- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Virago (Oct 1 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1844086194
- ISBN-13: 978-1844086191
- Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.9 x 20.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 222 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #467,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Review
'The unsung heroine of British 20th-century fiction. Elizabeth Taylor wrote 12 novels, and each displays her exquisitely light touch, her firt for discreet irony and her skill at revealing the emotional depths behind even the meekest exterior. She is at her very best here, a novel in which love is never declared, but is meticulously evoked. No writer has described the English middle classes with more gently devastating accuracy' Rebecca Abrams, SPECTATOR
Product Description
During summer games of hide and seek Harriet falls in love with Vesey and his elusive, teasing ways. When he goes to Oxford she cherishes his photograph and waits for the letter that never comes. Years pass, and Harriet stifles her imaginings; with a husband and daughter, she excels at respectability. But then Vesey reappears, and her marriage seems to melt away. Harriet is older, it is much too late, but she is still in love with him.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Regrets only, Dec 30 2009
By Jay Dickson - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: A Game of Hide and Seek (Hardcover)
In her recent biography of the underrated English mid-century novelist Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman calls A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK Taylor's best book, and I think she's right. Although she has often been compared too frequently to Elizabeth Bowen (often to Taylor's chagrin), this is certainly her most Bowenesque novel, and it was indeed the one Bowen herself most highly praised. A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK is a study in first love between Harriet and Vesey, both of whom are largely disappointments to their parents; though they flirt in late adolescence and even fall in love, they are separated by the different paths their lives take them and then Harriet marries an older man because of a fear of lack of future prospects. Fifteen years later, Vesey returns into Harriet's life even though she's married and has a daughter, and the novel examines the effect their re-awakening love has not just on the two of them but on Harriet's husband Charles and her daughter Betsy.As in Elizabeth Bowen's novels, the point of A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK is show to the unspoken springs and touchstones. Harriet's thoughts are expressed to us with far more fineness and clarity than she herself could express them (we find she is a poor scholar and unsuited for college), but this seems somehow acceptable under the novel's own terms: we sense her sensibility is finer than her ability to express it could ever be. The perversely contrary Vesey is also beautifully drawn, as is the emotional Betsy and as is Julia, Charles's bossy and narcissistic mother. The novel also suggests a kind of critique laid against late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism, since both Harriet's mother and Vesey's aunt are former suffragists whose goals for a greater equity for women seem unrealized in the limited possibilities drawn for Harriet (who has to take a poorly paying job in a gown shop because of her limits as a scholar before she marries Charles) and for Miss Bell, Betsy's teacher. The novel's story is told with great formal imagination: its narrative achieves the feat of being highly constructed while never letting you feel this is an impediment to its telling.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, tender and fully realized, April 3 2012
By Michael Greenebaum - Published on Amazon.com
Achat Amazon vérifié(Quest-ce que cest?)
Ce commentaire est de: A Game of Hide and Seek (Paperback)
I am a fast reader, so one test I have of a book is whether it slows me down with pleasure (and often awe). From the opening, it became clear that Elizabeth Taylor is a superb writer of sentences, keenly aware of the sounds of words as well as their various meanings. Her sentences bear - and sometimes require - re-reading; plot and character points can sometimes be found in subordinate clauses. They also require close reading because every word counts and every word is necessary. (This distinguishes her from Elizabeth Bowen, in my opinion.)Her sentences are in aid of a wonderful, complicated story which weaves its trajectory through marvelous set pieces and aching missed opportunities. It is a love story and is told sometimes from within the heads of her two lovers and sometimes from an authorial distance. Like life, some episodes are ambiguous - none moreso than the ending. Because the story is about ordinary people, with ordinary feelings and dilemmas, it comes as a shock to the attentive reader to realize that this is a huge book, large in its compassion, understanding and clarity. Life is this way, but it is rarely told or experienced so beautifully.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
