![]() In a sense, the novel is a comic study in gently bad faith. ![]() What Mrs Palfrey doesn’t know is that Ludo is making a study of her for the novel he is writing. As Mrs Palfrey well knows, the young man is, in fact, a penniless young writer called Ludo. I enjoyed the work’s wit, the sense of a dispassionate eye looking anguish coolly in the face - but was there really much of a story?Īnd yet there is a plot line, clearly, running through the novel: Mrs Palfrey, a friendless but humane and stoic old woman, finds herself in a farcical predicament after she moves into a residential hotel and fails to correct her fellow residents’ fallacious impression that the young man who joins her for dinner on Saturday night is her filially affectionate grandson Desmond. ![]() My first impression on finishing Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was that the novel I had just greatly enjoyed reading was the literary equivalent of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday: a series of whimsical events that take place in a relatively closed social setting, strung along a flimsy thread that ultimately leads nowhere. Spoiler alert: This posting contains spoilers for Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor. ![]()
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