A slight, almost sadly inconsequential Taylor that explores the familial ties that shape us, bind us, and yet from which we long to be free. The way Taylor explores this across two characters—Cressy and David, both from totally different worlds—is skillfully done, but the writing here feels flat, awkward, and is riddled with sentence fragments that are atypical of Taylor’s usual elegance; the characterization is a bit forced, too, almost two-dimensional.

Recommended only for those seeking to complete their journey through Tayloyr’s oeuvre. I still have one more of her novels to read (The Soul of Kindness), and suspect The Wedding Group to be the dud of them all. It was followed by the hilariously morbid Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and then topped off with one of Taylor’s finest novels, her last published, Blaming.

I wrote at some length for Full Stop on Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, where I also place that novel in the context of several of her others, finding common threads across what is interestingly a very robust, versatile body of work.

For those new to Taylor, I would eschew Angel for your first read, which was the most popular of her novels during her lifetime (why, I’ll never know, as it’s an outlier). Instead, I would highly recommend either beginning with something like A View of the Harbour or In a Summer Season to get a sense of her breadth and scope, or even heading straight for her masterpiece, A Wreath of Roses. ( )

As Taylor’s tenth novel opens, Cressida “Cressy” MacPhail, 17, has returned from convent school to “Quayne”, the family compound/Catholic artist community founded by her overbearing grandfather, Harry—“The Master”—Bretton, CBE, an acclaimed painter. An indifferent student who challenged the rules, Cressy was regarded by school administration as a bad influence on the other girls and was asked to leave before completing her final year. The work at the artist commune—weaving, cooking, harvesting—done almost entirely by the women (the wife and daughters of “The Master”: Cressy’s grandmother, mother, and aunts) holds little appeal for Cressy. She understands that she is expected to marry, probably one of her grandfather’s young protégés, and move into one of the outbuildings on the property with him to begin a contained, domestic life of her own. Cressy wants all that the members of the commune (with its own chapel and boozy Catholic priest) spurn—including TV, Wimpy’s fast food, and mass-produced dresses of cheap synthetic fabrics (not homespun) that can be counted on to quickly fall apart so that Cressy can enjoy buying new ones. One morning at breakfast with her parents, soon after her return home, she risks causing a great rumpus (and inflaming her intimidating grandfather’s wrath) by declaring her loss of faith. And so begins Cressy’s “journey” into the wider world.

Instrumental in her real break from Quayne is David Little, a journalist/feature writer, who has recently produced a piece on Quayne for a newspaper colour supplement. David misidentified a girl in one of the photos that accompanied the article, and Cressy has written him a haughty letter (riddled with spelling errors) to set him straight. It was not she who was snapped with the pig, but her cousin Petronella. What’s more, Cressy tells him, she’s not 15 but 17, nor is she uneducated: “I know French for a start!” All this, David reports with some amusement to his mother, with whom he lives. Mrs. “Midge” Little’s entire life revolves around her son, but she artfully ensures that the apron strings that tie her youngest and most handsome child to her remain invisible to him. This isn’t that hard to do because, as Taylor notes, the workings of David’s own mind are almost entirely hidden from him. (This is probably the most common character flaw in Taylor’s protagonists.)

The long and the short of it is that Cressy and the much older David marry. It is, of course, a disaster of sorts. Having lived a sheltered life, Cressy is naïve and entirely impractical. She can manage nothing and is easily controlled and manipulated by her husband’s mother, who employs all her energy and skills to keep her favourite son and his young “pet” of a wife dependent on her and in the neighbourhood. Midge is a brilliant creation, another one of Taylor’s “souls of kindness” who is driven entirely by a self-centredness that she is determined not to confront. In fact, all three of Taylor’s central characters here possess very limited self-knowledge.

Although I was slightly disappointed with the novel’s ambiguous ending, I found this an engrossing and very psychologically astute work of literary fiction. ( )

This was my first Elizabeth Taylor and having looked around at some other comments on the book, probably not her best. It tells the story of Cressida, Cressy for short, who leaves her home in a religious (Roman Catholic) artistic community, to live and work in an antique shop in the town. She eventually marries a man who lives with his mother. Interesting to see how this cloistered young girl changes with marriage, a child and a mother-in-law. ( )

(1989)

A good one, I thought, although some don’t rate it among her master works. I like the undertones of Iris Murdoch, and wasn’t the only one to notice this in the Year of Elizabeth Taylor LibraryThing Virago Group I belong to. Cressy longs to escape the stifling atmosphere of the ‘free living’ artistic commune in which she’s been raised. But, lost living on her own above an antique shop, she has soon gone from frying pan to fire as she meets and marries the older journalist, David, and encounters his mother, Midge, trying to hard to demonstrate that she isn’t clingy and always somehow getting her own way. When Cressy gets pregnant, even needing her mother-in-law to alert her to her condition, it’s certainly all that Midge could want.

Seen with a very clear eye to the nuances of married life and changing expectations. I loved Mrs Brindle, the go between and village maven, although the secondary characters were not all as rich and vital as they have been in earlier Taylor novels. The Murdoch parallels were legion: weird siblings, pale, pre-Raphaelite cousins, father in a frowsty home in London – although the book with the most parallels in the artistic sense, The Good Apprentice, was written many years later, this is very interesting. ( )

The general consensus is that this is not Taylor at her very best, and I can't really argue. One becomes accustomed to sharp insights that come to balanced but unflinching conclusions about the general boneheadedness of human beings, yet in [The Wedding Group] (and what exactly is that title all about?) the story seems to simply do a fade out, literally with all but a few characters dispersing somewhat haphazardly, some reluctantly, some gladly..... Furthermore matters end quite 'well' as in 'happily' for almost everyone, even the cleaning lady will have a new and interesting job. And yet, my guess is, that on a second or even third reading, a structure would emerge as sturdy as a well-conceived painting or a house - and houses - the cosy or bleak, genteel or homespun play strong roles in the book. Perhaps a hidden theme is what makes a home a home? All along, Midge's essential warmth perhaps is hinted at in the fact that she lives in a truly lovely house that she has made that way herself. Is Taylor saying we make our environments but then our environments remake us, or trap us, or make us better, or worse? Inevitably when one begins to look underneath the surface of a Taylor book, the structure, neat and careful and strong does emerge. ( )