![]() ![]() They were waiting patiently for celery soup, hands folded in laps and eyes dreamy. Excellent cuisine”) is like: “she leaned forward in the taxi, looking from side to side of the wide, frightening road, almost dreading to read the name Claremont over one of those porches.” Once inside, she discovers that the Claremont is less gentlewoman’s hotel than residential home:Īt other tables sat a few other elderly ladies looking, to Mrs Palfrey, as if they had been sitting there for years. As the book opens she is in a taxi, apprehensive about what the Claremont (“Reduced winter rates. Mrs Palfrey is a recently widowed lady who decides to move into a London hotel to see her days out. In the Virago Modern Classics edition of the last novel published in Taylor’s lifetime, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), Paul Bailey distracts us from the awful movie tie-in cover by saying in his introduction: “I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time.” Elizabeth Jane Howard on the back cover adds: “How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!” There is also praise from writers as diverse as Jilly Cooper and Sarah Waters, though they don’t say how they feel about readers coming to her books for the first time. But the massed ranks of the literati are out to correct that. ![]() Elizabeth Taylor had the unenviable role of sounding very well known but in fact being almost entirely obscured by her namesake. ![]()
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