Picking a year: just over halfway through the 20th century (1951) and reading as many publications in that year as possible, has introduced me to many authors that I would not otherwise have sat down with. Elizabeth Taylor's; A Game of Hiding Seek was a surprise and a delight to me, almost from the first page. It was her fifth novel; she had first been published in 1945 and so was well into her stride by 1951. The subject matter and the quality of her writing style of this novel would appear to be typical of her work. She writes about the middle class, she writes about England particularly the countryside and she writes about relationships from a woman's point of view, all this I gathered from a sympathetic introduction by Elizabeth Jane Howard on my kindle edition.

The plot is a simple one; describing a love affair almost a love infatuation from the point of view of Harriet. She and Vesey spend many of their summer school holidays together in their native England as children and then as young adolescents during the period between the two great wars. Their families were closely connected, but it was Vesey who came to stay with Harriet until their fifteenth year, when Harriet's mother decided that is was no longer a suitable arrangement. Vesey was a difficult schoolboy, a little out of step with his compatriots. He did not make friends easily, he could be a little spiteful and did not settle down to work at his studies. Harriet seems to have been just the opposite, but she fell in love with Vesey, who was always inclined to do something to upset the grown ups. Harriet loses contact with Vesey and in her twentieth year marries Charles a well set up man, some fifteen years older than herself. She can never quite forget her first feelings for Vesey although happily married to Charles. She has caught sight of Vesey once or twice at formal family gatherings, but it is 20 years later when she has her own fifteen year old daughter that Vesey intrudes into her life and so starts the second part of the novel and where Taylor's writing really takes off.

The manners and mores of English country life is brought vividly to life by Taylor. Harriet is conscious of fitting in, she has made a good marriage from a financial point of view and buckles down to making Charles as happy as she can. Harriet's mother was a suffragette and had been imprisoned, but to Harriet this seems like another lifetime and not hers. She works hard for her husband and her family, but still cannot forget Vesey. The subject of the book is a love affair, the sort of affair that many readers at the time would have been able to identify/sympathise with: that love affair that seems to fly in the face of all that is comfortable and expected, a love so deep that cannot be forgotten and springs back into life sometimes quite unexpectedly. Taylor does not pass any judgements on her characters, she lets their lives flow just edging their story along in a way that really does feel quite natural.

This is not a modern forward looking novel, it seems steeped in the times in which it was written, remembering that the first part of the book covers a period between the wars. In the early 1950's middle class people still had servants or companions, fitting in, getting back to some sort of normality after the war, was what many people wanted. Taylor captures this atmosphere perfectly for me and I was entranced by some of her writing and her characters and so a 4.5 star read. ( )

A novel of an un-fulfilled love affair owing to an inability to communicate and lack of resolve when love was possible, and the sad realization that they lack the resolve to find a happy resolution after poor choices have been made, opportunities lost. It is well written and not sugar coated, but I am puzzled about the premise of the story, the intensity of their mutual attraction. ( )

Taylor is at the top of her game in this novel, the love story of Vesey and Harriet, who have known each other from childhood. Harriet is modest, self-effacing, and diffident. Academically untalented in childhood, Harriet is aware early on of being a disappointment to her careworn, widowed mother, Lilian, who was once a suffragette and dreamed of great things for her child. Vesey is the restless, troubled, and rather unreliable nephew of Caroline, Lilian’s great friend, also a crusader for women’s rights. Vesey is uncomfortable with vulnerability and tenderness, so any demonstration of these towards Harriet is often followed by sarcasm and even cruelty. The love between the two is real enough, but the character of each prevents any real relationship from forming.

When Vesey goes off to Oxford, Harriet finds work as a shop girl. Ultimately, she marries a much older man, who provides her with a comfortable, middle-class existence. After almost twenty years without contact, Vesey re-enters Harriet’s life. The dutiful, conscientious, and quite conventional woman now finds herself behaving almost as a character in a drama or a novel. She corresponds with Vesey (destroying his letters after having memorized them) and journeys several times by train to London to meet him. Vesey has made little of himself. He’s a third-rate actor, who travels around the country, living in squalid boarding houses, neglecting himself, never getting ahead. Taylor suggests that a lack of parental love is at the root of his troubles.

I found this a much more fully realized novel than Taylor’s earlier works. There are no pontificators here. The characters and the situations—and, yes, the sad story of a tragically unfulfilled love between two ordinary people, as well—are very well realized.

Rating: 4.5 ( )

The next installment in my exploration of the works of Elizabeth Taylor -- the British writer, not the lovely American actress – is A Game of Hide and Seek. Kingsley Amis. Antonio Fraser, Hillary Mantel – among others -- tout her works as among the best of the 20th century. The more of her works I read, the more I side with these opinions. It is a curious story of a two teenagers who form a deep and innocent bond. However, their paths take them in different directions, and it becomes anything but a children’s summer diversion.

This novel reminds me of 19th century novelists, such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. The narrative is understated with detailed probes into the psyche of Harriet. In the “Introduction” by Caleb Crain, he wrote, “Perhaps A Game of Hide and Seek should be understood in the spirit of a Brontë novel, as representing a world in which love is more easily distinguished by the shadows it throws than by any light it may cast” (xi).

I found myself enchanted from the first page. Taylor wrote, “Sometimes in the long summer’s evenings, which are so marked a part of our youth, Harriet and Vesey played hide-and-seek with the younger children, running across the tufted meadows, their shoes yellow with the pollen of butter cups. They could not run fast across those uneven fields; nor did they wish to, since to find the hiding children was to lose their time together, to run faster was to run away from one another. The jog-trot was a game devised from shyness and uncertainty. Neither dared to assume the other wished to pause, and inexperience barred them both from testing this” (3). I am fast becoming an avid admirer of this wonderful writer; however, collecting her 12 novels, 8 short story collections, and a children’s book, will be a daunting task – I only own two novels and a short story collection. That is what retirement will be all about to my mind.

Here is an example of Harriet’s musings. Taylor wrote, “After their walk in the woods, Harriet faced the day’s page uncertainly. There was either far too much space or only one hundredth part enough. Time had expanded and contracted abnormally. That morning and all her childhood seemed the same distance away. ‘I cannot put down what happened this evening,’ she wrote mysteriously. ‘Nor is there any need, for I shall remember all my life.’ And, although she was so mysterious, she was right. Much of those diaries would puzzle her when she turned their pages in middle age, old age; many allusions would be meaningless; week after week would seem to have been wiped away: but that one entry, so proudly cryptic, would always evoke the evening in the woods, the shadows, the layers of leaves shutting out the sky, the bronze mosses at the foot of the trees, the floating sound their voices had, and that explosive, echoing cry of the cuckoo. She would remember writing the words in the little candlelit bedroom” (26-27).

To give Vesey his due, Taylor adds, “He needed Harriet for his own reasons, to give him confidence and peace. In the shelter of her love, he hoped to have a second chance, to turn his personality away from what he most hated in himself, to try to find dignity before it was too late. Playing the fool bored him. With the failure of school behind him, he hoped to shake off the tedious habit” (30).

Some of Taylor’s works are available from the The New York Review of Books. try Elizabeth Taylor’s A Game of Hide and Seek, and find the wonderful world of her imagination, and then help revive interest in this amazing writer. 5 stars.

--Jim, 12/11/16 ( )

This seems to be one of Taylor's best-known novels. Superficially it's a reworking of the plot of Brief encounter - a happily-married woman finds she's desperately in love with Another Man. Taylor clearly enjoys planting a string of tongue-in-cheek references to the recent film in the text to show us that she's well aware of this overlap - and incidentally diverting any suspicion that there might have been such a situation in her own life (as we now know there was). But if it's Brief encounter, then it's Brief encounter as it would have been if they'd got E.M. Forster to do it instead of Noel Coward. There are all kinds of extra layers of frustration and miscommunication (especially between generations) going on alongside the main storyline, there is more ambiguity than you can shake a stick at, and there's a gloriously undefined ending where you have to decide for yourself how it all might have worked out. And of course a whole lot of wonderfully subversive lines, and some absolutely beautiful set-piece scenes. There may be a few bits of the book that feel like pastiche Forster, but then you get something like the scene in the café with the pork chops and you think "only Taylor could have written this". ( )