[In a] passage from The Sleeping Beauty, first published in 1953 and now reissued …, Elizabeth Taylor refers to two of the dreams dearest to the English middle class's collective unconscious. One is the fantasy of unbridled passion. The other is the vision of bourgeois bliss….

Miss Taylor is both realist and romantic. She writes, with a precision which leaves no space in which sentimentality could be accommodated, about the squalid, silly, intermittently charming lives and personalities of ordinary people. She records the minor deceptions by which they preserve appearances, and thereby renders those appearances absurd. But she loves and respects the pleasures and the yearnings of the flesh. While she satirises the dream of respectability, she confirms the potency of the vision of ecstasy. Respectability is vulnerable, it can be routed by the merest breath, by a whisper of scandalous truth.

Susannah Clapp, in her perceptive introduction to this...