Novel
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Elizabeth Taylor · 1971
Synopsis
Mrs Palfrey, recently widowed, arrives on a rainy Sunday in January at the Claremont, a hotel in South Kensington where a few elderly people live permanently, feed on gossip and watch for the visits each one receives. She has announced a grandson, Desmond, who works at the British Museum and is slow to come. One day she falls in the street, and a penniless young man, who is writing a novel in a basement, brings her into his home. She invites him to dinner, and asks him to let himself be taken for the one she was expecting.
Context
The novel appeared in 1971 from Chatto & Windus and was shortlisted for the leading British prize for fiction; in the first round of deliberations, Saul Bellow judged it one of those little things in which the teacups clink, and, according to the chairman of the jury, this counted against it. The prize went to V. S. Naipaul. Reissues by a feminist publisher brought the book back into bookshops, in 1982 and then in 2016, and it was translated into Spanish in 2025.
Who it is for
About two hundred pages; only one French translation, by Nicole Tisserand, since 1991.
Prizes and reception
Selected by Robert McCrum in his list of the hundred best novels in English, published by The Guardian in 2015.
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