A View of the Harbour

""Are we to go on until we are old, with just these odd moments here and there and danger always so narrowly evaded? Love draining away our vitality, our hold on life, never adding anything to us." 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"--

Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) was an English short-story writer and novelist. Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, came out in 1945. She would go on to publish eleven more novels, including Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek (both available from NYRB Classics). In 2014, NYRB published You'll Enjoy it When You Get There, a selection made by Margaret Drabble of Taylor’s short stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker.


Roxana Robinson is the author of five novels, including Cost; three collections of short stories; and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. She selected and introduced The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, published by NYRB Classics. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Travel and Leisure, and Vogue, among other publications. She divides her time between New York, Connecticut, and Maine.