Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Dial Press (1983), Paperback, 250 pages
Description
To win Emily now appeared to be the great task, the meaning, of his life... Vinny Tumulty is a quiet, sensible man. When he goes to stay at a small English seaside resort his task is to comfort a bereaved friend, Isabella. A past master at sympathy, Vinny looks forward to a solemn few days of tears and consolation. Then, on the evening of his arrival, he looks out of the window at sunst and catches sight of a mysterious romantic figure: a beautiful woman walking by the seashore. Before the week is over Vinny has fallen in love, completely and utterly, for this first time in his middle-aged life. But Emily is a sleeping beauty, her secluded life hiding bitter secrets from the past. How can this unlikely Prince Charming break the spell and rouse her from her dreams? First published in 1953, this is one of Elizabeth Taylor's most romantic novels, a love story, and typical too of her great talents in its quiet observation and delicate, ironic perception.… (more)
Media reviews
At Easter, a miracle. Thanks to the kindest friends a person could ever have, I spent the weekend on a Caribbean beach, where I indulged once again a now well-established holiday tradition. It goes like this: the hotter and happier it is wherever I am, the more damp and miserable it must be in the
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novel I'm reading. On this score, Elizabeth Taylor's The Sleeping Beauty exceeded all expectations by being set almost entirely in a postwar boarding house in an out-of-season south coast resort called – wait for it – Seething. Everyone in it is sad and thwarted, sleeps alone in their chilly bedroom and considers an hour in a milk bar whose windows are weeping condensation as no more than they are due by way of enjoyment – and yes, each page increased exponentially my own pleasure every time I lifted my eyes to the wide, turquoise sea. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member BeyondEdenRock
In this, her sixth novel, Elizabeth Taylor took the bones of a fairy story and re-set it as a very human story, among other human stories, in an English seaside town.
Vinny, the hero, is visiting to offer help and support to an old friend, Isabella, who has been widowed. He does the job beautifully
Her son, Lawrence, on leave from the army, is less impressed.
And Vinny is falling in love with another. With a young woman he saw walking, alone, across the beach.
Emily lived at the town’s guest house with her widowed sister, Rose, and Rose’s disabled daughter. She’d had an independent life, but there had been a car accident. The physical injuries had healed but the mental scars had not. Maybe Vinny, in love for the first time, in his fifties, could be the man to rescue her …
Meanwhile, Isabella and her friend Evalie invest in beauty treatments, trying to hold on to youth and hope. Laurence, to his mother’s displeasure, embarks on a romance with Betty a nursery maid staying with her employers at Rose’s guest house. And Rose frets about how she would manage, should her sister marry.
The relationship between Vinny and Emily advances nicely. But Vinny has a secret that he dare not tell.
Elizabeth Taylor, of course, paints all of those characters, all of those lives, quite beautifully. Always showing, but never telling. I saw insecurities, I saw snobbery. But I understood; these were real, fallible human beings. In a few places I had doubts, but in the end there was nothing that I couldn’t accept.
Those doubts lead me to say that this is not my favourite of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels. I’d like to explain more, but to do that properly I would have to give away more of the plot than feels right.
My other concern was the balance between the characters: one more household, one more plotline, would have made the community and this seaside town so much more real for me. But I think that maybe what I wanted wasn’t what the author intended.
Whatever the case, I have to say that this is still a lovely book: beautifully written and with much to say about the human condition.
Vinny, the hero, is visiting to offer help and support to an old friend, Isabella, who has been widowed. He does the job beautifully
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and Isabella, anxious about growing old on her own, fancies that she is beginning to fall in love with him.Her son, Lawrence, on leave from the army, is less impressed.
And Vinny is falling in love with another. With a young woman he saw walking, alone, across the beach.
Emily lived at the town’s guest house with her widowed sister, Rose, and Rose’s disabled daughter. She’d had an independent life, but there had been a car accident. The physical injuries had healed but the mental scars had not. Maybe Vinny, in love for the first time, in his fifties, could be the man to rescue her …
Meanwhile, Isabella and her friend Evalie invest in beauty treatments, trying to hold on to youth and hope. Laurence, to his mother’s displeasure, embarks on a romance with Betty a nursery maid staying with her employers at Rose’s guest house. And Rose frets about how she would manage, should her sister marry.
The relationship between Vinny and Emily advances nicely. But Vinny has a secret that he dare not tell.
Elizabeth Taylor, of course, paints all of those characters, all of those lives, quite beautifully. Always showing, but never telling. I saw insecurities, I saw snobbery. But I understood; these were real, fallible human beings. In a few places I had doubts, but in the end there was nothing that I couldn’t accept.
Those doubts lead me to say that this is not my favourite of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels. I’d like to explain more, but to do that properly I would have to give away more of the plot than feels right.
My other concern was the balance between the characters: one more household, one more plotline, would have made the community and this seaside town so much more real for me. But I think that maybe what I wanted wasn’t what the author intended.
Whatever the case, I have to say that this is still a lovely book: beautifully written and with much to say about the human condition.
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LibraryThing member thorold
Taylor is a very interesting novelist: in the tradition of the ironic, mildly subversive English-woman-novelist-who-gets-compared-to-Jane-Austen, but also a little bit off to one side of it. The books have a mood of quietly pleasurable pessimism that sits somewhere between Barbara Pym's "grateful
Like one or two of her other novels, this takes as its starting point the death of a husband and the consequent changes in a middle-aged woman's life, but in this case it isn't really the widow Isabella who is at the centre of the novel, but her male friend Vinnie, who falls, French Lieutenant's Woman style, for a mysterious woman he has glimpsed walking on the beach. It turns out that the "mystery woman", Emily, has had major plastic surgery on her face after a car accident and has locked herself away from the world ever since: the question is whether the middle-aged Vinnie has the qualifications to be the prince who awakens her. And whether a plot complication so absurd that it must have strayed in from either a Victorian novel or a soap opera can prevent the necessary happy-end?
A very good read, full of entertaining detail and anything but a romance.
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to be back where we started from" view of the world and the doom and gloom of Anita Brookner. The irony is carefully dosed, so we are often tricked into taking her characters seriously at the beginning only to find her, a chapter or two down the line, making us see how absurd they really are by sticking in a couple of beautifully observed and entirely ridiculous details. In this book there's a running joke that most of the characters are secretly addicted to betting on horseraces, taking considerable pains to prevent their friends (who have the same vice) from finding out about it, for instance.Like one or two of her other novels, this takes as its starting point the death of a husband and the consequent changes in a middle-aged woman's life, but in this case it isn't really the widow Isabella who is at the centre of the novel, but her male friend Vinnie, who falls, French Lieutenant's Woman style, for a mysterious woman he has glimpsed walking on the beach. It turns out that the "mystery woman", Emily, has had major plastic surgery on her face after a car accident and has locked herself away from the world ever since: the question is whether the middle-aged Vinnie has the qualifications to be the prince who awakens her. And whether a plot complication so absurd that it must have strayed in from either a Victorian novel or a soap opera can prevent the necessary happy-end?
A very good read, full of entertaining detail and anything but a romance.
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LibraryThing member tzelman
English seaside study of lonely people, varieties of and reasons for. A drier, soberer Barbara Pym.
LibraryThing member franoscar
Spoilers. It was fine. The writing style is a little formal. I didn't really like the story. I like romance. But the guy is a doofus and I guess it was a little hard to actually believe in the love between those 2. There might have been some caricature, the mother with her nosiness, Rose with her
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imprisoning care. And poor Isabelle. Show Less
LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
Vinny, a middle-aged bachelor, visits a small seaside town to comfort a friend whose husband, a former MP, has just died. While there, he sees a beautiful woman walking on the beach, and immediately falls in love. Will the problems in her past, and a mystery woman in Vinny's past keep them apart?
In
This was a quick and pleasurable read, although I don't think it was one of Taylor's best. (Read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont if you read only one book by her). Taylor reminds me of Barbara Pym, but she is not as kind to her characters as Pym.
3 stars
In
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the meantime, the widow believes Vinny is falling in love with her, as she bets on the horses and undergoes various beauty treatments in an attempt to recapture the past. In addition, her son is falling in love with a totally inappropriate nanny.This was a quick and pleasurable read, although I don't think it was one of Taylor's best. (Read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont if you read only one book by her). Taylor reminds me of Barbara Pym, but she is not as kind to her characters as Pym.
3 stars
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LibraryThing member oldblack
First published in the year I was born and the current Queen of England was crowned, so it's definitely an historical relic to some extent. Nonetheless, I reckon Elizabeth Taylor is a very good writer and there is an enduring interest in this book because of the skill she has in drawing characters
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and their relationships and tensions between them. Interesting view of British mid-20th century life and class structure too - makes me wonder whether is has changed fundamentally since then. I've never been there so I'll have to read more to find out. This book doesn't quite match her brilliant "Mrs Palfrey..." but I'll be looking for more of Taylor's work at the library tomorrow. Show Less
Language
Original publication date
1953
Physical description
250 p.; 8.1 inches
ISBN
0385279191 / 9780385279192
Local notes
GONE