📚'Rather Dated' May: Elizabeth Taylor's 'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont'📚

[MotherofPearl]

Link to main thread:

📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚 www.mumsnet.com/Talk/whatweree_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join

Place-marking! Thanks MotherofPearl!
I'll start this today. * *

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' book club. This month we are reading Elizabeth Taylor's 'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont'. Please do add your thoughts when you are ready.

About the threads:

We are reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day. We are reading one book a month. Spoilers are permitted!

We started the chat thanks to a thread where we kicked off with a discussion of Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield.

Currently we have these separate threads:
November: Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
December: Margaret Drabble: A Summer Bird-Cage
January: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
March: Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
April: R.C. Sheriff, The Fortnight in September.

Overall this felt like a sad story - Mrs Palfrey's loneliness (and that of many of the other hotel residents), and her attempt to save face with the ruse of passing Ludo off as her nephew, all felt quite painfully tragic. At the same time, it felt that there was a genuine connection between her and Ludo, and this was in sharp contrast to her relationship with her daughter and her real nephew, where there seemed little affection on either side.

I veered between finding the dated world of the genteel but slightly down-at-heel residential hotel appealingly nostalgic, and completely repellent (the food!). There were certainly some dated details, including the references to the "Ching-chong" from the awful Mrs de Salis, and the "Eye-tie" comment from Mr Osmond. I felt Mr Osmond was truly dreadful, and Mrs Palfrey dealt with him admirably.

I'll be interested to hear what others think of the novel. I read it earlier in April and so my responses are already fading! I know I raced through it, and that I found the ending a bit of a surprise.

I finished it last night so it’s still very fresh in my mind. I loved it, but it’s so very unsparing about being old, being dependent, being lonely. The genius of Elizabeth Taylor is her ability to find humour and pathos in the blackest of situations, I think.

I heard a review of it on ‘A Good Read’ which I think rather misrepresents it…this was before I’d read it, and the two guests made a big deal of the humour and cackled away - it was left to Harriett Gilbert to point out the almost unbearable poignancy of it.

I wanted to scoop Mrs Palfrey up and take her home with me.

That's interesting @Terpsichore. There are comic moments, but I agree that the best word for the book is poignant. I still really enjoyed it, and felt that the emotional tenor really resonated with me.

I read this back at the beginning of February so can’t remember all the details, but I really enjoyed it. I felt very sorry for Mrs Palfrey and all the other people who had just been left to live out their lives in an impersonal hotel. Does this still happen now? I’m not aware of it as a ‘thing’ now but it seems to crop up quite often in older books, TV programmes etc. I remember in Fawlty Towers there was the Major and the two elderly ladies who lived there all the time and that was in the 1970s.

I really enjoyed it. I had read it years ago but had completely forgotten the ending. I agree about the poignancy. Other things I thought about:

1. contrast between Mrs Palfrey and her daughter re their attitudes to being “abroad”. Her daughter had fully embraced being Scottish whereas Mrs Palfrey said she never felt more English than when abroad.
2. was relationship between them affected by the fact that presumably the daughter had been sent away to school while they were abroad?
3. Relationship between loneliness and poverty especially regarding Ludo.
4. Difficulty of being surviving spouse after a long marriage.

Lots more thoughts but don’t want to go on.

This was definitely my least favourite all the "rather dated" books so far. From the blurb I was expecting something nostalgic and heartwarming but I found the subject matter depressing and the characters unlikable. I didn't feel the author had any real affection for them either, although I appreciated her observational skill. I was expecting a great friendship to develop between Mrs Palfrey and Ludo, but it seemed like he didn't like her very much and was mainly just using her as material for his novel. The relationship between Ludo and Rosie didn't make any sense to me either, although I wondered if it was intended to mirror Ludo's relationship with Mrs P - he genuinely liked Rosie but she was just using him as a means to an end.

Like others I was interested in the social phenomenon of older people choosing to live permanently in hotels. That seemed to be a thing in Someone at a Distance as well. I wonder when it stopped happening and why.

I think the hotel thing was the very last gasp of the hangover from the era of 'distressed gentlefolk', when it was expected that elderly people of a certain class and upbringing didn’t live by themselves and - horrors - do their own cooking and housework. One had 'people' to do that sort of thing, or had done so in one's former life.

There's a great book by Mollie Panter-Downes called One Fine Day (which would be a good candidate for the RDBC!) that pins down exactly the phenomenon of women just post-war, having to grapple with not having servants any more. The main character has to pitch in and do the cooking and washing-up, and can see that this is the future, but her husband is baffled and outraged by it - they’ve spent their whole lives assuming someone else does those things, and it’s a massive shift to get their heads round.

A hotel that was cheap enough to allow you to live on the meagre interest from your capital seemed a solution that would enable elderly people of that class to retain their perceived dignity and status - except of course it didn’t; they knew it and everyone else knew it. But - ‘keeping up appearances' was all.

Plus, the idea of living with or near your adult children was also less of a thing than now. Mrs Palfrey's awful daughter had zero interest in her, but as readytostartagain says, she’d almost certainly have been sent back home to school as a fairly young child so they probably didn’t have much of a functioning mother-daughter relationship.

The novel was published in 1971 and I’d guess those hotels with their ‘favourable terms' were very much on their last legs around then. Corporate chains would surely have been the final hammer-blow for them.

Sorry for the essay!

That’s really interesting, @Terpsichore , about the context for older people living in hotels in reduced circumstances. And yes of course, the Twitter ladies and the Major in Fawlty Towers were of the same ilk. I’m a bit too sleepy now to do justice to my thoughts about the book, which I adored, so I will do it tomorrow.

Should say twittery not Twitter … damn autocorrect

Elizabeth Taylor is a genius writer I think, and part of her genius is being able to writing amusingly about terribly sad things, without it becoming embarrassing or awkward or cruel. Overall, the book is sad. It is unsparing about the loneliness of growing old in a world where no one, not even your relatives, have much time for you. The ladies at the Claremont were depicted so well, you could instantly tell them apart (I struggled with all the different nuns when we read Black Narcissus). Ludo was selfish, only concerned about mining Mrs Palfrey for amusing details to add to his (presumably unreadable) novel, and getting together with Rosie. His sad cold flat, and the terrible food at the hotel, and the fact it was nearly always raining, meant the overall tenor of the book was downbeat. However, there are some really funny episodes, I loved the party at Mrs De Salis’s flat, with Aunt Bunty and “Fay Sylvester”, and I Laughed out loud when Lady Swayne calls herself poor little me, and ET says she was at least five foot ten and with shoulders like a bison. I believe Mrs P was shortlisted for the ?Booker prize, but one of the judges said there was too much of the tinkle of teacups in it. I think this is a silly criticism, because to write movingly and cleverly about the tragedy contained within the ordinary is a remarkable achievement in my view. Absolutely loved it, but I knew I would because I really like Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm really enjoying reading everyone's comments.

"The tinkle of teacups" criticism sounds exactly the sort of thing that could only be levelled at novels perceived to be 'women's fiction'. Why shouldn't the domestic and small-scale be the setting for powerful human stories? I agree that ET really excels at this, @StellaOlivetti.

I'd be glad to read One Fine Day as one of our RDBC novels, @Terpsichore. The personal and domestic really is political, as of course all women already know.

Gosh. Saul Bellow and John Fowles were on the jury for the Booker that year (1971, plus Antonia Fraser. VS Naipaul won it - could there be anyone, writer or person, more unlike Elizabeth Taylor? But there was controversy even so, with Bellow letting slip that they’d given the prize to ‘the best writer, but not the best book’. However, it was also Bellow who made the ‘tinkling of teacups’ remark so yes, that says it all, doesn’t it?

@Terpsichore that’s really interesting, thanks for explaining. I’m not from the UK and find the social history very interesting.

I read this last year and really enjoyed it but I agree that it's very sad. I loved this quote: "I must not wish my life away, she told herself; but she knew that, as she got older, she looked at her watch more often, and that it was always earlier than she thought it would be. When she was young, it had always been later". I find it so poignant.

I wrote that quote down too, @Fiftyisthenewsixty . So sad, and I knew exactly what she meant.

I've just finished it. Gosh, poor Mrs Palfrey. Such a sad ending. She seemed to become more and more frail as the story drew to a close, so it wasn't really a big surprise, although it came quickly. I'm glad she kept her indomitable spirit to the last.

I liked the book although it was an uncomfortable read at times, mainly because the author conveyed the difficulties of old age so well; the loneliness, the boredom, the dependence on others, the fatigue, the niggling aches and pains and serious illness. I liked the humorous touches ('what is plonk?'), but it felt bleak and there weren't too many likeable characters to relieve the dark mood. In fact, Mrs Palfrey was the only likeable character in it and I think we liked her because we felt sorry for her. Ludo redeemed himself somewhat when he returned the money, but I disliked him as soon as he started writing the unflattering note on Mrs Palfrey following her first fall. I'm not so sure that they had a real connection.

I was looking forward to reading your comments and I was tempted, but held off until I read finished reading. Good observation, Chessie, about the Major and the two ladies at Fawlty Towers who were long-term residents. I used to find it fascinating that they lived in a hotel, albeit a very chaotic one! Terpsichore's comment on the 'distressed gentlefolk' is very interesting too. I hadn't thought about it, but it makes sense. They were ill-equipped to manage the challenges of an independent life. Unable and perhaps unwilling too? The Claremont was a kind of refuge for them. I also agree that 'poignant' describes the book very well and it certainly isn't a heart-warming book either. Stella's observation that the genius of the book lies in the very clever way of describing the tragedy within the ordinary sums it up so well for me too.

Just finished and loved it.

I am just old enough to remember hotels full of elderly gentlefolk living out their last years - when I was a very little girl in the early 60s my grandfather lived in one, and I was made a great fuss of by old ladies when we visited (one gave me a Lindt chocolate bunny every visit which was an unimaginable luxury). He would have been born in the 1880/90s and was widowed in his late 60s; he would not have had the faintest idea how to cook a meal or wash clothes when my grandmother died.

Personally I think a nice hotel would be a great improvement on the enabled isolation so many elderly people live in nowadays, but completely unaffordable at today’s prices.

I loved the contrasts - the massive effort put into keeping up appearances vs the indignity of incontinence, unbuttoned flies and eking out funds. The enforced togetherness vs the desperate loneliness. The humour vs the sadness.

What’s next???

I enjoyed your recollections, LadyGardener. That's fascinating. I would say the old folk enjoyed watchihg the other guests at the hotel and all the comings and goings. I wonder how they managed laundry. Perhaps the hotel arranged to have it sent out.

I’m sure they did, @FuzzyCaoraDhubh, or they did it in-house. Different areas of London were known for specialising in laundry. I used to live in a part of West London that was once known as ‘Soapsud Island’ because of the huge number of laundries there - though that was earlier, in the late 19th/early 20thc. Another thing that’s pretty much totally vanished. Who even remembers laundry-marks nowadays, which used to be the way you could be sure all your clothes came back after they were sent out to be washed?

I had no idea, @Terpsichore . 'Soapsud Island', I love it. I've no idea what laundry marks are at all. I used to use a 'laverie' in France as a student. Inserting coins into the machine, going away and hoping your clothes were still there when you came back :)

I’m straying way off topic here Fuzzy, but it’s an interesting by-way - to me, anyway! Here’s a good little blog about laundry-marks.

That's fascinating, Terpsichore. I'll read it properly over lunch :)* *

Our next book is Margaret Kennedy's 'The Feast'.

After that I'd be happy to go with the suggestion upthread for Mollie Panter-Downes' 'One Fine Day.'

I'm thoroughly enjoying reading everyone's comments.