I’ve had mixed experiences with Elizabeth Taylor’s novels over the years. Maybe my expectations were set too high by all the praised heaped upon her in the blogosphere but of the three novels I’ve read in the past , there has been only one I really enjoyed — Mrs Claremont at the Palfrey.
Maybe I should have called it quits at that point because my recent reading of At Mrs Lippincote’s has me questioning once more if this author is really one for me.
It’s the 1940s in this novel, World War 2 is in its final stages, though the characters wouldn’t have known that of course. Military men like RAF officer Roddy Davenant are being despatched all around the UK on various assignments. His superior officers “encourage” him to get his family to join him on his latest posting to an unnamed provincial English town. So he moves wife Julia, seven year-old-son Oliver and his spinster cousin Eleanor into temporary lodgings in the home of the widow Mrs Lippincote.
Full of fussy Victorian-style mahogany furniture, crockery and old family photographs, Mrs Lippincote’s house stands as a reminder of a world before the war; a world of servants, calling-cards and dressing for dinner. Every room echoes with reminders of the people who once lived and worked in this house, from the knitting needles and playing cards left in a bureau to the huge tureens and meat dishes in the kitchen.
Julia develops a curious relationship with these items, sometimes feeling like an intruder and other times using them to create an imaginary connection with the absent owner. The order and precision she detects in the lives of the previous occupants are at odds with her own, somewhat chaotic, approach to domestic matters.
Everything in the house was dark and heavy and old-fashioned and rather oppressively genteel, like a maiden aunt who has never taken to modern ideas.
There’s a sense that the house represents a world in transition; the old order gone but the new one yet to be established.
Julia too is caught between two worlds. As the wife of an officer she understands the principles governing her role but that doesn’t mean she buys into them wholeheartedly. Her resistance begins quietly with complaints that women are not permitted in the officer’s mess except on Ladies’ Night, It then escalates with Julia wandering the streets at night and drinking solo in a bar. Further danger lies in her burgeoning friendship with her husband’s commanding officer.
Julia’s husband is perplexed and more than a little annoyed by her apparent determination to flout the conventions he considers the foundations of an ordered, civilised society. But just like the house, Roddy belongs to the past, not the future.
Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behaviour of women. One accepted them and life ran smoothly and without embarrassment, or as far as that is possible where there are two sexes. Without the little rules, everything became queer and unsafe. When he had married Julia, he had thought her woefully ignorant of the world; had looked forward, indeed, to assisting in her development. But she had been grown up all the time; or, at least, she had not changed. The root of the trouble was not ignorance at all, but the refusal to accept.
At Mrs Lippincote’s is an interesting portrait of a society in flux, written in a style that’s unobtrusively elegant. Elizabeth Taylor captures the smallest details of domestic life, revealing much about her characters through seemingly mundane conversations.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was missing but I think it was mainly connected with the characters. Julia was an intriguingly complex character but husband Roddy wasn’t given much of a personality — he just came across as a dull old fish. Maybe that was exactly how we were meant to view him? Weakest of all however was the character of Cousin Eleanor. We’re asked to believe that she starts hanging around with a bunch of Communists out of loneliness and as a distraction from her unrequited feelings for Roddy. That whole section just never rang true.
At Mrs Lippincote’s was Elizabeth Taylor’s first novel and I had the same issues with it as I had with some of her later novels. I appreciate her elegant prose and witty humour but neither were enough to keep so so thoroughly engaged that I just kept wanting to read on and on. Something about her work doesn’t gel with me in the same way it does with her legions of fans.