Do novelists come nicer than Elizabeth Taylor? Her mother died of politeness – she developed appendicitis over Christmas, and didn’t want to interrupt the doctor’s holiday – but rather than renounce good manners on the spot, her biographer Nicola Beauman writes, Taylor ‘cared about good manners very much indeed’ to the end of her days. So attentive a wife was she, so doting a mother, that her adolescent daughter was supposedly shocked to discover that Taylor wrote books. In her letters, Taylor sometimes worried that being a Buckinghamshire housewife hurt her writing: ‘How can I have anything to write about when nothing happens to me?’ A different world intruded only in the form of mistakenly delivered fan letters intended for her namesake. ‘Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini.’ She was sometimes wounded by criticism that her fiction was unadventurous: too many exemplary Thames Valley women baking sponges for bring and buy sales, arranging flowers, giving tea parties, ‘even sometimes, daringly, sherry parties’. But she could only write convincingly about what she had experienced herself, she didn’t like to travel, and her friends were few and from her own class. Her situation, she comforted herself, was like Jane Austen’s. She was contented: ‘I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God.’ Her greatest grief (‘almost’), Beauman writes, was when, near the end of her life, the New Yorker stopped accepting her stories.

Still, a biographer must fill her pages with something. So Beauman gives a thorough report of the time when Taylor, almost an old lady, invited two friends to luncheon in 1969 and they came on the wrong day:

Herman declared Elizabeth had got it wrong and then sent what must have been a forged carbon copy of his original acceptance card ‘proving’ they had been due a day later. But Elizabeth, without ever admitting it to Herman or to Francis, had kept his original letter. Forging a letter because Herman ‘liked always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her if he was humiliated; anxious to continue the friendship with him . . . she instinctively grovelled rather than challenge him . . . What could be more embarrassing for both parties than for her to tell Herman, ‘I’m afraid I have a letter which shows that my date was the right one’?

What indeed? It’s a sign of how intensely Beauman has identified with her subject that this story, or the details of Taylor’s participation in various amateur theatre groups (first the High Wycombe Little Theatre Club, then the Naphill Village Players), or her perpetual anxiety that her daily help, Mrs Howard, might quit, are related at greater length and with more acuity than the world-historical events that seem only barely to have affected her. As a young woman, in the early 1930s, she had gone so far as to join the Communist Party, but Beauman is right to make little of this. Really Taylor just admired how the early British Communists seemed to follow ‘the teachings of Christ with the sharing of possessions and private property’, and she quit as soon as someone told her that things were bad in Russia. It was a bit of a relief: Party members had criticised her stories for their lack of political engagement, and ‘made me ashamed of the sort of talent I had, so that I stifled it and was shy’. During the Spanish Civil War, her support for the Republicans took the form of taking in a refugee child, whom she patiently cured of bedwetting. But it was exhausting, and so there her politics ended, ‘stopped at the Spanish War. After that, it was too late. I was fair wore-out, too, and cannot take such emotional interest in a war ever again.’ If anyone in England could be said to have sat out the Second World War, it was Taylor. Her husband joined the RAF, but was too old to be a pilot, and was sent only as far as Uxbridge. The war years were when she gave birth to her son, then her daughter, and she was overwhelmed by how much she loved them. In late 1942, she imagined someone in the future asking where she’d been during the Battle of Stalingrad and answering, ‘Oh, yes – I was at home minding the children.’