You'll Enjoy It When You Get There ─ The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor

An NYRB Classics Original

Nearly forty years after her death, Elizabeth Taylor is only beginning to gain the recognition due to her as one of the finest English writers of the postwar period, notwithstanding the praise she has received from writers as different as Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. Inheriting Ivy Compton-Burnett’s uncanny sensitivity to the terrifying undercurrents that swirl beneath the apparent calm of respectable family life while showing a deep sympathy of her own for human loneliness, Taylor depicted dislocation with the unflinching presence of mind of Graham Greene. For Taylor, however, unlike Greene, dislocation began not in distant climes but right at home. It is in the living room, playroom, and bedroom that Taylor stages her unforgettable dramas of alienation and impossible desire.

In 2012, NYRB Classics reissued two of Taylor’s finest novels, and The New York Times Book Review hailed the reemergence of this wonderful neglected author. Now, for the first time in more than a quarter century, Taylor’s stories, in many ways the heart of her achievement, will be available to readers in the United States, presented in a revelatory new selection by Margaret Drabble. In Taylor’s extensive body of short fiction, the bulk of which was originally taken by the legendary editor and writer William Maxwell for The New Yorker, her range of feeling and the power of her writing are evident as nowhere else.

Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was an English short-story writer and novelist. Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, was published in 1945. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek (both available from 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.

Margaret Drabble is an English biographer and critic, and the author of seventeen novels, including A Summer Bird Cage, The Millstone, and, most recently, The Sea Lady. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories appeared in 2011. In 2006 she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.