NYRB Classics discussion

A View from the Harbour



Publication Date: June 2, 2015
Pages: 328
Introduction by Roxana Robinson.
Originally published in 1947.

Blindness and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylor’s great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she turns her unsparing gaze on the emotional and sexual politics of a seedy seaside town that’s been left behind by modernity. Tory, recently divorced, is having an affair with her neighbor Robert, a doctor, whose wife, Beth, is Tory’s best friend. Beth notices nothing—an author of melodramatic novels, she is too busy with them to mind her house or its inhabitants—but her daughter Prudence knows what is up and is appalled. Gossip spreads in the little community, and Taylor’s view widens to take in a range of characters from senile, snoopy Mrs. Bracey; to a young, widowed proprietor of the local waxworks, Lily Wilson; to the would-be artist Bertram. Taylor’s novel is a beautifully observed and written examination of the fictions around which we construct our lives and manage our losses.

Moving from forthcoming to released!

I enjoyed this, my second Taylor novel. It was a bit confusing at first, many characters coming and going quickly, impressionistic, but once that clears up the story moves along. One can identify the Virginia Woolf influence throughout. I like the lack of sentimentality and the narrative playfulness. One of the characters is a novelist (an unflattering self-portrait in some ways) struggling with killing off one of her characters, just as Taylor is doing in her novel. Too many funerals, her husband tells her.

One pet peeve with the introduction. Robinson, like a lot of modern reviewers and introducers, seems more interested in giving her own autobiography than discussing the novel. "When I was a child.....".

btw the title of the thread should read "of the harbour" rather than "from the harbour"