Seen from afar, the lighthouse merely struck deft blows at the darkness, but to anyone standing under the shelter of its whitewashed walls a deeper sense of mystery was invoked: the light remained longer, it seemed, and spread wider, indicating greater ranges of darkness and deeper wonders hidden in that darkness.

Views are a great subject for a novel, because they are always already metaphorical. “After all,” comments Will Ladislaw to his artist friend Naumann in Middlemarch, “the true seeing is within.” “I have a view, I have a view!” exclaims Mr. Emerson in A Room with a View; then, “This is my son; his name’s George. He has a view too.” What they see is not just Florence but “courage and love.”

Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour (1947) also makes the most of the literary slippages possible between literal and metaphorical views. On one level it is a novel about people who share a particular view, looking out across a small harbour where the waves slap against the shore, and against the sides of the fishing trawlers that come and go. Their homes, shops, and businesses, in their turn, are the view for the men on those boats.

A View of the Harbour is very much about this setting: the literal view of the harbour is the surface of the novel, though Taylor’s rendering of it is anything but superficial. A View of the Harbour is set just after the war, and the war’s effects permeate the town and the lives of its residents in many ways, from the fragments of sunken wrecks that the fishermen’s nets dredge up, to the lost loved ones whose absences stunt the lives of their survivors. There’s an air of stoic shabbiness about the whole place, too, a kind of worn out fortitude. “When I was young it was so different,” says Tory Foyle, now a divorcée delicately balancing her bitterness against her ex-husband against her infatuation with her best friend’s husband:

Or, to look back upon, it was–a perpetual summer, like all those plays with young men in blazers coming through french windows–so many of them and all the same. It always seemed to be the week-end.

Within a few pages of the novel, Taylor has deftly introduced us to a cluster of the small town’s residents, including Tory and her novelist friend Beth Cazabon, and set in motion the small movements that over the course of the novel will gather intensity until by the end they crest and break, their energy dissipating, like the waves. Moving among them is one outsider, Bertram Hemingway, a visiting would-be artist who gradually moves from observing to participating in the subtle human dramas unfolding around him. Watching over them is Mrs Bracey, once a key player in the town but now an invalid whose acidity is somewhat tempered when she decides to have her bed relocated upstairs. From there she will once again be able to look out over the harbour “which had been a grey and white, remembered, half-imagined scene for so long”:

She wanted to watch the great dappled waves riding in to the foot of the cliffs, breaking and crumbling and scurrying back in confusion, to be conscious of the pulse of the lighthouse, to see once more visitors with folded raincoats stepping into rowing boats named Nancy or Marigold or Adeline; the moving water, the sauntering people, the changing sky, the wrinkled moonlight on the sea, and fishermen, coming out of the anchor on Saturday nights, standing round the lamp-post singing Sweet Genevieve.

She does see the scenery again, but the scenes of greater interest to her prurient curiosity are those played out by people she knows. And she’s not the only one watching from a window–or looking towards a window, including hers. As Sarah Waters remarks in her introduction to my Virago edition, “Taylor’s fascination here is with the perils and the pleasures of perspective. This is a novel in which people watch each other.”

A View of the Harbour is intricately constructed, all of its interconnected stories moving a little piece at a time, paths crossing, perspectives changing, the lights brightening or fading as the characters move in and out of the foreground. It is easy to imagine many of the incidents as framed tableaux, caught by an artist’s eye so that a moment of intimacy takes on the character of a broader revelation. Unsurprisingly, it’s often Bertram, the designated artist, who makes this potential explicit:

He sat on the edge of his bed and imagined the picture he was going to paint–the harbour buildings seen across the harbour water, the crumbling texture of plastered walls, the roofs of purple, of grey-blue, the grey church on the shoulders of the other buildings, the green weed on steps and the sides of the harbour-wall, silk-fine and damp like the hair of the newly-born–all the different surfaces and substances, the true being of it coming luminously through the essence of such a scene.

He is not a very good painter; perhaps, Taylor seems to suggest, and he himself seems to realize, his artistic deficiency is, paradoxically, what makes him such a good observer–or perhaps it’s that he is too nice a man to ignore what he sees around him, and thus he lacks the self-absorption necessary for greatness. He takes an interest in real people, and thus cannot achieve the sublime perspective needed to transcend their ordinariness, or their commonplace surroundings, and raise them to the level of art. Bertram is probably a better man for it, but his paintings are not worth much except as mementos of time passed.

An interesting complement to Bertram is Beth Cazabon, who is often so lost in the lives of her characters that she struggles to stay connected to the lives of her children, or her husband–which is a blessing insofar as she remains oblivious to his infidelity. Beth (and thus also, by implication, Taylor) is only too aware that this preoccupation with fiction is not altogether to the benefit of the author or her real-life friends and family, and that it also may mean little to posterity–Beth has no pretensions about the lasting value of her work. “I’m not a great writer,” she reflects;

Whatever I do someone else has always done it before, and better. In ten years’ time no one will remember this book, the libraries will have sold off all their grubby copies of it second-hand and the rest will have fallen to pieces, gone to dust. And, even if I were one of the great ones, who, in the long run, cares? People walk about the streets and it is all the same to them if the novels of Henry James were never written. They could not easily care less. No one asks us to write. If we stop, who will implore us to go on? The only goodness that will ever come out of it is surely this moment now, wondering if “vague” will do better than “faint,” or “faint” than “vague,” and what to follow; putting one word alongside another, like matching silks, a sort of game.

It seems at once ironic and apt, then, that the greatest pleasures of this novel are due to its novelist, to her uncannily precise choice of words and her ability to place them alongside each other so that they constantly delight and surprise. She shows us these commonplace people and their straggling lives–and also their landscape, with its roughness and its manmade debris but also its timeless beauty–with paradoxically ruthless grace.

I can’t take any credit for interpreting Elizabeth Taylor’s strange, gloomily elegant Palladian as a pastiche of Austen and Brontë. Not only does the back cover of my Virago edition baldly state that the novel “examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jane Eyre” and explicitly compare Taylor’s method here to Austen’s in Northanger Abbey, but the main character is named “Cassandra Dashwood” and criticizes her own flustered greeting to her new employer on the grounds that “Jane Eyre had answered up better than that to her Mr. Rochester.” Subtlety about its intertextuality, in other words, is not the most striking feature of Palladian … and yet what do we really know about the novel once we’ve identified those obvious connections? I’m not sure that thinking of it as a twist on the “governess novel” — or on the romance, or the gothic, plot — helps me out very much, because we still need to figure out to what ends Taylor has repurposed such familiar materials.

Having just worked through Jane Eyre with my 19th-Century Fiction class, I should be primed to consider what Taylor is up to. There’s not actually much that’s the same besides the bare outline: unprepossessing orphan accepts governess position at remote, slightly creepy country house, falls in love, endures trauma that threatens happy resolution, ends up safely married. Cassandra couldn’t be less like passionate, rebellious, creative, principled Jane, for one thing: while I lament the number of times my students (despite explicit instructions not to use the word!) called Jane “relatable,” I agree that it’s hard not to root for her — even as her novel (through her own retrospective narration) cautions us not to champion her uncritically. Cassandra, on the other hand, is a limp wanna-be, moping and hoping to live out a more interesting destiny, like a good fictional heroine. “He will do to fall in love with,” she thinks on meeting Marion Vanbrugh; “Meeting him,” she reflects later, “had merely confirmed her intention, made possible what she had hoped.” Jane is a fighter; she spends her book learning what she values most and how to stand up for it. Cassandra spends her book … hmm. Well, she spends it being in it, anyway, but that’s about as much as can be said for her.

Marion is an equally pallid recreation of Mr. Rochester: reclusive, scholarly, haunted not by a raging mad wife in his attic but by memories of his beautiful first wife, Violet. Why does he fall in love with Cassandra? Is that even what happens? Like Cassandra, he seems compelled by his implicit awareness of how their story must turn out. There’s no spark, no passion. Like Jane and Rochester, they kiss as a storm thunders, but while Brontë’s lightning, splitting the great chestnut tree, reflects the dangerous immensity of their love, it just seems ironic that nature surrounds limp Marion and passive Cassandra with such tumult:

Still holding the candles high, he drew her closer to him and kissed her. She received his kiss, but did not return it, for she did not know how, nor did it occur to her, so netted up in bliss was she, so content to be held by him not stirring, heedless of the next day and the next minute.

In their world, it seems that the most they can hope for is to go through the motions.

And even that isn’t easy, partly because they aren’t the only people there, and everyone else gets in their way somehow. Taylor populates her desolate manor with an assortment of characters, all in their own ways damaged or grieving, their paths day-to-day criss-crossing in an uneven pattern of tension and disappointment: Tom, holding the sins and regrets of his past at bay with drink; Margaret, awaiting the birth of her child, wandering the musty hallways hungry, always hungry; their fretful mother Tinty, always “full of little worries”; Nanny, grimly hanging on to her position in the family; little Sophy, the unknowing crux of the family’s unhappy plot; Mrs. Veal at the pub, pathetically needy for Tom’s attention and affection, resentfully in awe of the family at the ‘Big House.’ Only Margaret, a doctor, has any sense of purpose in her life; the rest of them seem cut off, somehow, not just literally by their isolated setting but mentally, from a world in which they can’t imagine, or find, direction or comfort. While the ending of Jane Eyre brings Jane to the end of her journey of self-discovery, nobody in Palladian gets anywhere. When Cassandra returns to the manor as its mistress, it is more decrepit than it was before.

It’s not an arch or satirical rewriting of those canonical stories: it is too fraught and specific for that. Paul Bailey’s introduction proposes that Taylor sets up the literary homage deliberately to collide with “that other, larger world out there, in which hurt and humiliation take their daily toll.” But he concludes that the result is “a fairy-story of sorts, with a happy ending for only two of its participants.” I’m not convinced, because I don’t believe in their happiness: it seems so baseless, so formulaic, so unearned. The prospect of the book seems more desolate to me even than that limited a fairy-story. When Cassandra arrives at Cropthorpe Manor, she’s warned to stay away from the greenhouse, as the glass panes have become precarious. Near the end of the novel, it has collapsed:

Like a cataract gathering speed, the sheets of cracked and splintered glass had come down a night or two ago, started by some small thing, something never to be known, a twig falling, an owl flying, or merely the last imperceptible change of quantity, a foreshadowing of what might happen to the house itself, how, after a long process of decay, one day it would suddenly not be a house any more.

Marion and Cassandra, married, go out to survey the wreckage and consider repairs: could this be an image of the future, a symbol of renewed possibilities? Why should we be so optimistic? “Marion wonders what can be done with it,” says Tinty, watching from the house. “He will never get beyond wondering,” replies Tom.

No, the pleasures of Palladian are not emotional, or not in an uplifting way. There are no romantic gratifications, beyond the artificial ones of seeing the cliché carried to its conclusion. There’s no social analysis or critique that I can discern — unless you count the general presentation of modern life as a malaise, a blight. What’s left? Literary pleasures, of course, or perhaps I should call them aesthetic ones. Palladian is only Taylor’s second novel (and it’s only the fourth of hers that I’ve read), and it’s just as distinctive as the others for its direct yet resonant sentences. They carry a moment, a mood, a mind, with few overt flourishes but many interesting choices, so that you read them once and then look again, to be sure, or to appreciate.  She’s particularly good at laying out how what seems simple — love, marriage — is actually unbearably complicated:

His head felt as if someone were doing knitting in it. Nothing was simple. He believed that he loved Cassandra tenderly; but marriage is not simple. It brought with it, Nanny had reminded him, so many complications which were beyond his energies. Tinty stood before him, and Tom, Nanny with her talk of refrigerators and change, the thought of beginning a new life in that fast-crumbling house, of leaving a smouldering and rank corner of earth to sons, perhaps, and then engaging servants, spending money, laying down wine, planting and clearing. In the library last night, no one, nothing, had stood between him and Cassandra. Now so much interposed. She was a child merely, to be led into so dark, so lonely, a wilderness as his heart. For her, so much unravelling of people, so much sorting out of possessions would have to be done. He might draw her to him and ease the passion which lay under her silence, lead her into the circle of ice which encompassed him: but the obstacles were still outside, where the world was, and even within him, there was Violet.