So the story shifts from one person to another, sometimes the reader sees from Bertram’s point of view, then shifts to another character, Prudence, say, walking along the harbour front, or one of Mrs Bracey’s daughters, or Tory who is perhaps the most clear-sighted of all, except she is blinded by love. I’d like to read it sometime.

― Elizabeth Taylor, A View of the Harbour “There’s no summing-up, but a sense of incompleteness. How does it compare to her other novels? Blindness and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylor’s great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she turns her unsparing gaze on the emotional and sexual politics of a seedy seaside town that’s been left behind by modernity. Blindness and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylor’s great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she turns her unsparing gaze on the emotional and sexual politics of a seedy seaside town that’s been left behind by modernity. No one asks us to write. In this insular community, everyone looks out for – and in on – each other. Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest. He had always had great confidence with women and a tendency to kiss them better, as he called it; only when he had gone, their fears, their anxieties returned, a little intensified, perhaps, but he, of course, would not know that, and remained buoyed up by his own goodness.

The night has separated them from the sleepers, who return to them like strangers from a distant land, full of clumsy preparations for living, the earth itself creaking towards the light.

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In ten years’ time no one will remember this book, the libraries will have sold off all their grubby copies of it second-hand and the rest will have fallen to pieces, gone to dust. But what he does not see it that he is rather selfish person who damages one of his abandoned protégées (Lilly Wilson) and his stance eventually ensnares him in what the reader feels will be a doomed marriage, even if it helps the lady out of a jam. How do Elizabeth Taylor’s descriptions of characters watching the harbour town through windows mirror the way in which Taylor structures the novel? Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail – the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life.’ Do you agree with this description?

Filed under Books, Elizabeth Taylor's novels, Reviews, Tagged as A View from the Harbour, Elizabeth Taylor, George Eliot, Henry James, Middlemarch. (p257).

They could not easily care less. Vite !

If we stop, who will implore us to go on? At the same time, of course, Elizabeth Taylor is capturing her own view of the harbour – and all the emotions which the people living there (pun alert) harbour.