A Game Of Hide And Seek

by Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard (Introduction)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, Modern Classics

319 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Elizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was a popular English novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1912. She was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and worked as a governess, as a tutor and as a librarian.

In 1936, she married John William Kendall Taylor, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.

Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.

Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle class and upper middle class English life won her an audience of discriminating readers, as well as loyal friends in the world of letters.

She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell.

Elizabeth Taylor died at age 63 of cancer.

Anne Tyler once compared Taylor to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen -- "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words . In recent years new interest has been kindled by movie makers in her work. French director Francois Ozon, has made "The Real Life of Angel Deverell" which will be released in early 2005. American director Dan Ireland's screen adaptation of Taylor's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" came out in this country first in 2006 and has made close to $1 million. A British distributor picked it up at Cannes, and the movie was released in England in 2009.

Reviews

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This is my second Elizabeth Taylor novel and what I’ve noted already is that she wanted her readers to come to their own conclusions regarding her characters. She didn’t point fingers or tell us how to feel about them. She wasn’t guided by some strict moral compass that she expected us to follow as well. With a great deal of subtlety, the characters’ actions and dialogue provide enough clues as to the inner workings of their psyches for the reader to decide if he or she wants to label someone a hero or a villain – or simply a human being with flaws. I believe I fall in the latter category once I reach the end of her books. I don’t hate or love a single person but I recognize something in each of them that makes me stop and think deeply about myself or someone close to me. I also suspect her endings are perhaps always a bit ambiguous – or at least I found this to be true here as well as in A View of the Harbour.

“Sometimes in the long summer’s evenings, which are so marked a part of our youth, Harriet and Vesey played hide-and-seek with the younger children, running across the tufted meadows, their shoes yellow with the pollen of buttercups. They could not run fast across those uneven fields; nor did they wish to, since to find the hiding children was to lose their time together, to run faster was to run away from one another.”

I love the way Taylor sets up the start of her stories, as she does here with the main characters Harriet and Vesey. Two adolescents that grow up together, are in love with one another, yet don’t exactly know how to communicate their feelings to one another. Sound familiar?! Taylor uses the theme of the game of hide-and-seek both literally and metaphorically throughout the novel. It’s rather brilliant, actually. One can hide physically from another, as in this childhood game. One can also hide his or her emotions from the other – either never revealing the truth in one’s heart or doing so slowly, perhaps a bit too late, long after the game has ended.

“Time’s wingèd chariot was not a thing that they could hear.”

Just like people, love is imperfect and Taylor is a master at illustrating this. Miscommunications abound and our desires can be confusing. What is it that we want - to be with a certain partner at all costs or to avoid being left alone in the world? What sort of risks are we willing to take and at what cost might they affect the other important people in our lives, including even ourselves and our own personal happiness? Is it possible to spend years with someone and yet never get a glimpse into the soul, to never truly understand what makes that person tick? At the same time, we may harbor memories that are distorted; perhaps we become too nostalgic over time.

“Our feelings about people change as we grow up: but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes.”

I suspect Taylor’s novels are ones that would benefit greatly from starting over right away after finishing the last page. I highlighted my kindle to death while reading this. When I went over my notes, I found so much more meaning that perhaps didn’t even strike me quite so hard the first time around. There are so many nuances to her writing that one might miss until the significance is revealed much later on. I don’t have the luxury of rereading novels immediately after completing them, but I’m grateful for the highlight function because I’ve fallen in love with this book even a little bit more once I put my thoughts together. I’m already daydreaming about my next Taylor novel, but I’ll have to exercise some patience as some other authors are also clamoring for my attention!

“It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.”

[Emily May · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some gorgeous writing, but I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as the premise made me think I would.

The description sells us this-- Harriet falls for the elusive rascal Vesey during childhood games of hide and seek. He goes off to Oxford, years pass, she gets married and devotes herself to husband and child. Then Vesey reappears and so, too, does the spark lit years ago.

I don't know about you, but it sounded utterly thrilling and scandalous to me. I was so ready to fall for this (probably doomed) relationship. And I was so so close, I almost did, but Harriet just ruined it for me.

The problem is that Harriet has the personality of a wet towel. And Vesey was kinda a dick, but I think I might have accepted that aspect if Harriet gave as good as she got, you know? Instead, Harriet mopes and pines so much it totally extinguished any desire I might have had for the two of them to get together. One particularly low point was when Vesey mocked Harriet's stutter.

I came to the conclusion that what Harriet needed was some personality and backbone, not Vesey.

[Andy Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

My third novel by Taylor, and every bit as good as 'Mrs Palfrey at the Clairmont' and the other one what's name I've gone and forgotten.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.
Elizabeth Taylor can write a beautiful sentence. This novel is awash with beautiful writing. Essentially, it's a wise grown up take on romantic love. As a young girl Harriet falls in love with the elusive and unreliable Vesey, an aspiring actor and soon to depart for Oxford. I liked the split Taylor creates here between the subjective and the objective. Vesey isn't objectively very attractive as anything but a passing crush but to Harriet he personifies everything that is missing from her uneventful rural existence. He will become a powerful idea opposing the practical and fearful choices she makes. Taylor does a great job of conjuring up all the sorcery of first love. Vesey now vanishes and Harriet marries Charles, an older businessman. The narrative skips forward two decades. Harriet has a teenage daughter when Vesey makes a reappearance in her life. Not surprisingly he hasn't made much of his life. But neither is Harriet exactly enthralled with her married life. The temptation now is to try to reconnect with the past and all its glamorous wishes.
Elizabeth Taylor is tremendously wise about the compromises marriage involves and the enduring sorcery exerted on a woman by the one who got away. It's the middle-aged Harriet who plays a game of Hide and Seek with her younger self in this novel. Will she be able to find her and reconnect with her?

I'll definitely be reading more Elizabeth Taylor. And well done Virago yet again for resurrecting the reputation of a hugely talented female novelist.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I read Elizabeth Taylor, I am struck by how her books are about nothing. They are about the mundane, everyday lives, of everyday people. And, then, suddenly you realize they are about everything–for they are about human interaction, love, loss, deception, self-deception–all the things that make up our own everyday existences.

When we first meet Harriet and Vesey, they are eighteen years old, with the rushing hormones and confused feelings that are easy to recognize in that age, if you have been there. They play hide and seek with the younger children and slip away into barn lofts, where they are timid and uncertain with one another; they share a first kiss; they try on adult feelings and do not know what to do with them. When they part company, there is too much unfinished business and imagination in the spent summer, and you can feel that this will be a summer that influences lives.

Harriet soon meets and marries another man, Charles, who has suffered his own heartbreaking rejection. When he discovers she has mementos of Vesey, he latches onto that and allows it to breed a jealousy in his heart. He imagines her always loving another man. She imagines what life with Vesey might have been, versus the reality of life with Charles.

“For it was Vesey who had undermined their life together, the idea of him in both their heads.”

Needless to say, Vesey re-enters the picture and what transpires is what makes this book so poignant. There is a daughter to Harriet and Charles, a sixteen year old, who also figures into the equation, and the misunderstanding, miscalculations, and utter confusion are so realistic they make you wonder if any one of these people knows the least thing about one another or even about themselves.

“Our feelings about people change as we grow up; but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I suppose you thought ‘Vesey wouldn’t have done that.’ But an idea can’t ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain.”

I love Taylor’s penchant for understatement and her ability to weave a tale that seems at times to be going nowhere specific, when she has, in fact, a very specific destination in mind at all times. I did not find any of these characters overly likable, but I found all of them exceedingly real and truly pitiable. Taylor seems to say that we are all struggling for happiness and fulfillment, but we are so flawed, along with the others around us, that we can never recognize it when we find it, nor can we ever hold on to it for long.

I would probably give Elizabeth Taylor the “least appreciated great author” award. At the very least, I know she would be in the running.

[Beverly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Taylor, the writer, not the actor, sets memorable scenes in this story. You remember them. They are the little stories that make up a life. Her characters are real and their internal thoughts are laid bare for us. That being said, this is a meandering story about the staying power of first love which never completely took hold for me.

I liked the characters, especially Harriet, Charles, her husband, and their daughter, Betsy. Vesey, her first love, was harder to like. He vacillated so much. I really hate the young version of Vesey. He could be so rude and obnoxious and unfeeling. Most teenage boys are like that. I didn't understand Harriet's attraction. Vesey and Charles both made fun of and criticised Harriet's stutter, which I found abysmal. I believe the 1950s was not a great time for any disability or difference.

Vesey does feel deeply, but as a typical English gentleman, he can't show it and Harriet shows her feelings too readily. She cries, another thing neither man is comfortable with.

[Antoinette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my third novel by Elizabeth Taylor. Every time I have finished one, I find myself thinking long and hard. What does she want me to take away from this one? What was her inspiration for writing this one? She must have known (maybe herself) someone caught in an unrequited love that consumed them.

Basic synopsis of the book: We meet Harriet and Vesey at age 18, on a beautiful summer day. Harriet develops a major infatuation for Vesey. Does he feel the same or is he just teasing her? He goes off to Oxford and she never hears from him till about 15 years later, he turns up. She is content in her marriage to Charles, but Vesey coming back, stirs up all Harriet’s past feelings. What transpires and how it affects every character in this book is the heart of this book.

I must state that all the characters were unlikeable. I was not rooting for any of them, but yet I followed along in dread. I needed to know how everything would be resolved. Harriet was so vague and wishy washy, I wanted to shake her. Vesey was an unfocused gadabout. Charles was insecure and his insecurities made him lash out. All the secondary characters were meaningful to the plot. I appreciated how Taylor brought this story to a close, albeit, it was a bit vague.

Taylor’s writing is second to none. I often found myself pausing and rereading these perfect sentences:

“ When you are hurt, you lay waste to all around you.. No one is safe.”

“We cannot always remember our first glimpse of those who later become important to us. Feeling that the happening should have been more significant, we strain back through our memories in vain.”

“Our feelings about people change as we grow up: but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I expect you thought: “Vesey wouldn’t have done that.” But an idea can’t ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain.”

This is an author I will return to again and again. If you haven’t read her yet, I wouldn’t start with this one. Start with Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. It is simply her best so far for me.

4.5 Stars.

Published: 1951

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel has several interesting elements, most notably for me, an experiment (as I think of it) in exploring how a teenaged memory of one single day can sustain a love through separation and middle age. I thought Taylor would go in a different direction with the male character of Vesey, though to go in the direction I envisioned might’ve been a cliché. Taylor gets the emotions and thoughts of her characters down perfectly, including the role of the peripheral ones. The main character Harriet’s encounter on a train with a very minor character surprised and rang true.

Through two female characters of different (outward) temperaments, Taylor captures what it’s like to be a teenaged girl and has some interesting things to say about heredity. The teenaged girl of the second section, Betsy, reminded me a little bit of Angel (from Taylor’s novel of the same name) with her obsessiveness. I wouldn’t be surprised if Betsy becomes a writer. She has tons of imagination, mostly to her and others’ detriment, thus having a lot to write about.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is a game which children play in which they creep up to one who is hiding his eyes; step by step, frozen still with innocence at each quick glance they go tentatively forward, until at last they grow close, close to the point of touching.”

I think this might be my second favorite Taylor novel so far, right after Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. They are similar in a way, as they deal with regret, about adjusting to what life has brought us, something not what we expected.

In this story, we meet Harriet, who is infatuated with the aloof and troubled Vesey. Their connection is her mother Lilian and his Aunt Caroline, old friends from their days as suffragettes. Harriet and Vesey are eighteen, and spending a last of many summers together at Caroline’s, where Harriet is paid to help to care for her children, and Vesey is sent to escape his own unreliable mother. They meet again many years later, after Harriet has married and has a teenaged daughter of her own.

Around Harriet and Vesey Taylor gives us a diverse set of characters who are experiencing their own very different regrets, with unexpected layers revealed about each of them. There is a comically real group of ladies Harriet works with in a dress shop, her sadly dull husband Charles, the couples’ closest friends Kitty and Tiny, Charles’ overly-dramatic mother, and their daughter Betsy who is going through obsessions of her own. Each of these characters feels whole and unique, and each provides us ambiguity and surprises.

I think what Taylor is so good at is showing us something we often forget about ourselves and our fellow humans. Her characters are often average and not always likable, just like us. What she uncovers, what we forget sometimes, is the uniqueness, the beauty in the ordinary. These surprises, along with the open-endedness of her characters’ stories, make the reading experience authentic but strangely magical at the same time.

“'There is no one else like me,’ she told herself. ‘I represent no one. I am typical of no one. No one else thinks my thoughts or understands my hopes or shares my guilt. I am both better and worse than I would admit to other people.’”

An odd but curiously moving story from a remarkably talented writer.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars - spoilers below

This morning, sitting at her desk, with the ink dry in her pen, she knew that they had both wept nostalgically for their own youth.

I've seen review after review discuss this as a poignant love story and to some extent it is - but for me this is a book about nostalgia and disappointment, sometimes intergenerational, and about the fantasies that sustain and hearten against the mundane and narrow ordinariness of most lives.

Taylor weaves in subtle intertexts: there are accents - and later name-checks - from Madame Bovary when the stolid and staid Charles enters the book and we shouldn't forget the way Flaubert also used literature in his story. But Taylor is more knowing and smart than to simply duplicate a prior text: her Charles is spotted reading Persuasion at a point when he's concerned that his wife, Harriet, and Vesey might renew their teenage infatuation. And conjuring up Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth shows us how different Harriet and Vesey are: Harriet has certainly been in love with Vesey since she was young but she barely knows him - the boy he was or the man he now is - and he is as much fantasised personification of all her life hasn't been as anything else to her. His feelings are more opaque but his downward spiral - dropping out of Oxford, an 'unsuccessful' war, now playing bit parts in a run-down theatrical troupe and living in grotty bedsit with holey shoes and ragged shirts - is in contrast to Captain Wentworth's successful career. All the same, that scene where Harriet and Vesey tango publicly is a highpoint where we think that some happiness might be scraped back from all the downbeat disappointment - but this is Taylor and we know better than to expect a fairy-tale ending.

It's important, too, to put Harriet and Vesey into the context of what is more of an ensemble novel than I expected from the reviews: Harriet's mother and Vesey's aunt were suffragettes and went to prison together, something which they look back on as their crucial activities in the world. Being middle-aged and now overlooked, seeing the next generation of women, epitomised by Harriet, squander all the advantages their mothers fought for: failure at school exams, a job in a shop, a solid and unexciting marriage and motherhood, causes a strain between Harriet and Lilian, with Harriet always being aware what a disappointment she is to her mother. And Vesey's own mother could have been monstrous in the hands of a less subtle and compassionate author than Taylor with her numerous 'men-friends' and her life-long neglect of her son - though even she is a vague source of something like solace at the end.

This is, after all, a Taylor novel so there are sharp flashes of sardonic humour, especially amongst the hilarious women of the shop where Harriet works as they defiantly spend as little time working as possible, running rings around their underpaying boss, and experimenting with the latest beauty fads (the scene where they try waxing their facial hair for the first time is brilliant - ouch!). There are also wonderful moments of the post-war Dutch au pair being patronised by the cleaning woman for her patchy Engish, and Harriet's daughter, Betsy, asserting she could never fall in love 'with a Negro, or a Chinaman, or an Eskimo', as both look back to a different form of nostalgia in a nationalist myth that, in reality, never existed.

There is disappointment, too, in Charles' business life as his partners (I think) embezzle him or abscond with the money - it's never quite clear and probably doesn't matter except for the effect on Charles. And Betsy's teacher on whom she has a crush is forced to leave her job because she has got too close to her pupil.

So, for me, this is a book about so many different forms of disappointment and nostalgia for various personal pasts that may or may not have existed. It's not just the relationship between Harriet and Vesey which is a perpetual 'game of hide and seek', and people pursue happiness and find it too often obscured and unfindable.

There is an open ending that not everyone will like but I didn't find it ambiguous in my reading of the book - there is no fairy-tale happy ever after ending to be found here. But Taylor's understanding for all these flawed people going about their troubled lives is where the emotional heart of the novel lies for me.

There are perhaps too many side-lines like the Betsy/Miss Bell plot that slightly diluted my response to this, but the combination of Taylor's compassionate empathy together with her gorgeous writing makes this a wonderful addition to her canon.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

A vapid colourless girl from a nice family falls in love at the age of 18 with a boy called Vesey who can’t be bothered with anything, life is such a bore. He has the charisma of a dead water vole, but for Harriet he is the mid 1930s version of Ryan Gosling even though clearly he is destined for a life of mooching about aimlessly. Eventually after some months of bloodless cheek pecking he saunters off stage and becomes a third rate provincial actor and is not seen or heard from for 150 pages. That is the good news but the bad news is we now have to spend all our time with Harriet and the guy she ended up marrying because getting married to the first man that implies you might possibly consider it (they would never do anything as forthright as to ask somebody in this novel) is the very acme of a girl’s aspirations.

So the pallid tedious girl becomes a model Stepford wife and produced a 15 year old daughter who is also something of a drip. Then Vesey the Tiresome oozes back into the plot. He has acquired a turn of phrase, and now says stuff like

"Keep nothing, my dear one. Don’t be a sentimental woman. Have now. This evening. All the rest is a dust laden with threats."

And a page later:

"You justify everything, hallow everything. It doesn’t any longer matter if I cannot pay the rent."

Will Harriet and Vesey finally get together, this is the question. Not something to set you on the edge of your chair. It is like wanting to know the winner of a slug race.

Such a shame! This was the third Elizabeth Tayor novel I read and the first one Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was brilliant, and the second one Angel was a great hoot, and both are highly recommended.

Everyone except me seems to love this one though. It’s a mystery.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A teenage near-romance has the chance of being rekindled twenty years later. Twenty years too late? (This review gives away no more than is in the books's blurb, though the quotes section at the end is a little less subtle.)

It is poignant and painful, occasionally funny, but never sentimental or saccharine. Beautifully written, and it doesn't take the easy options. However, Taylor often introduces new characters or situations as if the reader knows all about them, only filling in the gaps later. Also, there are a few sections that are rather different in tone from the rest of the book, making it feel a little unfinished.

Harriet and Vesey have known each other since childhood, but the book starts between the wars, when they are around 18 and spend much of the summer at the house of his aunt, where Harriet is helping with the children. There is plenty of frisson, but Harriet in particular is naive, and the reader is somewhat in the dark as well. As she remembers a tryst, she reinvents it, whereas Vesey dismisses it because "'we are children.' He did not know that at his age most youths believe that they are men."

This summer makes up the first third of the novel, and teenage awkwardness and doubt is painfully authentic, though it's harder to see why Harriet is so attracted to Vesey when he's oafish, self-centred and lacking in empathy. There is also some pop-psychology about them both being only children, Vesey's mother being a poor parent, and Harriet's suffragette mother being disappointed in her daughter's lack of academic success and ambition. It feels a little out of place, though it does deliver some wonderful insights: Vesey's mother "drew attention to him as if he were a beloved marmoset on a chain, somehow enhancing her own originality, decorating her" so he had "no close friends, for he had too much to hide."

They drift apart. Harriet finally shows a smidgen of initiative and gets a job in a shop (a very comical section, but more caricatured than the rest of the book). She then marries a pleasant enough man and has a daughter, Betsy. When Betsy is in her teens, Vesey comes back into Harriet's life. Their feelings are clearer, but their course of action less so. This takes its toll on her marriage, and this is the finest section of the book (see some of the quotes). Time drags on, with increasing tension, longing, and doubt all round.

The tragic passages are balanced by comedy: in the shop, and then with Harriet's incompetent au pair, "the Dutch girl". In the latter case, the humour is based on misunderstanding, exacerbated by the housekeeper using twee British idioms that she doesn't understand. When wondering why she came, Charles suggests "it's a cheap way of learning how to speak American".

Overall, despite its inconsistent style, this is a beautiful book.


Miscellaneous quotes

* Suffragettes wondering, years later, if it was all worth it or whether "time would not despite them have floated down to them casually what they had almost drowned in struggling to reach." Nearly a wonderful sentence, but actually horribly mangled.

* An adult's irritation at young Vesey "was in in reality impatience with another person's youth heightened by nostalgia for his own."

* A bucolic bus journey: "In those days, trees laced together above many a road; buses took perilous journeys, with twigs scratching at either side; cars, meeting them, backed up into gateways. The bus conductor was like the conductor of an orchestra. He guided the conversation, drew out the shy or bored or tired, linked the passengers together... and made a whole thing out of an assortment."

* When lovers walk, "Time's winged chariot was not a thing that they could hear."

* "Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it."

* "The days shortened, but only technically. The time it took to live them seemed endless."

* Virginity a mixed blessing: "She was left with only her self-respect, which did not seem to mean as much to her as she had been led to believe."

* "What she had dreaded in suspense and embarrassment, she now fastened to. She embraced him with an erratic but extortionate passion. He was profoundly moved, though shocked, by her desperation... But to her, life seemed all at once simplified."

* "The lady of the Manor who looked as if she had been bred in her own stables."

* "Far from fearing middle age, one took refuge in it." I'm not sure about that!

* Being tormented by a cue for jealousy: "It was as if an unkind hand raked up dead leaves in his heart."

* When tension is highest between Harriet and her husband: " Marriage doesn't solve mysteries... It creates and deepens then. The two of them being shut up physically in this dark space, yet locked away for ever from one another, was oppressive."

* "Looking back on her married life, it seemed a frayed, tangled thing made by two strangers."

* "Beyond their familiarity and nakedness they could now sense their true isolation and were more perfectly strange to one another than people passing in the street."

* "Betsy had not so much grown up as unrolled - as if she were all there at the beginning, but that each birthday unrolled more of her, made more visible, though suggesting more."

* A lady's companion "had nothing to sell but her own company, which most people would have paid to avoid"!

* More teen angst: "Nothing was explicable, even to herself. When she wept, it was from confusion. Her ravelled emotions fatigued her. She was overwrought from uncertainty, more than from any specific cause."

* "Dusk, like a sediment, sifted down through bluish sky."

[Emmkay · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a rich read. The plot is simple: Harriet and Vesey have grown up together, she acts as sort of an au pair to his aunt, with whom her mother is best friends. At 18, they are each other's first loves, though that first love is frustrated and they go their separate ways. Many years later, when Harriet is the mother of teenage Betsy and married to the rather older Charles, she and Vesey encounter each other again.

Harriet, Vesey, and Charles are all flawed and trapped - by their personalities, by their pasts, and by convention - and I found them all intermittently irritating but deeply sympathetic, thanks to Taylor's skilled, insightful writing. The supporting characters are interesting too: an amusing group of women working at a gown shop, Charles' self-absorbed former actress mother, a female school teacher on whom Betsy has a crush. It took me some time to fall in as initially I found it a bit elliptical and had trouble following the relationships, but it seemed to go from strength to strength.

Many, many passages I'd like to revisit later, among them:

Of Harriet and her mother, a former suffragette who had high hopes of her daughter's success: "She and Harriet lived uneasily together: they were more intimately placed than suited either. Harriet's failures at school had been a matter of agonised embarrassment for both. Success is always less awkward. It does not make claims upon pity or tact: congratulations are easier to give than condolences. Her mother's timid smile, her way of saying 'It doesn't matter' had the opposite effect to what had been intended. 'I have failed as a daughter, too,' Harriet would think."

"Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We being to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before."

"With their backs to the church, they saw that blue evening had suddenly come down. They thought of fires made up especially for their return; of mothers waiting; of the last crumpet in the dish, porous, soggy with butter; sweet tea; swiss-rolls; the day beautifully shut out."

Of a young Dutch woman: "She thoughts the English were as taken up with the weather as they sounded; not knowing that it was a refuge."

On aging: "False, betraying hearts!...To leave us schoolgirls inside, and to destroy us from without in so many dreadful ways; stiff joints, knotted veins, cushions of fat, ruined bosoms, uncertain teeth...darling, I do know what one feels and with what appalling suddenness it is too late. One moment one is scorning lovesick young men; the next, everything has suddenly gone, young men are lovesick for other women, one is alone, a figure of fun, perhaps. You must take what is offered at the time. I never think infidelity is a thing one ever regrets..."

"...[S]he suffered from a strange caution fostered by her failure at human relationships and a reluctance to be shocked or joked from the neat life she had planned for herself. She was not often at a loss to know how to behave rightly. She had found convention not often at war with her conscience and was brave enough to act according to her conscience if it were. This afternoon, the issue seemed more confused. Her heart and head did not run in unison; her conscience was silent."

"He began to realize that neglect lay deep in him, too deeply to be eradicated now - neglect of his friends (for he had not made the social effort), his life, his love, his body. It was not his nature to be sorry for himself; but he wondered how he had come to make such a wry thing of his life. At school, masters had criticised what they called his attitude. Casting round for an attitude, though, he had found only blankness."

[CanadianReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taylor is at the top of her game in this novel, the love story of Vesey and Harriet, who have known each other since they were children. Harriet is modest, self-effacing, and diffident. Academically untalented in childhood, she is aware early on of being a disappointment to her careworn, widowed mother, Lilian, who was once a suffragette and, unsurprisingly, had big dreams for the girl. Vesey is the restless, troubled, and rather unreliable nephew of Caroline, Lilian’s great friend, also a crusader for women’s rights. He is uncomfortable with vulnerability and tenderness, so any time he demonstrates these towards Harriet, he follows up with sarcasm and even cruelty. The love between the two is real enough, but the character of each prevents any real relationship from forming.

When Vesey goes off to Oxford, Harriet finds work as a shop girl. Ultimately, she marries a much older man, who provides her with a comfortable, middle-class existence. After almost twenty years without contact, Vesey re-enters Harriet’s life. The dutiful, conscientious, and quite conventional woman now finds herself behaving almost as a character in a drama or a novel. She corresponds with Vesey (destroying his letters after having memorized them) and journeys several times by train to London to meet him. Vesey has made little of himself. He’s a third-rate actor, who travels around the country from venue to venue, living in squalid boarding houses, neglecting himself, never getting ahead. Taylor suggests that a lack of parental love is at the root of his troubles.

I found this a much more accomplished novel than Taylor’s earlier works. There are no pontificators here. The characters and the situations—and, yes, the story of a tragically unfulfilled love between two ordinary people, as well—are very well realized.

Rating: 4.5

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Miss Lovelace] and Miss Lazenby gave Harriet a great deal of
conflicting advice, but Miss Brimpton's ruled through both.
Miss Brimpton's bade her turn her back on men: no relationship
in which a woman might stand to a man could but debase her;
she evoked a procession of downtrodden wives, bullied mothers,
cast-off mistresses; the jilted, the enticed, the abandoned; harlots,
doormats, birds in gilded cages. Were not men, she asked all
ungenerous or tyrannical or both, peevish, bestial? They were also
vain-glorious and ugly. They had, she always ended, hairy legs.
There she shuddered. She took up her cup and drank tea slowly,
as if rinsing her mouth.

A Game of Hide and Seek, Elizabeth Taylor's fifth novel, published in 1951, covers a range of characters from the early 1930s through to post WW2 England - 1946/7.

The above quote shows the fun side to Taylor. She often writes 'tongue in cheek'. A long list of detestable men and poor, down-trodden women - are we to take Miss Brimpton seriously? Is this a feminist novel? Maybe - the first chapter tells us about Caroline and Lilian (Vesey and Harriet's mothers) - friends united in the Suffragette movement. But it's also a novel about men - more balanced, I think than the fun version above.

The three women work with Harriet in a gown shop. They are badly paid and over-worked, yet Harriet describes her time with them as very much 'feeling at home'; a reflection on her lack of belonging in her home with her mother, Lilian. Harriet takes the job, at a loose end. She has not done well in her school exams, so there is no chance for her to get a place in a womans' college.

Here's another short paragraph from the fun chapter above.

Their hours were long, so they spared themselves any hard
work, filched what time they could; went up to elevenses at
ten, were often missing while they cut out from paper-patterns,
set their own hair, washed stockings, drank tea. Nothing was
done in their own time that could be done in the firm's. They
were underpaid, so they took what they could; not money in
actual coins, but telephone-calls, stamps, boxes of matches,
soap. They borrowed clothes from stock; later when these were
marked down as soiled, they bought them at the staff-price, a
penny in the shilling discount.

Taylor is a great humourist, and something our group didn't touch on too much. We were all eaten up with the love story between Vesey and Harriet and the over-bearing Charles; the contrasting marriage between Kitty and Tiny and a large and varied cast of minor characters, featuring, predominantly - single women. A reminder I think to both wars, leaving an unbalanced ratio of men to women.

The paragraph above makes me laugh - there were several disastrous jobs I tried where not only myself but others looked for side-benefits, but we certainly didn't wash our stockings or drink tea at 10 a.m. Again, it was something the group missed and not really very surprising. We do tend to read from our 21st century perspective. It's hard to step outside of what we are familiar with. And not surprisingly this also is a major theme in Taylor's book. The fact that we seem to be isolated in our egotistical view of the world. And I don't use this word in a negative connotation; it's hard to step outside of the 'I'.

I think what I particularly liked in our two main characters, is that they stubbornly resist the world's attempts to change them from their 'natural' selves; but in their love story; in their attempts to meet each other, they are both forced outside of what they are comfortable with. Taylor's novel is a great reminder of how love both allows and challenges us to move away from the 'I' of self.

Here is the old crone Julia, retired actress, mother of Charles, and mother-in-law to Harriet - with a very blunt appraisal of Harriet. The quote below also demonstrates Taylor's constantly shifting emphasis on how all her characters have completely different view points.

So you've cut yourself a fringe?" Julia said in a patronising
voice. "It makes you look all eyes."
"But Mrs Jephcott has such beautifully expressive eyes,
" Miss Bastable said.
"Beautiful, perhaps: expressive, no. Expressive eyes, my
dear Miss B., have to express something. Harriet's remind
me of that fairy story- what is it? Bluebeard- 'I see nothing
but the sun making a dust and the grass looking green,."

She lifted her ruined face, her voice sang ominously.
Her hands- a little contorted with rheumatism- looked too
big for her slight wrists; her sleeves fell away from her now
shrunken, blue veined arms. Her gestures were less
impetuous, more tragic, perhaps more beautiful. Her eyes had
a waiting emptiness, which was her imitation of Harriet.
"What could you express, darling? What have
you suffered in your sheltered life? Married out of the
school-room . . .?"

It's strange how Taylor makes her cruel characters a little sad, and beautiful also; but how wrong Julia is about Harriet. Harriet suffers greatly over her affair with Vesey. It's almost as if at this point in the novel Julia is pushing her into this experience.

That also brings us to another theme. Does suffering make us better people? Do we really learn and/or change for the better when we have suffered?

It is Caroline, Harriet's aunt and friend to Lilian, who asks: 'Did going to prison make them better people? Were they better for the suffering they endured'?

And Harriet? Let me finish with this fine example of Harriet suffering. I think Harriet is remarkably strong in her determination to resolve her feelings for Vesey. She needs to know if her feelings exist only in her imagination or will they stand the test of a real person. And poor Vesey, who tries and tires, to be successful according to our cruel world's definition of success. Would Harriet and Vesey be strong enough in their love to be able to deal with the economic demands of the real world - the world of the 40s and 50s?

In this little scene Harriet believes her husband Charles has read the letters between herself and Vesey. She casts her mind back over the previous evening, when she arrives home from a meeting in London, supposedly to the cinema with Miss Lazenby. Harriet presents an innocent front to Charles and to her he also seems to present a very smooth performance. The following morning is when she discovers or thinks she has discovered that he has read her letters.

He was cheerfully busy about the room. He poured
a drink for her. Calm, bland, he asked no questions,
made no enquiries after her, for instance, Miss Lazenby.
He lulled her to bed and there made love to her.

Now, she saw in this, not so much her own distress,
as her knowledge of having been duped; one betrayal
unfolded to reveal another. All her treacheries, her
husband had cynically observed. He watched her- until
she seemed in her own eyes both deluded and
delusive; fallacious; trumpery. No woman, she
felt could have bided her time, as he had.

But we know that Charles has not read the letters - someone else has. I particularly liked this complex unfolding of deceit upon deceit. Harriet has made an assumption - and she suffers for it. I loved the way in which Taylor's novel examines all the multiple ways in which we seek ourselves and yet hide from the truth. Charles is aware of his wife's feelings for Vesey but he doesn't pry into her private life, at least not after the disastrous visit Vesey makes to their home. And Harriet shies away from seeking the truth on this occasion. She doesn't ask Charles if he has read her letters; she prefers to believe that he is manipulative and to use this idea of him to justify her continued meetings with Vesey.

Fabulous writing and a fabulous novel. As one reviewer noted Taylor is at the height of her form and skill.

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading an Elizabeth Taylor novel, one immediately is struck by the economical beauty of her prose.She employs precisely understated, acutely piercing observations that create a panoramic view of middle class post war England. Her characters engage in a dance of innuendo, implication and, occasionally, naïveté. By the end of the journey the reader is immersed in a swirl of emotions and is confronted by a series of questions that transcend a specific time and place.

As the novel opens, we meet eighteen year olds Vesey and Harriet as they play a summertime game of hide and seek with two younger children.This simple childhood game sets the thematic tone of the novel, serving as a metaphor for the ability to obscure oneself and hide both physically and emotionally. While playing this game, Vesey and Helen experience feelings that border between unacknowledged attraction and incipient love. Their youthful fumblings and glances slide away unfulfilled. Both youngsters move on in life while the memory of their encounter remains embedded in each, subtly impacting the arc of their internal core.

Harriet ultimately settles into the conformity of married life,prioritizing security as a buffer against loneliness and misunderstood feelings. Vesey departs for Oxford and then embarks on an acting career that allows him to obscure himself in temporarily assumed personalities, occasionally emerging like a groundhog and then retreating upon glimpsing his true self.

Years later, the lives of our two protagonists again converge and set Vesey, Harriet and her husband Charles on a restrained yet determined course of emotional turbulence that alternates between cycles of self discovery and self delusion.Their dynamic is a subtly depicted triangle laced with inference and conjecture. The author is never pedantic in presenting her characters and their life choices. Instead, she leaves open ended contextual clues that allow the reader to look below the placid surface constraining the characters and experience the complexities percolating underneath.

I read this novel as a journey of two people who are uncomfortable with emotional intimacy. The arc of Harriet and Vesey’s relationship exudes a lingering sense of longing, unverbalized tension and subtly acknowledged passion. Throughout the novel they struggle to either sublimate or acknowledge their desire for the connective intimacy that each is unable to discover elsewhere. By the novel’s denouement, we are left to speculate about the final result of these entanglements. We can, however, rest assured in the knowledge that Elizabeth Taylor is an expert at exploring the interstices of emotional reticence and the resulting repercussions.

[J.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now this is more like it. After having been rather disappointed by "A Wreath of Roses" I felt that this was a top-class novel, subtle and understated. I have mentioned before that when Elizabeth Taylor has included more sensationalist elements (twice, in my experience) I've felt let down, as if she doesn't need to do it, and this novel, without anything of that, is just perfect. Here the passionate transcends the ordinary, which she is so clever in handling; love, fulfilment, are trapped within the bounds of society and human interaction like a bird in a golden cage. No, that's not an appropriate simile, unless the bird is tortured by all that it is missing.
Initially I was wary, but Elizabeth Taylor's pen is a magic one. How else can you start by disliking a character (Vesey) and end up almost loving him? And I felt sorry for Charles, but by the end dreaded his calculated torture of his little bird. It was an interesting analogy that he is shown as either caring for or being intolerant for a kitten!
The plot kept me guessing throughout, especially when a teenager is at work, with her own passions and her imagination. Even the minor characters were believable to me, and are displayed in all their little cruelties or their unsatisfied needs. Is Elizabeth Taylor's message here that love is unable to survive in society, as the blurb indicated when I brought the book up on GR? I am not so sure. The ending turns everything on its head - or does it? Whichever way, I thought it was . . . yes, you've guessed it - perfect!

A selected paragraph:
"That looks are inherited none dispute. Character goes down the years. Temperament is handed on. Genius skips from one generation to another, crops up strangely. That gestures should do so is the strangest of all. More strangely betraying, they are also more miraculous: they hold the significance and wonder of human personality. The way in which a hand is lifted in farewell, may have been learnt, determined, unfolded, in the womb."

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up
For some reason I didn’t connect with this novel in the same way as I have with the other novels by Taylor I have read. The two main protagonists are Harriet and Vesey. They have known each other since childhood and have always had feelings for each other. Their feelings as teenagers are intense and innocent and Taylor is good at highlighting hidden fears, disappointments, griefs and longings that everyone has and then show how odd and absurd it all is. Harriet is shy: so is Vesey, but in a different way and also has a cruel and destructive/self-destructive streak. They lose touch when Vesey goes to Oxford (he doesn’t stay in contact from distance). Harriet marries an older man and has a daughter, safety and security. Vesey drops out of Oxford and becomes an actor. They might again when Harriet’s daughter is fifteen. Feelings are still strong and the second half of the novel is the working out of the situation.
There are plenty of minor characters, some better drawn than others. The portrayal of Harriet’s daughter Betsy is well drawn in its capture of teenage angst, rebelliousness and obsession. Taylor also has a sharp sense of humour as this passage shows. Harriet is young and working in a shop with her co-workers:
“Miss Lovelace removed her chicken broth from the gas-ring so that Miss Lazenby could heat the little pan of wax...
We spread it on and tear it off, ' Miss Brimpton directed.
'Then we'll have the chicken broth,' Miss Lovelace put the pan back on the gas-ring.
'On the upper lip first dear,' Miss Brimpton advised Harriet, 'Slightly downy if I may say so.'
'Anyone else would be insulted,' Miss Lazenby said dreamily. 'I call mine a bloody moustache.'
'Well that's up to you dear, what you call it...'
Harriet obediently spread the melting wax around her mouth.
'I'm doing my beard as well,' Miss Lazenby said recklessly... “
The tenor is set from early on and the story itself is poignant: love which endures but never really works out and the differences between the two are clear:
“Vesey, whose next steps would take him over the threshold of a new and promising world, wished to go without any backward glances or entanglements. He was not one to keep up friendships, never threw out fastening tendrils such as letters or presents or remembrances; was quite unencumbered by all the things which Harriet valued and kept: drawers full of photographs, brochures, programmes, postcards, diaries. He never remembered birthdays or any other anniversary.”
Taylor highlights the mundanities of everyday life, marriage and convention as well:
“When she married Charles, she had seemed to wed also a social order. A convert to it, and to provincial life, and keeping house, she had pursued it fanatically and as if she feared censure. […] But now she flouted what she had helped to create – an illusion of society; an oiling of the wheels which went round but not forwards; conventions which could only exist so long as emotion was in abeyance.”
As always Taylor is very quotable and this is a nuanced novel and it is clear that if Vesey and Harriet had been together that things would not necessarily have been better. In that way it is also rather bleak: but Taylor does insert humour, even about her own trade:
“The novel is practically finished as an art form,” he replied.
“I suppose it is,” said Harriet.
“Virginia Woolf has brought it to the edge of ruin.”
“Yes,” said Harriet.
“But it was inevitable,” he added, laying no blame”
As I said I didn’t connect with this one in the way that I did with A View of the Harbour, but it is an interesting exploration of love and convention.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She was left with only her self respect, which did not seem to mean as much to her as she had been led to believe."

That's why I love Elizabeth Taylor. The quote above is describing a minor character, not one of the principles, but we get a complete picture of everyone who walks on the scene. It's like watching a play, you can see every move in your mind. She knows what motivates people, whether it's noble or base. The novel starts with an innocent flirtation between Harriet and Vesey as teens, then an accidental reunion years later when Harriet is married with a teenager of her own.

I was not fond of any of these characters, Harriet was wishy washy and easily led, Vesey was a horrible teenager and not much better as an adult. Her husband Charles has a cruel streak because of his insecurities, and her daughter Betsy was very naive and immature for a 16 year old. No matter: I needed to know what decisions these people reached, and why, and what happened because of them. Elizabeth Taylor took me there in high style.

This is my 4th or 5th novel of hers, and certainly not my favorite. I wouldn't recommend starting with this one, but still a worthy read for her fans.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

In A Game of Hide and Seek Elizabeth Taylor has created a heartbreakingly poignant love story. Though this is in no way a conventional girl meets boy happy ever after kind of love story. I imagine the story was shaped largely by events in Elizabeth Taylor’s own life – and this shows in the absolutely exquisite writing and what feels for the reader, as an absolute authenticity. Nicola Beauman author of The Other Elizabeth Taylor considers the character of Harriet – along with that of Julia in At Mrs Lippincote’s to be the characters most like Elizabeth Taylor herself. I was also reminded strongly of a short story in The Blush – called Goodbye, Goodbye – in which a man breaks his promise to never see again the woman he had a relationship with years earlier. Maybe there was a little of Elizabeth Taylor in the character of Caroline in that story too.

At eighteen Harriet and Vesey have already known each other for years, his aunt and her mother were great friends, suffragettes once imprisoned together. Vesey is carelessly rebellious – Harriet loves him quietly and nervously. When Vesey goes to Oxford – their lives begin to diverge. Harriet waits anxiously for news of him. Following the death of her mother Harriet marries Charles, older and dependable he provides her with a lovely conventional home, and draws her into a social circle that includes Kitty and Tiny. Vesey is never forgotten by Harriet who only glimpses him only briefly thereafter – until he returns to her when they are both middle aged - he a rather down at heel actor she a mother of a fifteen year old daughter. Harriet finds herself disregarding her marriage in order to see more of Vesey, a situation that Charles and Kitty soon become aware of. The ending in many ways is the right one although inevitably sad - and one I think I will keep thinking about for many days.

Life for Harriet passes by quickly – in the narrative the years speed by – just as in life Suddenly she is middle aged with an almost grown daughter, more than once she wishes she could be young again – that she and Vesey could have their time over.

“If only we were young again!” she said in a tired voice “And might have a second chance”

The daily routines of a conventional wife and mother are brilliantly reproduced. The conversations between Harriet and her daily help Mrs Curzon, the frustrations with her mother in law, the dullness and disappointments of life. These are the preoccupations of many middle class women and Elizabeth Taylor’s view of them is sharp. Even Harriet’s view of foreigners seems so like Elizabeth Taylor’s would have been, rather modern by the standards of the time she absolutely understood how it would feel to be cast adrift in a new country – the confusion and incomprehension of England and it’s ways . Children are done brilliantly as ever – their little observations and worries beautifully observed. Time and again in her writing Elizabeth Taylor shows how wonderfully well she understands children. It is often in these wonderful observations of children and childhood that we see some of the best examples of Elizabeth Taylor’s wonderful wit.

“Deirdre suddenly remembered that she would get infantile paralysis if she ate ice cream that had not been made in her own home.”



Elizabeth Jane Howard considers A Game of Hide and Seek to be probably her best novel – she said as much at the Elizabeth Taylor event in Reading recently – and although there are three I have yet to read – I think I already agree. This is a wonderful novel. What more is there to say?

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally good writing, treading a thin and delicate line without falling into trite cliche or pat romanticism. At the sentence level, her craft is just phenomenal. Certainly the best of hers I have read so far. Highly recommended.

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the ninth novel of Elizabeth Taylor’s I have read. I have 3 more to go (A View of the Harbour; The Wedding Group; In a Summer Season). This was her fifth novel…written 69 years ago. So, it is dated. And I wouldn’t recommend this for someone just coming across Ms. Taylor. I liked it, but not goo-goo-ga-ga over it. I didn’t like the characters all that much…I guess that is why I gave it 3 stars, and the fact that it was dated, and its length (306 pages). Three stars for me. 😊

The two protagonists are Harriet (when we meet her she is 18) and Vesey. They are teen friends and he kisses her and she falls in love with him, and then he leaves for a good long while, during which time she married an older man Charles (he is 35…she is in her early twenties) and they have a daughter Betsy, who is 15 when we meet her. Well, Vesey comes back on the scene after some 20 years, and as they say “love never dies”… The ending is enigmatic…

The likability is not so much in the plot, as nothing much happens. The likability is in Taylor’s writing. As in all novels I have read by her, more is written by Taylor as to what characters are thinking versus what they are saying, and they can be polar opposites.

Some observations:
• Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote the introduction for this Virago Modern Classic in 1985. She also wrote the introduction to another in the Virago series, The Wedding Group. The Introduction she wrote for A Game of Hide and Seek is good. She makes this very astute observation to this novel that I very much liked: “In one sense, there is nothing particularly unusual about Harriet or Vesey, but as Mrs. Taylor presents them, there are no two people exactly like them either. The subtle and seldom dealt with paradox of the ordinary and the original, the universal and the unique is something that this novelist really understands; it could indeed be said to be her hallmark. So many writers strain for original characters, or pose them in the dull and awkward stance of the ordinary man or woman, achieving in either case no more than a series of prototypes that illuminate nothing. We read those books and forget them, much as we forget the innumerable people we encounter in life with whom we have had no communication beyond the exchange of opinions, or facts, or of our habitual emotional responses. Mrs. Taylor presents the reader with the opportunity of suspending judgment, of altering responses, of discovering more than they knew before: reality, after all, - at least in this context – is no more than each of us can believe. One reason that I re-read Elizabeth Taylor’s novels is because she increases my sense of reality.”
• This was funny (to me)…context is a book on how to raise children…”I guess like a Dr. Spock book…”Caroline remembered how she had turned those pages on anxiety and despair. Few of the horrors had happened to her – neither of the children had … pushed beads up its nose.”
• In this sentence, she uses the phrase “a wreath of roses” – this was the title of her 4th novel published 2 years prior to this novel: “Waiting, shivering, for Charles to sort out his keys, she stared before her at the iron knocker – a hand grasping a wreath of roses.”
• She also mentions a conservatory, as she also mentioned in her novel “Angel” (1957), and which figured importantly in her novel “Palladian” (1946).
• She uses the word “meretricious” twice in the novel which forced me to look it up in the dictionary ☹ “tawdrily and falsely attractive” “pretentious, superficial” a second meaning not meant in the context of the sentences I read: of or relating to a prostitute : having the nature of prostitution.
• She used the word “enisled” twice…again to the dictionary I go…"isolate on or as if on an island”

Here are some reviews: https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
From a Goodreads reviewer JacquiWine whose reviews I like very much: https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2016...
A review of both Angel and Hide and Seek: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/bo...

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this book. I came very close to abandoning it several times. I dreaded the thought of reading it, ten or twenty pages at a sitting. It was an emotional roller-coaster. There were moments of agony; there were moments of bliss. But mostly, it was a drudge.

Try as I might, I could not connect with the characters. Try as I might, I could not overcome the unsettling feeling of having been repeatedly dropped by parachute into situations which I did not understand which were peopled by characters that I did not recognize.

So why did I finish it? Because this author, more than 100 years after her birth, is being lauded as one of the greatest authors of her time. Because I was curious. And (as my mother habitually responded to my tiresome-to-her childish curiosity) “just because”.

I believe that this novel was not written to be enjoyed. It portrays a grim slice of middle-class life in mid-20th-century England. With a few changes in dialogue, some different place-names and given names, it could have been middle-class life in mid-20th-century Canada. In fact, it might very well be a slice of life in many cultures in the early 21st century.

As I ponder my discomfort, I begin to realize that I feel strongly about this story because I do recognize these people. I don’t like them, though, these immature, dysfunctional, insecure people. Watching them stumble through their daily life for eighteen years has been painful. Almost as painful as looking back on the immature, dysfunctional, insecure people who populate my own personal history.

Without exception, the characters in this book all had their own unique and exceptional gifts, their own potential which with appropriate nurturing might have blossomed and borne fruit. Sadly, it seems that not one of them had this advantage. They are wounded people, emotionally crippled, victims paralyzed by misunderstandings, poor communication, contemptuous glances, and self-serving schemers. The list of blows is lengthy.

“The sins of the father are visited upon the son.” Likewise, mother and daughter. Both are front and center in this tragic tale. Those who, in mid-life, are stuck at the emotional age of eighteen are neglectfully parenting another generation who will likewise be stuck in adolescence. I weep and gnash my teeth. I can manage no other response.

[shakespeareandspice · Rating 1 out of 5]

I almost died of boredom.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it must be a literary rule that since 1856 every cuckold character must be named Charles. But it is Charles' wife Harriet, not Emma, who says this: I am not the first, or last, woman to fall in love with someone not her husband. And if we're yet too dull to follow, Kitty, Harriet's friend, says this: Think of the consequences. Remember Madame Bovary.

So I was well into this novel and had a real sense of having heard this story before, and not just Gustave's telling. You know the threads: the passive husband; the languid, unfulfilled wife; the other fella, who makes the reader wonder what she sees in him; the misunderstandings; the inchoate stabs at an affair. No one's love-making ever was so deferred as ours!

So I paused, and went back to read the obligatory nyrb Introduction. It did not pretend to be a literary criticism, instead providing insightful biographical details of the author who, it says there, was menaced by marriage, which, as the poet Marianne Moore once wrote, requires all of one's criminal ingenuity to avoid. She did not avoid it, and soon felt maybe Mr. Taylor wasn't quite bohemian enough for her. So she joined the Communist Party and became the lover of some painter. At one point Elizabeth Taylor thought she was pregnant and self-administered quinine in an attempt at abortion. She became violently ill. Thinking she would die, she destroyed the hundreds of letters from her lover. But the painter kept her letters to him, so that's how we know . . . .

. . . . So I returned to the story and, as often happens to me, found Harriet destroying letters from her lover, who said in reply: your letters I keep wrapped up in a paper bag. That changed the read for me, making it a riff on the author's own relationships (and, too, made me realize that the author's Angel had its genesis in the author's own young life).

Whether this story is autobiographical or not, it's a well-worn literary path, for every Emma, Harriet or Elizabeth. Still, as tired as that might be, Taylor always thrills with her purchase of the language. Here, for example:

That looks are inherited none dispute. Character goes down the years. Temperament is handed on. Genius skips from one generation to another, crops up strangely. That gestures do so is strangest of all. More strangely betraying, they are also more miraculous: they hold the significance and the wonder of human personality. The way in which a hand is lifted in farewell, may have been learnt, determined, unfolded, in the womb.

[Zorlon Zorlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Forbidden fruit would be just as boring as the other kind if we ate it all the time."

Harriet and Vesey meet as adolescents, fall in love as near-adults, and spend near-middle age rekindling their proto-love after two decades of virtually no contact (and marriage, kids, etc). The title is apt, since the entire novel constitutes a slow, gamboling chase of two people trapped in not so much a love story as a lost-love story. For all the doom though, Taylor, is hilarious, with wicked little touches and tricksy things and people permeating the lot. In the end, it comes down to people wedding themselves to convention instead of greater, nobler ideals, like love. If you've seen it, it might remind you of the classic film Brief Encounter, which I must always recommend for fans of doomed passion.
Weirdly overlooked, Taylor stands out as one of the greats of just-after-WW2 British fiction.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I enjoyed Elizabeth Taylor's observations of time passing and the amusing and touching scene of a couple trying to part with books for a bazaar but finding them hard to part with ! Lovely cover.

[Resh (The Book Satchel) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Game of hide and Seek is the story of Harriet and Vesey who develop affectionate feelings for one another as children but fate plays a game of hide and seek with their lives.

The novel has very strong character sketches. The reader almost feels as if inside Harriet’s head. As for Vesey, I found myself warming to him as the novel nearly reaches its end. Vesey is always the insensitive fellow, but Taylor explains how or why he is so towards the ending which made me love his character too. Both Harriet and Vesey are victims of misunderstandings, unsaid confessions and unexpressed feelings. Charles (Harriet's husband), who is aware of Harriet’s affections towards Vesey, feels his marriage threatened by Vesey’s presence. Taylor brings out his fears and agony as a husband while contrasting it to the desperation and yearning that Harriet and Vesey feel for each other. The secondary characters are well crafted too.

I found this to be a heart touching read. It is one of my favourite novels now. Highly recommended. For a detailed review visit - http://www.thebooksatchel.com/game-hi...

[Katie Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Elizabeth Taylor, but certainly won't be my last. The way she draws characters, even minor ones, is so outstanding, I hardly cared what was going to happen next.

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK (1951) has a simple plot: Harriet is married to Charles, a rather dull but kind man. One day Vesey, her first love, reappears after after 15 years of absence. They have known each other since childhood, when they fell in love. Then Vesey left to study at Oxford and Harriet stayed at home, pining for silent, absent, insensitive Vesey. When she met Charles, a well established solicitor who proposed to her, she married him and became the perfect housewife.

Vesey is now a struggling actor who works for small second-rate theatre productions. Harriet has a settled, comfortable life and is the mother of a fifteen year old girl. Despite her best efforts, Harriet's life becomes completely disrupted.

A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK is a melancholy story about stifled middle class lives filled with sadness, regrets and disappointments. This novel is a brilliant example of psychological realism; Taylor's prose is subtle, precise, her representation of her character's inner lives is shrewd and poignant. It's a good thing that her work is now gaining the recognition it deserves.