The truth about aging is a subject we want to avoid. Elizabeth Taylor confronts the truth with sensitivity and honesty, stripping away the platitudes about the golden years and showing us the reality of life for an older person in contemporary Western society. The individual is rendered meaningless the more they are removed from the family group, and even when included there’s a sense of alienation. In spare sentences without false emotion, Taylor gives us a heart-wrenching picture of Mrs. Palfrey, a woman doing her best to keep her dignity. The writing has a vibrant eloquence, and was a joy to read.

Taylor deftly portrays Mrs. Palfrey as tough in a British stiff-upper-lip way. She refuses to be isolated, and seeks friendship, with mixed results, as others her age are totted off to nursing homes or live in their daydreams. Her one success is the relationship with a young man who goes along with the lie that he is her nephew. He does this in exchange for the material he finds for a book he’s writing, but not entirely one suspects, as his own relationships are unstable. She goes along as well since refuting it would cause more consternation and she’s able to at least have a relationship. It’s her refusal to go quietly that causes her to fall, quite literally. Is it better to sit and wait for death, or to die rushing to meet someone, to do something? This is a question all who live to a ripe old age will ask themselves.

This book was recommended by the WALL STREET JOURNAL for books for readers who like the heroine to be above 50.

Mrs. Palfrey is an endearing character.

She joins an eccentric mix of characters at the Claremont, a hotel for retired folks and tourists.

Mrs. Palfrey is a widow and needs to make friends and create a new life for herself. How she does that is the plot in this book.

If you are a tad depressed about being older, or are a caregiver, you may find this too melancholy for your taste.

I enjoyed the writing and characters, but found it a trifle sad.

I watched the movie twice and then decided to read the book. This story is a gem. I felt the movie was a little more heartfelt. I cried several times. The love of the psuedo grandson Ludo was so real and poignant. However, the book was also wonderful. I read it in about a day and felt I was also at the Claremont talking with friends and fighting off loneliness. This is a book that will stay with me for a long time. The characters were 3 dimensional and real and I came to love Mrs. Palfrey. One of my favorite stories of all time. If you haven't seen the movie, please do. It was a little happier than the book and the acting was phenomenal.

Though nicely written I found the tale rather dreary. Others in my book club enjoyed it, so it strikes readers differently. Getting on in years myself, I found the tale of a bunch of elderly English folks - mostly women - living in a 'residential hotel' alarming, their loneliness evident and their situation dire. I am trying to keep in touch with reality and plan for my declining years before they hit.

In terms of sheer craftsmanship alone this little novel is a masterpiece--there hardly seems to be a word out of place. But what really distinguishes it is its sophisticated and yet almost oblique take on the many varieties of love. Elizabeth Taylor's setting is a small hotel in London which caters not only to visiting tourists but also to a small group of retired middle-class widows and widowers, who are forced to accept the dark back rooms and have little to do as they wait for death but knit and wait for the change of the evening's menu in the dining room. To this sad last stop before the grave comes Laura Palfrey, who (rare for a Taylor novel) is a genuine heroine in her kindness, sensitivity, and refreshing lack of the silliness or malice endemic among so many of the Claremont's other permanent denizens. Neglected by her only relative in the city, a grandson working at the British Museum, Mrs. Palfrey asks a young penniless writer who helps her after a fall one day to pretend to be the grandson in order for her to save face among her hotelmates--and as she learns to love him for his attentions and goodness to her he also begins to revel in her generosity and maternal care. Despite the repeated praise lavished on this book by other writers I held off reading it for a long while because I feared it would be unbearably sad; but while Taylor does not stint on the emptiness and pathos of her retiree characters' lives, she brings humor and an expansive vision of redemption to the book.

Very well written, but a bit depressing. Since they use old British English, it was difficult for me to understand at times.

Mrs. Palfrey is of a time and place in the recent past. But she also is very much an older woman in any era who sees the best years of her life behind her. Taylor’s characters are so very British and so well drawn.

Written some years ago, a touching, sometimes humorous tale of an elderly British woman who goes to live in a small hotel for a group of older people. Gentle, but not overly sentimental, a good read.

This is the first Elizabeth Taylor book I’ve read and I’m cock-a-hoop at discovering a “new old” author.

In the 1960s, it was customary for reasonably well-to-do old people who weren’t quite decrepit enough for the “Old Folks’ Home” to go and live in “an hotel”. This wasn’t quite as grand as it sounds, though, and inevitably involved shared bathrooms, thimble-size glasses of medium-dry sherry, monotonous meals and a semi-institutionalised environment.

This delightful novel follows the fortunes of a motley group at The Claremont - four old ladies (including Mrs Palfrey) and one old gent. I thoroughly enjoyed the late 1960s London atmosphere and the characterisation, particularly Mrs Palfrey, who is a no-nonsense ex-colonial sort who gives herself a “good talking-to” from time to time. The plot of the novel involves her entering into a deception, a masquerade - not really deliberately or maliciously - with a co-conspirator, a young would-be novelist who she meets by chance.

Elizabeth Taylor’s observations of ageing are marvellous. These are conveyed from inside - the characters’ own thoughts, feelings and motivations (for example, Mrs Palfrey reflecting on how her group of residents regress back into the roles they had long ago in ther schooldays) - and as an external authorial observer (how the sexes become increasingly indistinguishable with age). Expressions and ideas I remembered from my grandparents in my childhood came rushing back in a wave of nostalgia.

“Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont” is both comforting and uncomfortable simultaneously - and quite a lark!

そのまま食べる。大豆の香りを残した炒り具合が良い。

I spotted this on a list of "great" books, nearly all of which I'd read, and was in the middle of tackling the mid 20th century lady authors; Taylor was next on my list, and I was intending to read "A Wreath of Roses", which I had in the bookshelf. Ordered this and was entranced. Yes, shades of Barbara Pym, but without the everlasting pesky clerics. The same needle sharp observation of dress, appearance and manner. She really captures people and their characteristics brilliantly. Not as funny as Pym, but it is not without humour. It is of its time - a period when the genteel elderly tried to keep up appearances in gloomy hotels - where "they weren't allowed to die". Then, as now, their relatives were all too prone to ship them off to even grimmer nursing homes in order to eliminate the need to care for them personally. The difference being that carefully hoarded annuities and pensions meant that in all cases the care was paid for by the individuals and not the state. Some of the occupants of the Claremont are less than pleasant, but Mrs Palfrey comes across as a splendid individual - plucky, brave and resourceful. The limitations of old age come as a bit of a surprise, with her stick and wobbliness, which leads to her fall and fortuitous meeting with the delightful Ludo. The ensuing subterfuge was rather joyful, and Ludo certainly played his part with aplomb. Inevitably, le vrai Desmond was going to appear, to distinctly less acclaim from the denizens of the Claremont. The contrast between the kindness and decency (I kept thinking, no, he must be doing this for some unpleasant motive) of the one, and the careless heartlessness of Mrs Palfrey's daughter and grandson was telling. Ludo's backstory explains his need for a kindly, upright female in his life, and the character and his lifestyle was partly based on one in Taylor's own life - again very like Pym who used her own life experiences repeatedly in her novels.

There is no great plot - some lovely vignettes of shopping in Harrods food hall - further shades of Pym with the knitting of jumpers for favoured young men (not curates, thankfully). A little twist at the end where we are lead to believe that Ludo is not after all, the paragon he has appeared, only for his goodness to shine through at the end. I kept thinking how unusual it is in a relatively modern novel to have a thoroughly decent, likeable and kind male character; none of Dickens' saint or villain or comedy stereotypes. We, like Mrs Palfrey herself, are not expecting her to die, but die she does, with Ludo easing her passing. Many readers have found this sad and depressing, but the only moment of total pathos for me was when her thoughtlessly unpleasant daughter and son-in-law failed to put a notice of death in the Daily Telegraph in the belief that there was no one left who cared. It was always matter of great concern to my elderly relatives that they were properly "despatched" in the Telegraph and to those who understand how important these things are to the elderly, it was a cruel and rather bleak ending.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, which I think is an understated masterpiece - I'm not going to make the inevitable comparisons with Jane Austen, although I have drawn them with Barbara Pym. I found her style in this book more agreeable than Bowen's, which I found horribly convoluted, although in "A Wreath of Roses", which I subsequently read, I found greater similarities of style, and found the endless internal musings of rather pointless women a tad tedious.

Such a wonderful book. Such wonderful writing. I'm a bit lost for words. I am full of emotion and admiration.

This is one of those books where the writing is SO good that you feel your heart lift. i can't remember reading any more empathetic account of ageing -- certainly nothing combining such wit, dignity and insight.

This is not sentimental escapism but sophisticated humour that lays bare the social discomfort with ageing. Whilst its setting is no longer contemporary, it distils the essence of human relationships in a way that is breathtakingly brilliant. Comparisons with Austen are well deserved. People who can't see the humour in this sometimes bleak but mostly life affirming tale would do well to reflect further. Taylor is not laughing at Mrs Palfrey; in creating a character with a wry but realistic perspective she doesn't indulge sentimentality but expands the empathy in all who are willing to attend. And its a really easy read!