Feminine Ripples

A WREATH OF ROSES (243 pp.)--Elizabeth Taylor--Knopf ($3).

"Life persists in the vulnerable, the sensitive," said the aging artist. "They carry it on. The invulnerable, the too heavily armoured perish. Fearful, ill adapted, cumbersome, impersonal. Dinosaurs and men in tanks. But the stream of life flows differently, through the unarmed, the emotional, the highly personal . . ."

"You turn my anxiety about Liz into a disarmament conference," Camilla said.

Adventure Enough. In this typical "bit of dialogue, Novelist Elizabeth Taylor skips ahead of the reader to state--and quickly puncture with mockery--the best justification for her novels. A Wreath of Roses is her fourth, and it has the same lightness and speed, the same clairvoyance at catching ripples of feminine feeling, as her first, At Mrs. Lippincote's. Since there is nothing very busty or blustery about all this, Mrs. Taylor will probably have to be content with a lot fewer readers than she deserves.

Like Jane Austen, one of her models in the art of fiction, Elizabeth Taylor has lived a quiet life in provincial England. As a schoolgirl in Reading, she wrote surreptitious romances when she was supposed to be studying; she worked as a governess, later as a librarian, then she married and had two children. She is now a fair, grey-eyed young woman (36) who lives with her family in Buckinghamshire and, thinking that to be adventure enough, hopes never to have any others. She is a born writer and a good one.

A Wreath of Roses is not the "perfect novel" that she has confessed she would like to write, but it contains three extremely well-drawn characters: two young women and a baby. Confidantes and friends . from girlhood, Camilla Hill and Liz Nicholson are spending their summer holiday together again in an old village, full of gardens which ooze sunny peace as a honeycomb oozes honey. Liz's new baby creates all kinds of subtle estrangements, hilarities and tensions. A more serious tension arises when a handsome young stranger arrives at the local inn; though Camilla knows that he is dangerous, she is attracted to him.

Stranger-Trouble. Novelist Taylor comes a cropper in dealing with the handsome stranger--a psychotic who is a good deal more dangerous than Camilla at first suspects. Mrs. Taylor suggests facets of his character, all neatly and plausibly, but no individual emerges. At the climax of the story Camilla is filled with understandable terror at learning that her new friend is a murderer. The motives and behavior of the young man at this point are, however, by no means made credible to the reader. The novel ends rather helplessly with his suicide.

Elizabeth Taylor's best novel is still her third, A View of the Harbour, in which she managed a greater range of characters and moods with more solidity of style.

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