A bleakly humorous novel about conformity and displacement, set during the last year of WW2. The Davenants spend a year living in a rented house—the Mrs Lippincote's of the title—and through Elizabeth Taylor's eyes we observe how they interact with one another and with the world around them. Taylor's approach to her main characters is deft and emotionally intelligent—they are sometimes awful but mostly just recognisably muddling through life; sometimes sympathetic but rarely likeable.

The secondary characters, particularly the group of working-class (gasp) Communists with whom one of the Davenants falls in with, convince less. There are some moments of observation here that are truly pleasurable to read, but there was something about Taylor's prose that I struggled to get on with: something disjointed, opaque. There was also a brief, jarring bout of antisemitism in one chapter.

A solid book, but I can't say it's one that has me dying to rush out and read more of Taylor's work. ( )

best line in review: for Roddy, merely love cannot suffice - he needs homage as well as admiration ( )

To enter into Elizabeth Taylor’s world is always unsettling: I’ve written a bit about some of her work—especially A View of the Harbour—after reading some of the “bigger hits” of her writing career. However, as I’m making my way through some of the other novels of hers that I haven’t yet gotten to, I’m continually astonished at her unique vision of England, of marriage, and of (especially female) subjectivity.



Taylor’s vision is comedic but also bleak and often dark; here, in her first novel, she is as assured with her subject matter and her own voice as Elizabeth Bowen was in her own debut, The Hotel, which I also just recently read. While Taylor uses numerous intertextual elements in At Mrs. Lippincote’s to situate her own thematic concerns as well as her characters’ reactions to World War II—e.g., allusions to the Brontës abound—her voice is all her own.



Forced to live in a home that is not her own, Julia Davenant tries to maintain order in her life as mother to an ill, book-obsessed seven-year-old son, Oliver; as wife to the egotistical, career-driven RAF officer, Roddy; and as surrogate sister-in-law to Roddy’s spinster cousin, Eleanor, who lives with them. Yet order is difficult to maintain when one is resistance to conformity and when one balks at the constraints of life as they become apparent: we witness Julia’s difficulty balancing her own independence with her various roles, juxtaposed darkly and comedically—in a way that only Taylor can pull off—with men straying from their wives, with those who have come down in the world due to the war, and with the pull toward different kinds of affinities in a world made somehow smaller and scarier by the threat of bombs, even though Roddy’s post is in part an attempt to get his family out of the danger zone of London.



Brutal and honest in its portrayal of marriage and wartime disappointment, At Mrs. Lippincote’s takes a subtle pacifist stance to question notions of patriotism, the allure of socialism (some of the novel’s finest scenes see Eleanor’s seduction by the socialist ideal, as much out of politics as out of loneliness), and the trappings and cruelties of daily life that war intensifies just as it magnifies.



Those new to Taylor would do well to start here, and perhaps then build their way up to her magnum opus: A Wreath of Roses. ( )

Brilliant slow story in boarding during the war. marriage breakdown ( )

Elizabeth Taylor’s crushing tale of a disintegrating marriage in 1940’s England. Julia Davenant has just joined her husband, Roddy, at his RAF posting in the countryside outside London. With Roddy, his cousin Eleanor, and her son, Oliver, Julia has been installed in the rental home of Mrs. Lippincote. Julia is as uncomfortable in her life as she is in the house that is not her home.

It is the state of marriage that Taylor is truly exploring, the confining nature, the double standard.
Per Roddy:

She exasperated him. Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behavior 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.

This is Elizabeth’s Taylor’s first novel. If this is the beginning effort, I am looking forward to reading her more mature and polished work.
( )