INTRODUCED BY HILARY MANTEL
Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth - Sarah Waters
Writing stories that are extravagant and fanciful, fifteen-year old Angel retreats to a world of romance, escaping the drabness of provincial life. She knows she is different, that she is destined to become a feted authoress, owner of great riches and of Paradise House . . .
After reading The Lady Irania, publishers Brace and Gilchrist are certain the novel will be a success, in spite of - perhaps because of - its overblown style. But they are curious as to who could have written such a book - an elderly lady, romanticising behind lace curtains? A mustachioed rogue?
They were not expecting it to be the pale, serious teenage girl, sitting before them without a hint of irony in her soul.
*
'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
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781844083077
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 262 g
Dimensions: 196 x 129 x 17 mm
Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen - soul-sisters all - Anne Tyler
One of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century - Antonia Fraser
I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time. Theirs will be an unexpected pleasure - Paul Bailey
Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning point in one's own experience - Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Taylor's tender, funny, exquisitely stylish novel keeps us on Angel's side, even though we are appalled by her narcissism and shocked into laughter by her self-delusion. She is a monster, but a delicious monster, and the novel poses, for writers, questions that don't date. That's why I'm so drawn to the book and have loved it for years; there's a bit of Angel in every writer, I fear. - Daily Telegraph
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