📚'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

Thank you, MotherofPearl. I'm enjoying it every month.* *

There's a film of the book which is much more upbeat, with Ludo and Mrs Palfrey having a very strong connection.

I've not started The Feast yet, but have just read the foreword - by Cathy Rentzenbrink - to the edition I bought. Of Margaret Kennedy's writing she comments: "satisfyingly granular details of daily life coexist with a brutal ability to face unpleasant truths about humanity", and I feel this applies equally aptly to Elizabeth Taylor's writing.

😱I've got ahead of myself and just finished The Feast! Will have to go back and do some from last year that I missed; I'm hooked!

I've just finished Mrs Palfrey and I did enjoy it. The little descriptions of interractions and the awkwardnesses made the characters come to life. I was worried for Mrs Palfrey getting found out in her grandson deception but then annoyed with the ending when no one really did find out. I felt they should have as to give a twist, but maybe the ending was more realistic. We don't always get the ending we want in books as with life. The ending was sad, but expected in a way. It does give insight into the loneliness of being elderly.

Dh and I once stayed in a funny hotel in Sidmouth, must have been the 1990s. Some of the rooms were given over to residents I remember.

There's a lot of back and forth in Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh where the owners of a residential hotel are trying to get rid of Guy Crouchback's elderly father because they can make more money from non residential guests in wartime. Which paints another vivid picture of this existence.

Of course , famously, Margaret Thatcher spent her final years in a suite at the Ritz Hotel. Can't imagine that was very similar to The Claremont.