Elizabeth Taylor

"Angelica Deverell lives above her diligent, drab mother's grocery shop in a dreary turn-of-the-century English neighborhood, but spends her days dreaming of handsome Paradise House, where her aunt is enthroned as a maid. But in Angel's imagination, she is the mistress of the house, a realm of lavish opulence, of evening gowns and peacocks. Then she begins to write popular novels, and this fantasy becomes her life. And now that she has tasted success,...

""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...

Character story of a woman who goes to live in an English seaside town.

Set in the green Thames valley, an interpretation of the varieties of a woman's love - a woman headstrong at twenty, wiser but just as vulnerable at forty.

Angel Deverell fantasizes about living in the town mansion, Paradise House. After a London publisher turns her novel into a best seller, she is able to buy Paradise House and pursue the man of her dreams, a painter struggling for his own big break.

"The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith's 'Public Library and Other Stories.' In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore's 'Community Life' and Elizabeth McCracken's 'Juliet' and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite...