
by Elizabeth Taylor
selected by Margaret Drabble
New York Review Books, 428 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
No, the other Elizabeth Taylor. The English one, who you’ve never heard of. The one who was a librarian and a governess, because that was still a thing in England in the 1930s, before marrying a businessman, which was also a thing and a perfectly acceptable in terms of occupations for men, prior to the invention of career terminology like “Lead Regional Response Liason” and “Customer Solutions Engineer.” It was a different world, in which you could be a writer and a housewife at the same time, and wear white gloves and talcum powder, and have a lover, and have two sets of riveted china, whatever that is. It is a world Taylor describes perfectly in her story “The Benefactress,” in which people “kept to themselves, drank their own tea in their own kitchens, used surnames, passed a few remarks, perhaps, when they met by chance in the graveyard or weeding their garden plots or, dressed in their best, waiting for the bus to go to the village and draw their pensions.” Every peg has its right hole. In unfamiliar circumstances, the characters’ familiarity with rightness changes.
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