Palladian

Elizabeth Taylor's Palladian is this wonderful mid-century English writer's second novel, from 1946. (Perhaps needless to say, she was not the actress.) I'd previously read and enjoyed her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's as well as two late novels, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (one of the great old age novels), and The Wedding Group. Taylor was one of the great run of social comic writers in England at that time. (Along with Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark among others.) The nominal protagonist of Palladian is Cassandra Dashwood, who becomes governess to Sophy, daughter of a rather ineffectual widower, Marion Vanbrugh, who lives in a decayed manor house with his drunk cousin Tom, Tom's pregnant sister Margaret, a couple of not very respectful servants, and Tom and Margaret's somewhat dotty mother. Cassandra is a romantical young woman who determines in advance to fall in love with Marion. And so she does. But that is a small part of the story. More important, perhaps, is Tom's tawdry relationship with the local publican's wife, and Tom's secret past involving Marion's dead wife. There are also telling tidbits from the POV of the two servants. Margaret's rather bossy and excessively bracing nature. Sophy is depicted as a pretty normal girl of her age, not at all a prodigy, desperate about her failure to be the beauty her mother was. The novel turns on a shocking event with about 40 pages to go. I admit I put the book down for a day or so at that point -- it seemed unearned, unfair. But -- though I am still unsure that that plot development works -- Taylor still brings home the novel quite effectively. It's by no means her best novel, but it's fine work. Delicately funny, acute, honest about its characters' failings but still fair to them. Taylor was a fan of Jane Austen, which is fairly clear in all her work, but perhaps never more so than here, as indicated by her protagonist's name, by the reference to the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier vehicle PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which is shown at the local theater, and by a couple further overt references to Austen.