A Game of Hide and Seek

In her recent biography of the underrated English mid-century novelist Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman calls A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK Taylor's best book, and I think she's right. Although she has often been compared too frequently to Elizabeth Bowen (often to Taylor's chagrin), this is certainly her most Bowenesque novel, and it was indeed the one Bowen herself most highly praised. A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK is a study in first love between Harriet and Vesey, both of whom are largely disappointments to their parents; though they flirt in late adolescence and even fall in love, they are separated by the different paths their lives take them and then Harriet marries an older man because of a fear of lack of future prospects. Fifteen years later, Vesey returns into Harriet's life even though she's married and has a daughter, and the novel examines the effect their reawakening heart has not just on the two of them but on Harriet's husband Charles and her daughter Betsy. As in Elizabeth Bowen's novels, the point of A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK is show to the unspoken springs and touchstones. Harriet's thoughts are expressed to us with far more fineness and clarity than she herself could express them (we find she is a poor scholar and unsuited for college), but this seems somehow acceptable under the novel's own terms: we sense her sensibility is finer than her ability to express it could ever be. The perversely contrary Vesey is also beautifully drawn, as is the emotional Betsy and as is Julia, Charles's bossy and narcissistic mother. The novel also suggests a kind of critique laid against late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism, since both Harriet's mother and Vesey's aunt are former suffragists whose goals for a greater equity for women seem unrealized in the limited possibilities drawn for Harriet (who has to take a poorly paying job in a gown shop because of her limits as a scholar before she marries Charles) and for Miss Bell, Betsy's teacher. The novel's story is told with great imagination in constuction: its narrative achieves the feat of being highly constructed while never letting you feel this is an impediment to its telling.