An NYRB Classics Original<br><br>Nearly forty years after her death, Elizabeth Taylor is only beginning to gain the recognition due to her as one of the finest English writers of the postwar period, notwithstanding the praise she has received from writers as different as Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. Inheriting Ivy Compton-Burnett’s uncanny sensitivity to the terrifying undercurrents that swirl beneath the apparent calm of respectable family life while showing a deep sympathy of her own for human loneliness, Taylor depicted dislocation with the unflinching presence of mind of Graham Greene. For Taylor, however, unlike Greene, dislocation began not in distant climes but right at home. It is in the living room, playroom, and bedroom that Taylor stages her unforgettable dramas of alienation and impossible desire.<br> <br> In 2012, NYRB Classics reissued two of Taylor’s finest novels, and <i>The</i> <i>New York Times Book Review</i> hailed the reemergence of this wonderful neglected author. Now, for the first time in more than a quarter century, Taylor’s stories, in many ways the heart of her achievement, will be available to readers in the United States, presented in a revelatory new selection by Margaret Drabble. In Taylor’s extensive body of short fiction, the bulk of which was originally taken by the legendary editor and writer William Maxwell for <i>The</i> <i>New Yorker</i>, her range of feeling and the power of her writing are evident as nowhere else.