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Product Description
Val Hennessy
'Once you've finished IN A SUMMER SEASON, you are totally fired up to read every book that Taylor ever wrote'
Review
'Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning point in one's own experience' ELIZABETH BOWEN '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 'One of Taylor's best novels' NEW STATESMAN 'It's smashing ...When you've finished In a Summer Season, you are totally fired up to read every book that Taylor ever wrote' VAL HENNESSEY 'How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!' ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD
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First Sentence
'AFTER all, I am not a young girl to be intimidated by her,' Kate decided, as she waited outside her mother-in-law's house. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
'AFTER all, I am not a young girl to be intimidated by her,' Kate decided, as she waited outside her mother-in-law's house. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Many have told me that I should read the books of Elizabeth Taylor - an author I'd not heard of until the publication of Nicola Beauman's recent biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor by the wonderful Persephone Books. I picked up this particular one for its striking cover photo, and was told by pal Helen, that it was about a woman who marries a much younger man - a toy boy! - well that sold it to me instantly.
Published in 1961, it follows one summer in the lives of a family living in the Thames Valley, with 'The View' of Windsor castle visible in the far distance. This is already prime commuter belt - every day the men go off to work on the train to their jobs in the city - well, everyone except Dermot that is. He is the young Irish thirty-something husband of forty-something well-off widow Kate. They live in some comfort with Kate's sixteen year old daughter Louisa and twenty-two year old son Tom, her Aunt Ethel, and looked after by cook Mrs Meacock. As the novel opens, Kate is on a duty visit to her new mother-in-law, Edwina, up in London for the day. Edwina is always trying to find a job for her youngest, who has never been able to settle at anything or anyone until he fell in love with Kate.
In the first half of the movel we find out what makes them all tick - and frankly, it's all about sex. Kate with her younger husband, Tom with his girlfriends, and Louisa's growing awareness and crush on the young curate in the village. Aunt Ethel watches all these mostly repressed emotions and assesses it in her letters to her friend Gertrude - "When the sex goes Kate will think him no bargain".
Then the Thorntons return from abroad. The Thorntons, Charles and Dorothea, were Kate and her first husband Alan's best friends, and Tom had a thing for Minty, their daughter. Charles' wife died and Kate is keen to make them feel at home again now they're back in England. There are bound to be problems - as three's a crowd - Charles and Kate are the same age, whereas Dermot is closer to the children in age and sometimes, outlook.
"They were walking in circles around each other, Kate thought - both Dermot and Charles. When she had introduced them, Dermot had shaken hands with an air of boyish respect, almost adding 'Sir' to his greeting, and Charles seemed to try and avoid looking at him or showing more than ordinary interest. Although he had not met him before, even as far away as Bahrain he had heard stories, and Kate, writing to tell him of her marriage, had done so in a defensive strain, as if an explanation were due and she could think of no very good one."
The story is mainly told from Kate's point of view, and we hear not only her voice but her thoughts also - the two are often opposite. In that terribly repressed middle-class way, everyone says one thing and means another. The author takes a scalpel to these relationships and dissects them with sensitivity and wit, bringing things to a climax with great skill. I can safely say this novel made an instant fan of me, and I wonder why I never discovered her before
Published in 1961, it follows one summer in the lives of a family living in the Thames Valley, with 'The View' of Windsor castle visible in the far distance. This is already prime commuter belt - every day the men go off to work on the train to their jobs in the city - well, everyone except Dermot that is. He is the young Irish thirty-something husband of forty-something well-off widow Kate. They live in some comfort with Kate's sixteen year old daughter Louisa and twenty-two year old son Tom, her Aunt Ethel, and looked after by cook Mrs Meacock. As the novel opens, Kate is on a duty visit to her new mother-in-law, Edwina, up in London for the day. Edwina is always trying to find a job for her youngest, who has never been able to settle at anything or anyone until he fell in love with Kate.
In the first half of the movel we find out what makes them all tick - and frankly, it's all about sex. Kate with her younger husband, Tom with his girlfriends, and Louisa's growing awareness and crush on the young curate in the village. Aunt Ethel watches all these mostly repressed emotions and assesses it in her letters to her friend Gertrude - "When the sex goes Kate will think him no bargain".
Then the Thorntons return from abroad. The Thorntons, Charles and Dorothea, were Kate and her first husband Alan's best friends, and Tom had a thing for Minty, their daughter. Charles' wife died and Kate is keen to make them feel at home again now they're back in England. There are bound to be problems - as three's a crowd - Charles and Kate are the same age, whereas Dermot is closer to the children in age and sometimes, outlook.
"They were walking in circles around each other, Kate thought - both Dermot and Charles. When she had introduced them, Dermot had shaken hands with an air of boyish respect, almost adding 'Sir' to his greeting, and Charles seemed to try and avoid looking at him or showing more than ordinary interest. Although he had not met him before, even as far away as Bahrain he had heard stories, and Kate, writing to tell him of her marriage, had done so in a defensive strain, as if an explanation were due and she could think of no very good one."
The story is mainly told from Kate's point of view, and we hear not only her voice but her thoughts also - the two are often opposite. In that terribly repressed middle-class way, everyone says one thing and means another. The author takes a scalpel to these relationships and dissects them with sensitivity and wit, bringing things to a climax with great skill. I can safely say this novel made an instant fan of me, and I wonder why I never discovered her before
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When I finished my first Elizabeth Taylor - I only discovered her a few months ago - I immediately set out to read
everything she has written. She is always so brilliantly observant and it seems she is incapable of writing even
a single jarring word.
This book is about Kate, a wealthy widow who marries a purposeless, feckless charmer ten years younger than herself. Dermot didn't marry her for her money; he does love her, or thinks he does, but how long can such a marriage last? Elizabeth Taylor's talent is to make you sympathise with Dermot, too; his feeble attempts to find work, his lack of any self-respect, his awkwardness with his wife's friends whose literary allusions soar over his head, his wretched boredom during an evening of classical music. Their marriage is more like a tolerant mother and son relationship with passionate sex thrown in ... and indeed Dermot (whose hinterland is fast cars, pubs and television) has far more in common with Kate's son.
The end of the book - and Kate's return to her old, sedate Home Counties life - is quite shocking.
everything she has written. She is always so brilliantly observant and it seems she is incapable of writing even
a single jarring word.
This book is about Kate, a wealthy widow who marries a purposeless, feckless charmer ten years younger than herself. Dermot didn't marry her for her money; he does love her, or thinks he does, but how long can such a marriage last? Elizabeth Taylor's talent is to make you sympathise with Dermot, too; his feeble attempts to find work, his lack of any self-respect, his awkwardness with his wife's friends whose literary allusions soar over his head, his wretched boredom during an evening of classical music. Their marriage is more like a tolerant mother and son relationship with passionate sex thrown in ... and indeed Dermot (whose hinterland is fast cars, pubs and television) has far more in common with Kate's son.
The end of the book - and Kate's return to her old, sedate Home Counties life - is quite shocking.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Fantastic
26 Mar 2008
Format:Paperback
I am reading all of Elizabeth Taylor's books, one by one. They are all beautifully written, fiercely intelligent, and both hilarious and heartbreaking at once. Had it not been for an article in the Atlantic Monthly, I would have lived my whole life never having discovered this author, who has become one of my absolute favourites. When you discover a writer that you love, you cannot imagine never having read their words.
I almost feel as if I know her.
Elizabeth Taylor is often compared to other female British writers but somehow the comparisons are not accurate to me. She was different; more intelligent, stronger, and had a wit that showed a subtle brilliance.
Her writing is not typically female, and has a sharp masculine undercurrent about it eventhough her stories are almost exclusively concerned with female domestic life. It's a fascinating contrast.
She once said that she preferred books where "almost nothing happens." Yet her stories are so rich - in dialogue, in analysis of human behaviour. It is "inaction" at its very finest.
Furthermore, she was able to do what few female authors manage: to write male characters authentically - their mannerisms, their voice, their perceptions, in a way that is totally believable. What a rare and wonderful writer she was. If you haven't yet discovered Elizabeth Taylor, how I envy you. You have so much enjoyment to look forward to.
I almost feel as if I know her.
Elizabeth Taylor is often compared to other female British writers but somehow the comparisons are not accurate to me. She was different; more intelligent, stronger, and had a wit that showed a subtle brilliance.
Her writing is not typically female, and has a sharp masculine undercurrent about it eventhough her stories are almost exclusively concerned with female domestic life. It's a fascinating contrast.
She once said that she preferred books where "almost nothing happens." Yet her stories are so rich - in dialogue, in analysis of human behaviour. It is "inaction" at its very finest.
Furthermore, she was able to do what few female authors manage: to write male characters authentically - their mannerisms, their voice, their perceptions, in a way that is totally believable. What a rare and wonderful writer she was. If you haven't yet discovered Elizabeth Taylor, how I envy you. You have so much enjoyment to look forward to.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
The young and the restless
8 Oct 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Elizabeth Taylor was unquestionably one of the most intelligent and hard-to-describe British novelists of the mid 20th century. Each of hers novel is very unlike every other novel in terms of its plot, although you'd never mistake her witty way at getting at the springs and balances of genteel middle-class behavior for anyone else's. And yet her work shows strong affinities with her great friend Ivy Compton-Burnett's, as well as with Elizabeth Bowen's and even (at times) with Iris Murdoch's.
IN A SUMMER SEASON, one of Taylor's finest novels, is a striking blend of both comedy and tragedy, centering largely upon the ways in which the young and unsettled cling to that which is older because it seems safe, even when it is not the best thing for them (or for their elders). The middle-aged wealthy widowed Kate has married Dermot, over a decade her junior, mostly for his sexual allure, but he stays clinging to her because she makes it possible for him not to work or grow up; significantly, his own mother wants him to work in a shop selling Victorian antiques. Meanwhile Kate is watched in her marriage by her live-in aunt Ethel, a former suffragist; her son by her first marriage, Tom, who works for his condescending and nagging grandfather in hopes of rising in the family business; and Tom's sister Lou, who nurses a crush upon a middle-aged pastor with High Church tendencies that distress the other townsfolk. Even though the novel's women sport the latest and highest bouffant hairdos of the novel's era (it was published in 1961), the family's telescope in their Thames Valley home gives away their fixation on the ways and comforts of the past, in that it more often than not focused on Windsor Castle several miles away. The novel has some of Taylor's best comic moments in it (there is a very wittily composed section midway through the novel concerning a contentious dinner party featuring a roast turkey that has gone off), and also shows her usual gift for delaying violence until it becomes almost inevitable at the novel's conclusion. This is a novel that should be much better known in the United States, and shows Taylor at her most skilled and intelligent.
IN A SUMMER SEASON, one of Taylor's finest novels, is a striking blend of both comedy and tragedy, centering largely upon the ways in which the young and unsettled cling to that which is older because it seems safe, even when it is not the best thing for them (or for their elders). The middle-aged wealthy widowed Kate has married Dermot, over a decade her junior, mostly for his sexual allure, but he stays clinging to her because she makes it possible for him not to work or grow up; significantly, his own mother wants him to work in a shop selling Victorian antiques. Meanwhile Kate is watched in her marriage by her live-in aunt Ethel, a former suffragist; her son by her first marriage, Tom, who works for his condescending and nagging grandfather in hopes of rising in the family business; and Tom's sister Lou, who nurses a crush upon a middle-aged pastor with High Church tendencies that distress the other townsfolk. Even though the novel's women sport the latest and highest bouffant hairdos of the novel's era (it was published in 1961), the family's telescope in their Thames Valley home gives away their fixation on the ways and comforts of the past, in that it more often than not focused on Windsor Castle several miles away. The novel has some of Taylor's best comic moments in it (there is a very wittily composed section midway through the novel concerning a contentious dinner party featuring a roast turkey that has gone off), and also shows her usual gift for delaying violence until it becomes almost inevitable at the novel's conclusion. This is a novel that should be much better known in the United States, and shows Taylor at her most skilled and intelligent.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Compelling and illuminating
27 Jan 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I first heard of Elizabeth Taylor in an Atlantic Monthly review. I am a Barbara Pym fan(atic) and it seemed Taylor would be to my liking. I received In a Summer Season on Thursday and devoured it by Saturday morning. The story was compelling, the characters beautifully drawn and largely sympathetic. Some of Taylor's emotional or psychological insights caused me to catch my breath. I am widely read and slightly cynical, but I found this novel to be that paragon of literature--entertaining, informative, and thought provoking. I highly recommend this author and am only sorry it took me so long to hear of her.
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