Book description
During summer games of hide and seek Harriet falls in love with Vesey
and his elusive, teasing ways. When he goes to Oxford she cherishes his
photograph and waits for the letter that never comes. Years pass, and
Harriet stifles her imaginings; with a husband and daughter, she excels
at respectability. But then Vesey reappears, and her marriage seems to
melt away. Harriet is older, it is much too late, but she is still in
love with him. The unsung heroine of British 20th-century fiction.
Elizabeth Taylor wrote 12 novels, and each displays her exquisitely
light touch, her firt for discreet irony and her skill at revealing the
emotional depths behind even the meekest exterior. She is at her very
best here, a novel in which love is never declared, but is meticulously
evoked. No writer has described the English middle classes with more
gently devastating accuracy Rebecca Abrams, SPECTATOR Elizabeth Taylor
(1912-1975) was born in Reading, Berkshire and spent much of her life in
Penn, Buckinghamshire. She is one of the most acclaimed British
novelists of the twentieth century.
