I felt chastened soon after this when I read a piece on Taylor by the estimable writer Philip Hensher, who said (in an undoubtedly Austenian tone) that: ‘Any woman novelist who writes grammatically, it sometimes seems, will sooner or later be compared to Jane Austen, but in Taylor’s case, the comparison is peculiarly inappropriate.’ I still think my missing link idea is true, though. Let’s begin by drawing the relationship between Austen and Updike: the canvas of both is always a small, provincial section of the middle-classes; their narratives explore love and marriage and its breakdown within that canvas; and they both subscribe to the need to, in Updike’s words, ‘give the mundane its beautiful due’. They both, in other words, find art in the everyday, rather than the fantastical. Or perhaps they find the fantastical in the everyday. Elizabeth Taylor operates along all these lines. The Sleeping Beauty is a novel entirely committed to finding the fantastical in the everyday: It looked a sad, unwelcome garden with its yellowing leaves.
