Kalliope's Reviews > Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Beware of thieves.

Beware of writers.

The plot of this novel is about an elderly widow who retires to a hotel in London, where the other hosts are in a similar situation to hers. One would expect therefore that this book is about loneliness and fear of death.

Or you could think that this novel is about how writers could steal your soul. If you think that a person who is eating close to you in a bus and seems distracted in watching how the bus is getting close to her stop, if this person happens to be a writer, you delude yourself. She is probably observing how your hat is too small, or the colour of your handbag is not exactly the same hue as that of your shoes, or you look bored. If you think that a person who is having his lunch in a café terrace on the table next to yours and seems absorbed in studying the menu, if this person happens to be a writer, you delude yourself. He is noting down in his head that you are reading a trashy book, that your skirt is too tight, and that you are obviously worried because the person you expect to join you does not arrive. At least these people, these writers, are fortuitous encounters. If the writer happens to be a friend of yours, then you ought to be a great deal more careful with what your friend is taking from you.

Elizabeth Taylor died relatively young, at 63, due to cancer. She published this novel in 1971, four years before her death, although I do not know if she was already ill when she wrote this. But she had met, in the Magazine department in Harrods in 1969, a young man who had published a year before a novel about a home for elderly women. This man was Paul Bailey, and the novel was At the Jerusalem. (view spoiler)[ Paul Bailey has written the Introduction to my edition and presents these facts to the reader (hide spoiler)]. In her novel Taylor has appropriated Bailey the writer and uses him as her raw material to create a character who seizes on the characteristics of the protagonist, the Mrs Palfrey of the title, to write his own novel while sitting in the former Banking Hall in Harrods.

In spite of all the snatching and poaching going around in the writing and in the written, this is an engaging account which shows that writers, in stealing, will prove to have also a heart.