The making of a literary reputation is an awkward, unfair business. "One of our foremost novelists", Angus Wilson is quoted as saying on the jacket of one Elizabeth Taylor novel; James Agate, in 1945, "chortled from the first page to the last" of another one; the TLS managed a comparison with Chekhov, Amis, Hartley, Priestley, Bowen, Betjeman—a chorus of praise from fellow-writers of various sorts fills up the blurbs of her fifteen books. Yet it would not be entirely farfetched to apply what she says about her character Martha, in this last and posthumous novel, to Martha's creator: "Her … books were handsomely printed, widely spaced on good paper, well-reviewed, and more or less unknown. Without fretting, she waited to be discovered." Except that "without fretting" suggests a tranquillity that does not suit well with the fierceness, the controlled energy that exist just below the surface of Elizabeth Taylor's...