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ebook / ISBN-13: 9780748130993

Price: £9.99

ON SALE: 7th July 2011

Genre: Fiction & Related Items / Classic Fiction (pre C 1945)

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Paperback

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INTRODUCED BY HILARY MANTEL

Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth – Sarah Waters


Writing stories that are extravagant and fanciful, fifteen-year old Angel retreats to a world of romance, escaping the drabness of provincial life. She knows she is different, that she is destined to become a feted authoress, owner of great riches and of Paradise House . . .

After reading The Lady Irania, publishers Brace and Gilchrist are certain the novel will be a success, in spite of – perhaps because of – its overblown style. But they are curious as to who could have written such a book – an elderly lady, romanticising behind lace curtains? A mustachioed rogue?

They were not expecting it to be the pale, serious teenage girl, sitting before them without a hint of irony in her soul.

*

‘Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning-point in one’s own experience’ Elizabeth Bowen

‘No writer has described the English middle classes with more gently devastating accuracy’ Rebecca Abrams, Spectator

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Reviews

Elizabeth Taylor's tender, funny, exquisitely stylish novel keeps us on Angel's side, even though we are appalled by her narcissism and shocked into laughter by her self-delusion. She is a monster, but a delicious monster, and the novel poses, for writers, questions that don't date. That's why I'm so drawn to the book and have loved it for years; there's a bit of Angel in every writer, I fear.
Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph