At Mrs Lippincote's

Book 4: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth Taylor, Valerie Martin

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The debut novel from Elizabeth Taylor - shortlisted for the Booker Prize * Mrs Lippincote's house, with its mahogany furniture and yellowing photographs, stands as a reminder of all the certainties that have vanished with the advent of war. Temporarily, this is home for Julia, who has joined her husband Roddy at the behest of the RAF. Although she can accept the pomposities of service life, Julia's honesty and sense of humour prevent her from taking her role as seriously as her husband, that leader of men, might wish; for Roddy, merely love cannot suffice - he needs homage as well as admiration. And Julia, while she may be a most unsatisfactory officer's wife, is certainly no hypocrite. * 'Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning-point in one's own experience' Elizabeth Bowen 'No writer has described the English middle classes with more gently devastating accuracy' Rebecca Abrams, Spectator 'A Game of Hide and Seek showcases much of what makes Taylor a great novelist: piercing insight, a keen wit and a genuine sense of feeling for her characters' Elizabeth Day, Guardian

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 280

Sample

‘One of the best novelists born in this century’ Kingsley Amis


‘Taylor is finally, I think, being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion
and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor’s novels and short stories many times over.
As a writer I’ve returned to her, too – in awe of her achievements and trying to work out how she does it’ Sarah Waters


‘One of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor writes with a wonderful precision and grace.
Her world is totally absorbing’ Antonia Fraser


‘A wonderful novelist’ Jilly Cooper

‘Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen – soul-sisters all’ Anne Tyler

‘The unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction … In all of Taylor’s novels and short stories, there is subtle humour,
acute psychological perception and great tenderness … but it is her unflinching dissection of what goes on beneath the surface
of people’s lives that makes the worlds of her novels so magnetising … She is adept at capturing the ways people interact
– and how they fail to; how words, thoughts, actions glance off each other in unpredictable directions; how even those closely
related can live curiously parallel existences’ Rebecca Abrams, New Statesman

‘How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!’ Elizabeth Jane Howard

‘Elizabeth Taylor has an eye as sharply all-seeing as her prose is elegant – even the humdrum becomes astonishing when told
in language that always aims for descriptive integrity, without a cliché in sight. As a result, Taylor excels in conveying
the tragicomic poignancy of the everyday’ Daily Telegraph

‘Elizabeth Taylor had the keenest eye and ear for the pain lurking behind a genteel demeanour’ Paul Bailey, Guardian

‘Sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’ Rosamond Lehmann

‘How skilfully and with what peculiar exhilaration she negotiated the minefield of the human heart’ Jonathan Keates, Spectator

‘Taylor is an overlooked genius, her quiet and sharply observed novels the equal of any of our modern novelists who portray
women and their daily lives. For anyone new to work, think Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter and all that passion raging under a prim middle-class exterior. I envy anyone who has yet to discover this wonderful author’
Sue Baker, Publishing News

Though I never met either of them, Kingsley Amis introduced me to Elizabeth Taylor. He did it slyly, with deceptive nonchalance,
as one might present a powerful relative to an acquaintance at a party; he knew she was important but he had his doubts about
me. This happened in his novel Difficulties With Girls. After a poor lunch of macaroni cheese, Jenny Standish, much neglected wife of the libidinous Patrick, has gone to the library
in search of steady company. ‘Everything seemed to be out, bar an enormous saga about Southern Belles, but then she spotted
a new Elizabeth Taylor on the returns shelf.’ At home, Jenny is disappointed to discover that ‘the new Elizabeth Taylor turned
out to be an old Elizabeth Taylor in a new impression and with a different outside, and she must have been slipping not to
have checked, always advisable with an author whose books were marvellous but rather the same.’


For any novelist, let alone one as famously cranky and hard on the women as Sir Kingsley, to stop cold the progress of his
own story in order to extol the virtues of another novelist is unusual, to say the least. In spite of the mild cavil about
‘sameness’, Amis has gotten the full name in three times and coupled it with the adjective ‘marvellous’, clearly intent upon
a forceful recommendation. As a reader I had no choice but to ask myself – who is this Elizabeth Taylor?


Once I finished Amis’s Difficulties, I set about finding the answer to that question. This was in the USA, before the virtues of the Internet had come to my attention,
so I did it in the old-fashioned way, on foot, in stores, everywhere I went. Fortunately, Virago had recently put out new
editions of the novels. I soon fell into the habit of scanning the store shelves for the often sadly limited collection of
dark green spines. In this way, over a long period of time, I acquired and read, in no particular order, all of Mrs Taylor’s novels. My gratitude to Kingsley Amis grew with each one.


Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading in 1912 and educated at the Abbey School. When she was twenty-four, she married a businessman,
John Taylor, and they moved to Penn, in Buckinghamshire, where she spent most of her adult life. She had two children, a son
and a daughter. In school she had begun writing, but it was not until some years of dreary rejection that a novel was accepted
for publication. This was At Mrs Lippincote’s, which was published in 1945. It was well received critically, as was the steady stream of novels and story collections that
followed. Mrs Taylor was shy in public and disliked publicity, but through her writing she became friends with novelists she
herself admired, especially Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Bowen. This good opinion of her peers seems to have been all
the fame she required.


Should her work ever find the wide audience it deserves, doubtless some literary sleuth will dig beneath the placid surface
of the bland facts which currently constitute her biography and come up with some hidden passion or suffering, some deeper
tragedy than her children’s measles or her char’s bad temper, but until that time we must accept the possibility that this
consummate artist was a very nice woman who lived in a small town, surrounded by a happy family.


While it is true that her subject matter is largely the quiet horror of domestic life, one of the pleasures of reading Mrs
Taylor’s novels is the wide range of variation rung upon that theme. One might as easily complain that Dante had limited his
scope by focusing too relentlessly on the damned souls in hell, as accuse her of ‘sameness’. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, for example, examines the indignities of aging; The Wedding Group concerns the cruel tyranny of art; A Game of Hide and Seek discourses upon passion, love lost and life spoiled by that loss; and in Angel, perhaps her most successful novel, the demon
of literary ambition is dissected and displayed with utmost care and delicacy.


‘I write in scenes, rather than in narrative, which I find boring,’ Mrs Taylor observed in an interview. Though not without
a certain narrative cunning, her method is revelation by accumulation of detail. For the reader it is like working a jigsaw
puzzle, holding up a piece shaped like an eggplant which appears to contain a section of a tree stump, to find, when it is placed
in its rightful position, that it is a nose. As the scenes unfold the reader very gradually gets the picture.


In keeping with her shy disposition, Mrs Taylor never uses the relentlessly personal first-person point of view. The vast,
various, densely populated world of her fiction is seen from the outside, but – and this is, in my view, her most original
achievement – never at a distance. There are all kinds of omniscience available to the novelist, but the breezy, always sympathetic,
never exculpatory consciousness that flits in and out of the heads of her characters is utterly her own. Here is a sample
of it from the opening lines of At Mrs Lippincote’s. Julia and Roddy Davenant, their son Oliver, and Roddy’s cousin Eleanor are unpacking in their new furnished house. Roddy
has advocated the usefulness of packing lists. Julia responds in self-defense:


‘There are some things you cannot acquire,’ she told Roddy. ‘These lists for instance. They are not in me. It is a flair. Like
making pastry. You are either born with a cool, quick hand or you are not. It can never be taught.’


Such reflections were always thrown away upon Roddy. ‘I have never complained about your pastry,’ he assured her and then,
remembering some book or other, written by a woman, on Happy Marriages, How to Make, Maintain, and Endure Them, he basely and unnecessarily betrayed his own mother. ‘Her pastry is always heavier than yours,’ he concluded.


‘Those tarts!’ she thought. The greyish slabs embedded with cherries. But he shouldn’t have said it. ‘I wouldn’t like Oliver
to, one day.’


How much, in this scrap of dialogue, which slips by unnoticed between the preoccupied couple, is revealed; and not just about
Roddy’s mother’s pastry. And how visceral is the reader’s awareness of the unconscious tension that is fraying this marriage
to a thread. It’s in the undercurrent of thought, in what is not said, for example, that the word ‘pastry’ uttered between
them shifts the subject to Roddy’s mother, though neither of them mentions her name.


At Mrs Lippincote’s was written in 1945, when Mrs Taylor’s own husband was in the RAF and London was shovelling out from the Blitz. Ostensibly the story is about the faltering marriage
of Julia and her husband Roddy, a junior officer in the RAF, and the strains undergone by their family when they are forced
to set up housekeeping in the musty, cluttered, seriously furnished house of the eponymous Mrs Lippincote. The war is both
behind and before them, but they are, for the moment, safe from it, stuck away in St Winifred’s Crescent, a colourless suburb
without a pub but with a school that offers employment for Eleanor and ‘Montessori methods’ for their sickly son Oliver. Roddy’s
duties here consist of ‘meetings’, which often last late into the night, leaving Julia to amuse herself as best she can among
total strangers in a house she finds oppressive.


Though no bomb is dropped that explodes anything more concrete than love’s illusions, at every turning of the way, beneath
the surface of every conversation, haunting the landscape as vividly as the ghosts of the monks haunt the ruined abbey Julia
frequents on her restless walks, are both the apparition and the cold hard fact of war. On the first day Julia muses, ‘I wonder
how long we shall be in this house?’


‘For the duration. I’ve told you, you needn’t worry,’ Roddy said. ‘I won’t be posted now.’

‘The war might go on for ten years,’ said Julia, who was depressed beyond words. ‘Oliver might grow up to be a man in this
funny place.’


Every relationship Julia has is coloured by the omnipresence of the war. Eleanor, whom she despises, is living with her because
she has had a breakdown, after ‘a dear friend was reported missing, then killed, then, after a long time, a prisoner of war.’
Mr Taylor, former manager of La Belle Charlotte, a restaurant Julia frequented in London, having come down in the world, economically
as well as physically, is discovered by Roddy working as a waiter in the lounge of a nearby hotel. Julia meets him wandering
about the abbey ruins, bemused and ill, still shaken by ‘those terrible nights’ in the Blitz.


‘You get up in the morning with your stomach tender from the fear you’ve been in all night. Can’t be any good for you, can
it? […] And then,’ he continued, ‘there are all the people who refuse to have their morale destroyed. They’re the worst part of the
whole affair. Sometimes you feel it would be such a relief to say you’re frightened, but those awful people stop you.’


The Wing Commander, a dour eccentric first seen knitting at an officers’ cocktail party, forms an attachment to Julia based
on their mutual enthusiasm for the Brontës, but it is the war that has drawn them together. When Julia, in her entrenched
unhappiness, is reduced to tears, he admits:


‘I feel responsible for bringing you here. I persuaded Roddy to find a house’ – surprise put an end to her sniffing – ‘because
in this sort of job – office jobs, schoolmastering, nurse-maiding – it settles an officer to have his wife.’


Even children have lost their innocence in the shadow of the war. Felicity, the Wing Commander’s precocious daughter, peppers
her discourse with all things military. When she and Oliver lie upon the lawn looking up at the sky, it is not cloud shapes
that thrill her imagination:


‘Beautiful formation […] Fine aircraft, too. I’ll hand that to the Yanks,’ said Felicity generously, rolling back on to her
stomach.


‘What kind are they?’ Oliver inquired.

Her eyes stretched in surprise. ‘Forts, of course. Now this one, coming this way – that’s a Dakota.’

In a startling conversation with the visiting clergyman Mr Maffick, Julia, swatting flies with a telephone directory, confesses
that she does not like killing them. ‘What about fly-papers?’ he suggests.


‘No, they’re so cruel. Imagine it! Striving to free oneself until the legs leave the sockets. This way is bad enough. Contemplating
brutality makes you used to it […] If I really imagined what I’m doing now, I couldn’t do it. It is the first step towards
committing atrocities on human beings. At first, you are nervously repelled, then take it for granted, then look to it for
excitement and, finally, for pleasure and ecstasy. Then you’re done for and must be shot […] This morning I read in the paper
about something vile the Nazis did, and I thought: “It’s all right. It’s not as bad as the atrocity I read about last week.”
I was very much shocked at myself.’


‘War does that for one.’


‘Yes. That’s what I said. The contemplation of brutality brutalises. Last time you didn’t get your tea. This time you shall
have it.’ She laid down her blood-stained directory and went to put the kettle on.


Julia, critical, observant, occasionally cruel, ‘too busy, as a rule, measuring up and deploring other people to be in any
way conscious of herself, expends her energy on not allowing herself to apprehend the true state of her marriage and of the
world in which it is foundering, but there is no escape from what the war is doing to the moral landscape she is forced to
inhabit. In a friendly chat about the unpleasantness of killing insects, the small domestic canvas for which Mrs Taylor was
sometimes unjustly criticized is revealed to contain a window opening upon all the horrors of the vast undertaking of war.
Her simple observation is as timely as it is acute.


Elizabeth Taylor died, of cancer, in 1975, working against time to complete her twelfth novel Blaming, which was published posthumously in 1976. Kingsley Amis began his review of this novel in the Observer by expressing his own sincere puzzlement at the neglected state of her reputation:


Outside her family and friends, her death was not much noticed except among the smallish band who care for literature. Her
genuine distaste for any kind of publicity – that rarest of qualities in a writer – and her deeply unsensational style and
subject matter saw to it that, in life, she never received her due as one of the best English novelists born in this century.
I hope she will in future.’ (Observer, 12 Sept. 1976).


Let that future be now.

Valerie Martin, 2005

“DID THE OLD MAN die here? What do you think?” Julia asked, as her husband began to come upstairs.


“Old man? What old man?”

She stood on the shadowy landing with its six white doors.

“What old man?” asked Roddy once more, coming up and putting his arm along her shoulders.

“The husband. Mr Lippincote. Oh, how I wish we needn’t live in other people’s houses!”

“What if he did?”

Yes, what indeed? The dead cannot communicate with the living, or do harm to them. Julia believed that: there are, of course,
those who do not. She knew his death could make no difference to her, even if it had happened in that room, upon that bed.
Heart trouble (angina pectoris, which people die from so often in novels) had been the end of him, not some loathsome disease.
The heart gave its last tick, the blood having slowed, the limbs stiffened. Bodies are hastened away before further changes
occur. ‘A place for everything,’ she thought, and giggled. But, nevertheless, hung back till Roddy had preceded her into the
bedroom.


“Anyhow,” he said, seeing her poor face, “people mostly die in nursing homes these days.” That was Roddy all over—that leader
of men, who did not know how the world lived, discounting all those who do not go to nursing homes, and Mrs Lippincote herself
who believed in dying, if possible, upon the bed where one was born, and who had herself closed (without horror, only grief)
the eyes of her dead husband in this very room a month or two before.


The room itself was filled with mahogany—wardrobe, chest, tall-boy, medicine cupboard—with a bluish sheen on it this damp evening. The window was in one corner and was semi-circular, for it formed, as one saw from the outside, a little
turret with a gilt weather-vane upon it. Green leaves —of some not very interesting tree, perhaps a sycamore—pressed up close
to the panes. But there was every comfort. Julia switched on the electric fire and changed the room completely; the mahogany
shone with pink now, and the trees outside were at once discounted.


There were all the trunks, one with the lid off and frothing chaotically with her underclothes, for she had dived to the bottom
in search of handkerchiefs. Oh, God! Of course, they were not there. She found, however, some talcum powder and a packet of
envelopes which she needed.


As for a handkerchief … sniffing miserably, she had begun to rummage in the pockets of Roddy’s greatcoat. She did this aloofly,
for husbands’ pockets, since they were the subject of music-hall jokes, were always to be scorned and avoided. He did not,
apparently, carry handkerchiefs. “Now, what are you up to?” he had asked, coming into the bedroom with yet another case. “My
dear Julia, this trunk! You dive like a mole and leave disorder in your train.”


He considered a list in his hand. “Handkerchie. . .