Mrs Palfrey invites Ludo to dine with her one Saturday evening. Impoverished young writer Ludo picks her up, cleans her wound and makes her a cup of tea. Mrs Palfrey is beginning to feel pitied by other residents for Desmond’s non-attendance. The resident remarks “Oh then, you will be seeing a great deal of him, I expect.”Ĭhapter 2: A resident asks Mrs Palfrey “What have you done with that grandson of yours? … If we don’t see him soon, we shall begin to think he doesn’t exist.”Ĭhapter 3: Mrs Palfrey’s grandson Desmond has not responded to Mrs Palfrey’s letters asking him to visit. She tells a fellow resident she has a grandson who lives nearby. Mrs Palfrey comes to live at the Claremont Hotel in London. The following is my chapter-by-chapter outline of this plot, ignoring all the other, rather briefer, subplots that Taylor develops around other characters who live at the Claremont, plus Ludo and his mother and girlfriend.
In an effort to understand better why the novel’s plot struck me as rather thin, I re-read the text, this time focusing only the ‘grandson plot’, in order to sketch out how this unfolds. In a sense, the novel is a comic study in gently bad faith. What Mrs Palfrey doesn’t know is that Ludo is making a study of her for the novel he is writing.
As Mrs Palfrey well knows, the young man is, in fact, a penniless young writer called Ludo. I enjoyed the work’s wit, the sense of a dispassionate eye looking anguish coolly in the face - but was there really much of a story?Īnd yet there is a plot line, clearly, running through the novel: Mrs Palfrey, a friendless but humane and stoic old woman, finds herself in a farcical predicament after she moves into a residential hotel and fails to correct her fellow residents’ fallacious impression that the young man who joins her for dinner on Saturday night is her filially affectionate grandson Desmond. My first impression on finishing Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was that the novel I had just greatly enjoyed reading was the literary equivalent of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday: a series of whimsical events that take place in a relatively closed social setting, strung along a flimsy thread that ultimately leads nowhere. Spoiler alert: This posting contains spoilers for Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor.
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