(I’m sure you can guess what happens later in the book.) Palfrey just appreciates the young Ludo’s kindness while he sees in her a potential muse for his fiction, that drifts into comic territory when she introduces him to her new neighbors at the Claremont as her grandson, Desmond, who really exists but has yet to bother to visit her. The two strike up an immediate friendship, as Mrs. Palfrey slips and falls outside the home of Ludo Myers, a would-be writer who spends his days at Harrod’s trying to work on a novel, and who runs out to help her. One day, while walking to pick up a library book for another resident, Mrs. Since the residents are all on the older side, that group will change over the course of the novel, naturally, and the tenor of life in the building (especially in the dining room, the center of most activity) will also shift slightly with each alteration in its makeup. Palfrey moves into the Claremont at the beginning of the novel and meets the cast of eccentrics – the busybodies, the would-be lothario, the lonesome, the creep – who populate it. Taylor rather deftly creates two parallel narratives around her protagonist and then spins them together to evoke comedy from the intersection. (It was adapted into a movie in 2005, but I’ve never seen it and hadn’t heard of it till now.) Palfrey at the Claremont, a sweet but unsentimental look at a widow’s move into a long-term hotel that attracted a number of retirees, forming the early equivalent of today’s over-55 communities, and the odd friendship she strikes up with a local writer. Regardless, she did make that top 100 with her wry comic novel Mrs. I imagine her chagrin at having a world-famous actress (and one who provoked many tabloid headlines) share her name, although perhaps it also pulled some readers toward her books when browsing store shelves.

I had no idea there was a British author named Elizabeth Taylor, apparently of some repute in the UK, until I saw the name pop up on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written about ten years ago, and even then knew little about her beyond the Wikipedia entry.

Mrs palfrey at the claremont book