Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (Virago Modern Classics) - Softcover

Taylor, Elizabeth

4

9,452 ratings by Goodreads

9780860682639: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (Virago Modern Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860682633 ISBN 13: 9780860682639

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group, 1982

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On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies—boredom and the Grim Reaper. Then one day Mrs. Palfrey strikes up an unexpected friendship with Ludo, a handsome young writer, and learns that even the old can fall in love.

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About the Author:

Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was born and educated in Reading. After leaving school she worked as a governess and later in a library. She lived much of her married life in the village of Penn in Buckinghamshire. In 1984 ANGEL was selected by the Book Marketing Council's 'Best Novels of Our Time'.

Review:

A funny and honest examination of the casual cruelty we can sometimes inflict upon each other * DAILY MAIL * The unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction * REBECCA ABRAMS, NEW STATESMAN * How skilfully and with what peculiar exhilaration she negotiated the minefield of the human heart * JONATHAN KEATES * A wonderful novelist * JILLY COOPER * She's a magnificent and underrated mid-20th-century writer, the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike -- David Baddiel * Independent * 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 Elizabeth Taylor is finally 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 Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen - soul-sisters all * Anne Tyler * Elizabeth Taylor's exquisitely drawn character study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp and witty portrait of genteel postwar English life facing the changes taking shape in the 60s . . . Much of the reader's joy lies in the exquisite subtlety in Taylor's depiction of all the relationships, the sharp brevity of her wit, and the apparently effortless way the plot unfolds . . . Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for me, her masterpiece -- Robert McCrum * 'the 100 best novels', Guardian *

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