A quiet novelist, wth a quiet reputation. Although I have known of her for close to 40 years, this is the first time I have read one of her novels. "Claremont" is the last of the 11 novels she published in her lifetime (1971). Another was published a year after her death in 1975.
This is the new reprint by the NYRofBks Press, with an Introduction by Michael Hofmann. There has been another pb edition available for years (decades?) by Virago Press, with an Introduction by Paul Bailey. Neither Intro adds much to the reading of the novel, and it is a shame we do not have a woman author writing an Intro for her.
The day to day existence of a recently widowed woman who moves into a London hotel, where 4-5 elderly residents eake through their days. Near parks and museums, but they never seem to get there. Families merely tolerate, and often ignore, these elderly cast-offs.
The ending is sad, and again, rather quietly sad. The worst part, where the 50 pound loan goes to!
Nothing much exciting happens here - a stumble, an offsite cocktail party, a Masonic dinner, a nasty fellow resident, a faux grandson. But with little stabs here and there, and perfectly structured sentences, Taylor writes a story that holds our attention and enlightens us on the life of the Brit elderly, those with a little money and standing, circa 1970.

It's okay, but I didn't find it very special.
Some nice lines and observations, e.g.:

Mrs Post put her small hair combings out of the window – London birds, she had read, were short of nest-building materials.

Some dialogues that are hilarious in their inanity:

'I thought the chicken wasn't half bad,' said Mr Osmond.
'There is so much chicken nowadays,' Mrs Palfrey complained. 'Once it was a treat.'
'Oh, I agree there.'
'Variety becomes more and more important as one gets older. There don't seem to be enough animals and birds.'
'Yes, lamb on Sunday, and it's round again in three. I agree with you. Only three animals, really.'
'Of course, there's veal, but...'

But the book takes a rather glum view of old age, and of the human condition in general, it seems to me &ndash and has little to offer beyond a rather generic grin-and-bear-it acceptance of the inevitable:

As she waited for prunes, Mrs Palfrey considered the day ahead. The morning was to be filled in quite nicely; but the afternoon and evening made a long stretch. I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at her watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she had thought it would be. When she was young, it had always been later.

This isn't relieved by anything like the black humour with which Kinsley Amis spiced up his Ending Up, written about the same time. Nor is it taken to its bleakest extreme: there's a rather soft storyline about the elderly Mrs Palfrey meeting up with a young aspiring novelist who does his writing in Harrods – possibly inspired by the author's catching a glimpse of the young Paul Bailey working in Harrods, as Bailey explains in his introduction he sometimes privately fancied. This (very plausible) fancy gives it some literary-historical value.

This storyline might also be seen as turning this slight novella into a variation on Henry James' famous story The Middle Years, where a dying author meets a young admirer who relieves his final days with the comfort of his admiration. (Okay, it's a little far-fetched. But there are some similarities.)

This text has received lamentable copy editing, if any. Vintage should be ashamed of releasing a book literally riddled with typos (most of them clearly OCR-based) like this:

Mrs Burton felt as if she were swimming along the corridor towards her bedroom, glancing off the wails (sic) like a balloon, gliding past pairs of shoes put out to be cleaned.

Elizabeth Taylor skewering human nature again. How perfectly she balances humour, cruelty and pathos! You can think these old people finishing their lives in a run-down hotel pitiful, but then she suddenly offers you a glimpse of the previous Mrs Palfrey:

After their hard, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous married life, that retirement -- the furnished house in Rottingdean, had, simply, been bliss. They became more and more to one another and, in the end, the perfect marriage they had created was like a work of art. People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.

Even the ghastly Mr Osmond is moved almost to tears at the thought of his wife. Terrible loneliness is reflected in the barbed comments the residents make to each other. Mr Osmond's air of superiority is punctured at the Masonic dinner:

... he did not seem to have many friends: the few people whom he introduced Mrs Palfrey had not the sort of bonhomie to match his own; in fact their eyes almost at once began to range the room for some escape. Rather like a small boy, he had shown off, overdone the familiarity, button-holed men he hardly knew. He was not snubbed; but he was not encouraged.

A Jane Austen-like acuity of observation, but also empathy with these people forgotten or ignored by their children.

Lovely, sad, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. A new author for me. I will seek out more by her

گریه کردم.

Wonderfully written, this is a bittersweet novel about new beginnings in old age, amongst other things. I was listening to a Barbara Pym novel the same week I was reading this, and Taylor's style reminded me of it. Delightful.

;_;

Mrs. Palfrey has moved to the Claremont Hotel in London where she anticipates spending her remaining days. Embarrassed that her grandson doesn't come to visit her, she asks a young man who helps her after a fall to pretend to be her grandson to help her keep up appearances. She quickly finds she's much fonder of the pretend grandson than she ever was of her real grandson. The story talks a bit about this relationship, but it's really a story about those who are aging alone and trying to maintain dignity in the process.

It is a stark, but sophisticated story. Extremely sad and filled with harsh realities. Taylor is a gifted writer.