Abstract
In Elizabeth Taylor’s novel A View of the Harbour (1947), a self-important librarian occupies himself in stamping his borrowers’ books with the insignia ‘for adults only’, but bestows his approval of Lily Wilson’s choice of library book with these words: ‘“That’s a fine and powerful story […] No need to be prejudiced against lady novelists. In literature the wind bloweth where it listeth […] Ladies — and you notice I say ‘ladies’ — have their own contribution to make. A nice domestic romance. Why ape men?”’1
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Notes
Elizabeth Taylor, A View of the Harbour (London: Peter Davies, 1947), p. 34.
Ibid.
Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s (London: Peter Davies,0 1945), p. 47. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
Jacqueline Wilkotz, ‘Game of Hide and Seek’, The Women’s Review of Books, 4:10–11 (July–August 1987), pp. 31–2 (p. 31).
Alice Ferrebe, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s Use of Romance: Feminist Feeling in 1950s English Fiction’, Literature and History, 19:1 (2010), pp. 50–64 (p. 61).
Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (eds), Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 1905–1991 (New York: Wilson, 1966), p. 985.
Elizabeth Taylor, A Wreath of Roses (London: Peter Davies, 1949), p. 46.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 225.
William Feaver, ‘Festival Star’, in Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier (eds), A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 54.
Elizabeth David, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (London: Robert Hale, 1984), p. 21. I am indebted to Victoria Cachin for this point.
Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 157.
Ernest Boll, ‘At Mrs Lippincote’s and Tristram Shandy’, Modern Language Notes, 65:2 (February 1950), pp. 119–21.
John Brannigan, ‘No Home of One’s Own: Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincot’s’, in Jane Dowson (ed.), Women’s Writing 1945–60: After the Deluge (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 73–84 (p. 74).
Regina Barreca, Introduction to Regina Barreca (ed.), Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988), pp. 1–22 (p. 7).
Judy Little, Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark and Feminism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 1, 7–8.
See, for example, Clare Hanson, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Journal Covered with Dust: The Postmodern Short Fiction of Elizabeth Taylor’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 22 (1994), pp. 93–103 (p. 93).
Quoted in Tim Waterstone, Introduction to Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s (London: Virago, 1988), pp. v–ix.
Elizabeth Taylor, ‘Husbands and Wives’, in Dangerous Calm: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor, ed. Lynn Knight (London: Virago, 1995), pp. 279–88 (p. 280).
Ibid.
Doris Lessing, ‘When in the Future they Look Back on Us’, in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), p. 16.
Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), p. 65.
Selena Hastings, Nancy Mitford (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), pp. 165–6.
Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (London: Michael Joseph, 1977), p. 20.
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (1945) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), p. 126. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
Rosamond Lehmann, The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967) (London: Virago, 1982), p. 137.
Evelyn Waugh, ‘The Last Committed Novelist’, undated MS (probably 1960), John Lehmann collection, Harry Ransom Center for Research in the Humanities, The University of Austin at Texas. This was later published in The London Magazine, December 1960.
Letter from Nancy Mitford to Raymond Mortimer, dated 19 June 1960, Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, ed. Charlotte Mosley (London: Sceptre, 1993), pp. 453–4 (p. 453).
Raymond Durgnatt, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 181.
Umberto Eco, ‘Frames of Comic “Freedom”’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 1–9 (p. 8).
Libby Purves, Home Leave (London: Sceptre, 1997), p. 240.
Ibid.
Denise Riley, ‘The Free Mothers: Pronatalism and Working Mothers in Industry at the End of the Last War’, History Workshop Journal, 11 (Spring 1981), pp. 58–119 (p. 98).
Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, vol. 2: Motherhood (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1945), p. 290.
See Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (1960) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1989), p. 85.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 218.
Luce Irigaray, Interview, ‘Women-mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order’, in Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 50.
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© 2012 Maroula Joannou
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Joannou, M. (2012). Present Laughter. In: Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137265296_5
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