“Ultimately, for Seldes, the most important legacy of the ‘fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks’ is their anti-materialism (we would now say ‘anti-capitalism’). ‘Something was needed to break down the monotony of an exceptionally materialistic existence,’ he says of the popularity of the Second Great Awakening. It was the ‘American radical’—’crackbrained or perverse as he was’—who most vehemently refused the culture of ‘make-money,’ and committed himself to seeking out alternatives. ‘In a society peculiarly preoccupied with things, he held to ideas,’ writes Seldes. When the gospel of ‘the spade, the rifle, and the steam-engine,’ threatened domination, the radical held onto his contemplative indolence.”

Kingsley Amis, who did more than anyone to undo her wallpapered-parlor image through a series of powerfully worded, almost angry reviews during her lifetime, still wrote defensively after her death in 1975 that Taylor’s ‘deeply unsensational style and subject-matter saw to it that, in life, she never received her due as one of the best English novelists born in this century. I hope she will in the future.’ By 1986, Anita Brookner was noting: ‘it is time that justice was done to Elizabeth Taylor, the Jane Austen of the 1950s and 1960s, a writer so beautifully modest that few have taken up the cudgels on her behalf.’