A View of the Harbour (New York Review Books Classics), by Elizabeth Taylor
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A View of the Harbour (New York Review Books Classics), by Elizabeth Taylor
Ebook Download : A View of the Harbour (New York Review Books Classics), by Elizabeth Taylor
Blindness and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylor’s great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she turns her unsparing gaze on the emotional and sexual politics of a seedy seaside town that’s been left behind by modernity. Tory, recently divorced, depends more and more on the company of her neighbors Robert, a doctor, and Beth, a busy author of melodramatic novels. Prudence, Robert and Beth’s daughter, disapproves of the intimacy that has grown between her parents and Tory and the gossip it has awakened in their little community. As the novel proceeds, Taylor’s view widens to take in a range of characters from bawdy, nosey Mrs. Bracey; to a widowed young proprietor of the local waxworks, Lily Wilson; to the would-be artist Bertram—while the book as a whole offers a beautifully observed and written examination of the fictions around which we construct our lives and manage our losses.
A View of the Harbour (New York Review Books Classics), by Elizabeth Taylor- Amazon Sales Rank: #304573 in Books
- Brand: Taylor, Elizabeth/ Robinson, Roxana (INT)
- Published on: 2015-06-02
- Released on: 2015-06-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .67" w x 5.16" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review “Like her stories, [Elizabeth Taylor’s] novels are stitched together out of a series of fragmented scenes. They are remarkable…for their implacable evenness of sympathy and lack of a unifying consciousness…A View of the Harbour may be Taylor’s most nuanced study of the push and pull between domestic and artistic labor.” —Namara Smith, The New Yorker“Gently raining. Camellias are blooming, it’s cold. . . . A new Elizabeth Taylor to read!” —Eudora Welty To William Maxwell “A View of the Harbour is Taylor’s lightest novel, and by that I mean that it’s done with an exquisite lightness of touch. It has a large cast, a musical rondo-like structure, and it’s her happiest novel, too, but happy in the way of, say, Così fan tutte or Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, where the infelicities of life are shown through the prism of an exquisitely aesthetic sensibility. There is no dodging of dark themes and no escape, but only a filtering.” —Neel Mukherjee, Boston Review“There is certainly little melodrama in Taylor’s novels; there are no heroes, and no improbable villains, only flawed, likeable characters negotiating the ordinary small crises of marriage, family and friendship.” —Sarah Waters“Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen—soul sisters all.” —Anne Tyler “Her best novels—At Mrs. Lippincote’s (1945), A View of the Harbour (1947), A Game of Hide and Seek (1951)—are, in spite of their prim titles, funny, savage and full of loneliness and suppressed emotion. For her characters, as for their author, propriety is a survival mechanism, a way of keeping the show on the road.” —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
About the Author
Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was born into a middle-class family in Berkshire, England. She held a variety of positions, including librarian and governess, before marrying a businessman in 1936. Nine years later, her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, appeared. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek (both available as NYRB Classics), four collections of short stories (many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and other magazines), and a children’s book, Mossy Trotter, while living with her husband and two children in Buckinghamshire. Long championed by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Taylor’s novels and stories have been the basis for a number of films, including Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), starring Joan Plowright, and François Ozon’s Angel (2007). In 2014, NYRB Classics published You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There, a selection of Taylor’s stories, edited by Margaret Drabble.Roxana Robinson is the author of eight works of fiction, including the novels Cost and Sparta. She is also the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. A Guggenheim fellow, she edited The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, published by NYRB Classics in 2007.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. “Only freaks get into the newspapers.” By Mary Whipple Author Elizabeth Taylor's 1947 novel A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR (newly republished by New York Review Books) reveals her agelessly elegant prose and her universality within an unusual kind of farce which is bittersweet, more ironic and thoughtful than filled with laughs for the sake of laughs. Here Taylor (1912 – 1975) employs a very broad focus, her goal being the depiction of an entire community of citizens living in a small seaport in England and the values they celebrate. Several whole families and some individualized single residents, are shown as they live their “ordinary” lives, and interact with each other. This creates challenges for the reader, initially, since s/he must try to remember the specific identities of a wide variety of townspeople, along with the relationships among them, while several small plots and back-and-forth action involving numerous residents substitute for the customary grand, unifying plot.Bertram Hemingway, a retired Navy man who has never married, is a free spirit who wants to be an artist and who hints that he is interested in finding a woman. Tory Foyle, a divorced woman, formerly married to a wealthy out-of-towner, is the liveliest woman in the community and is a school friend of Beth Cazabon, a writer who is married to Robert, the town physician. Beth is the mother of two daughters – the bratty Stevie, about six, and the shy Prudence, recently out of school, and Beth is hoping that that newcomer Geoffrey Lloyd, the son of one of her own school friends, will become a suitor for Prudence. In the meantime, Beth’s friend Tory is having an affair with Robert, Beth’s husband. At a different level of society, are the bed-ridden Mrs. Bracey and her daughters, Maisie and Iris, who sometimes take in boarders in addition to their other jobs. Lily Wilson, a pathetic and lonely young widow, lives in an apartment above the decaying Wax Works which has been in her family for years, and she quietly pursues several men whom she believes will assuage her loneliness without making too many demands.With her dark humor, Taylor leavens the atmosphere of claustrophobia inherent in small town life: Beth, the writer, has almost finished her latest book, and says she will never write another one: “The end of authorship will begin the season of miracles,” she hopes, though she later finds a review of her book “wrapped around the cod” she brings home for supper. Lily lives a deadly life in the wax museum and looks for companionship at the pub. Mrs. Bracey, the bawdiest of the characters, makes some surprising and important conclusions about life as her own winds down: “In the things that really matter to us, we are entirely alone. Especially alone dying.” The conclusion comes as a total surprise and provides the final irony.Those who have read other novels by Taylor will find this one to be fascinating for its broad scope and well developed themes, as it depicts an entire community. Later novels, far more focused, emphasize one or two main characters as they face crises in their lives, often dealing with love and death. Those who have never read Taylor might want to start with one of her later novels first, my own favorite being Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. The excellent NYRB Classics series introduced me to author Elizabeth Taylor By RCK The excellent NYRB Classics series introduced me to author Elizabeth Taylor, and I have been enjoying her short stories and novels, and "A View of the Harbour" is my favorite so far. It is an interesting, funny, well written look at life in an English coastal town, with a theme of deception--of others and of self.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful. An extraordinary view of ordinary people By Tony Covatta The reputation of the "other Elizabeth Taylor" took a bit of a dip in the years after her death, and it has now begun to rebound with the reissuance of a number of books, several of them in the NYRB series. Hats off to the New York Review for helping reinvigorate interest in this very skilled novelist. To this writer, Taylor is right up there with Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald and only a little behind my favorite female English novelist of the last century, Iris Murdoch.A View of the Harbour takes what seems at first a commonplace provenance and theme and makes a first class, deeply insightful and interesting novel of it. Set in the dilapidated older section of an English sea shore town the work delves into the overtly commonplace lives of several families and individuals who either live in or are visiting the town, Newby. The local doctor is having a painful affair with the town's rich divorcee. His wife is oblivious, a woman interested only in churning out her second rate novels (all of which are published--so how second rate can they be?--an open question). The hardbitten Mrs. Bracey lies ill, immobilized at home, where she takes in boarders above her shop and fights a running battle with her two daughters, Iris and Maisie who wish her dead but love her anyway. The girls are lovelorn and awkward, as is Prudence, the doctor's daughter. Also bereft of male companionship is Lily Wilson, proprietor of the forlorn wax museum. Hovering around all this lonesome and somewhat neurotic femininity are a variety of hapless young males and the eponymous Bertram Hemingway, a retired dilettante who fancies himself a painter.To delve further into the story would probably plunge us into a major spoiler. Suffice it to say that as the story continues and the plot unfolds, we get deeper and deeper into the yearning lives of the characters, and deeper and deeper into the fabric of life itself. It is no small irony that the unread and untutored Mrs. Bracey sees most deeply into life, more so than the novelist and the painter. Her disquisition on why she wants to move upstairs in the house so that she will have a view of the harbour is fine stuff indeed and the very center of the book. We come to see the Newby Harbour with its imperfect landlubbers and hard working fishermen as a metaphor for human life itself with its insignificant individual comings and goings that taken together make a rich though far from perfect, far from ideal portrait of what we are all about.This is not to say that the book is perfect. The first thirty pages or so are rough going simply because you have a difficult time keeping all the characters straight. But if you home in on that and keep going it is worth it. The characters are all imperfect, all flawed human beings, at times downright nasty and the book is somber at times. Definitely not one to put a song in your heart. But taken together it is a worthwhile portrait.As Mr. Pallister, the taciturn and unimaginative pubkeeper remarks to Bertram Hemingway when Bertram gives him and the pub his own painting of a view of the harbour, to rival a terrible one already on the wall, its interesting how different people see the same thing in different ways. Elizabeth Taylor sees ordinary life differently than most of us can: she goes deeply, ironically, and yet compassionately into the very core of what it means to be human.
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