On 15 November 1975, Elizabeth Taylor died. No, not that Elizabeth Taylor – she had many more years, and many more husbands, to get through. I mean Elizabeth Taylor the author, whose 12 novels and four volumes of short stories so piercingly and hilariously chronicle the quietly desperate lives of middle-class women in and around the sleepy towns and villages of the Thames Valley in the middle part of the last century.

Kingsley Amis thought her ‘one of the best English novelists born in this century’. Anita Brookner considered her ‘the Jane Austen of the 1950s and 60s’. Despite such accolades, Taylor never quite achieved the status she deserved. She was never a bestseller; she never won a prize. In fact, a faintly patronising air bedevilled her throughout her writing life. (Saul Bellow, when judging the Booker Prize, for which she was long listed, derided her work as redolent of  ‘tinkling teacups’.) She was seen by some as too genteel, too privileged, too low stakes – a mere lending library novelist.

This year marks 50 years since Taylor’s final novel, Blaming, was published, almost a year after her death, in the autumn of 1976. Her star has since risen slightly – Angel (1957) was chosen as one of the 13 ‘Best Novels of Our Time’ in 1984; Robert McCrum included Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) on his list of the ‘100 Best Novels Written in English’ – but nowhere near the heights it should. It therefore seems a good time to give this perennially undervalued writer her very significant due.

Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Coles was........

© The Spectator