If the English writer Elizabeth Taylor is not widely known in this country, maybe it's because most of her books were published back when people still spoke of "women's novels" without so much as a set of quotation marks to excuse the phrase. She did write exceptionally quiet tales—at least on the surface. She had a quiet, if excellent, reputation. And she admitted to enjoying "books in which practically nothing ever happens"—a charge leveled at her own work by more than one critic. (p. 1)

Her work seems to have sprung not from passion but from painstaking care and thoughtfulness; it sometimes took a whole page of crossings-out to produce a single sentence. The result was a prose that Elizabeth Janeway called "one of the most beautiful and exact instruments of precision in use today." On the other hand, some reviewers judged her books too unemphatic, too...