The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1956)(about) |
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Saturday 23 November 1946
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Significant New Novel
Palladian, by Elizabeth Taylor.
Peter Davies, London.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
No Mere Derivative Writer
WHEN the author of Palladian
sends her heroine Cassandra to Cropthorne Manor as gover- ness "with nothing to commend her to such a profession, beyond the fact of her school lessons being fresh in her mind and, along with that, a very proper willingness to fall in love the more despairingly the better, with her employer'." The reader will most certainly say, 'Ah, Jane Eyre with her employer'." The reader will be right, for, as Elizabeth Taylor says in her opening sentence of the first chapter, "Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sore of experiencing the proper emotions."
And not only Cassandra! There is a scene where Tom, hard-drinking wastrel cousin of Marion Vanbrugh, Cassandra's employer, breaks the in- fluence of Marion's dead wife, Violet, on her husband by telling him that he, Tom, and not Marion, is the father of Violet's child. The agonised husband asks how could they, being lovers, let him marry Violet, and Tom replies, "SHE did it, she turned me into a sort of glowering Heath- cliff." And a Heathcliff he surely was, when he was not being all the more truly a Bronte character, namely, Patrick Branwell Bronte, whose love story closely resembles his.
The manor, too, is not a newcomer to literature. It did yeoman service to Mrs Radcliffe and the Gothic novel school. And never for any Gothic novelist did it play a more macabre part than in Palladian, when it en- compasses the death of Violet's child, Sophy.
And Sophy, Cassandra's pupil, has been met before, but she neverthe- less becomes, in Elizabeth Taylor's hands, an amazingly modern type.
But, in spite of its debt to the Brontes and the Radcliffes, this is no mere derivative story. Margaret brings it right up to the present when she announces the coming
birth of her child. And "Tinty," her mother and Tom's, is as clever a pic- ture of anxious motherhood as ever menaced her children. And, for good measure and humour, there is Nanny, who is addicted to the cinema, and sees all the other characters through an old woman's eyes, sees their faults as she did when they were her young charges, and is refreshingly communicative about the too-much-loved Violet.
And there is Mrs Adams; delicious in her honest vulgarity, who could never, in spite of Nanny's corrections, see that "the gentry" were different from less fortunate folk, and who cherished the revolutionary view that a charlady might hope sometimes to get home earlier to her baby.
Palladian is a significant book.
G.A.H.