Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was born into a middle class family in Berkshire, England. She held a variety of positions, including librarian and governess, before marrying a businessman in 1936. Nine years later, her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, appeared. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including A Game of Hide and Seek (available as an NYRB Classic), four collections of short stories, and a children's book, Mossy Trotter. Long championed by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Taylor's novels and stories have been the basis for a number of films, including Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), starring Joan Plowright, and François Ozon's Angel (2007).

Hilary Mantel is an English novelist, short-story writer, and critic. Her novel Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

"With its monstrous romantic-novelist heroine Angelica Deverell, it's a study of extravagant self-deception that's both achingly funny and heart-wrenchingly sad." --The Millions

"Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person's dangerous housewife. Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail--the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life." --Valerie Martin

"Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor's novels and short stories many times over. As a writer I've returned to her too--in awe of her achievements, and trying to work out how she does it." --Sarah Waters

"Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning
point in one's own experience." --Elizabeth Bowen

"One of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor writes with a wonderful precision and grace. Her world is totally absorbing." --Antonia Fraser

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Pub date: 2012-02-14

Length: 272 pages