The Sleeping Beauty

By Elizabeth Taylor

Subjects: Sleeping Beauty (Tale)

Description: An unconventional tale of a modern middle-aged knight-errant who lays romantic siege to an emotionally frozen woman. The setting is a seaside town of summer trippers and concrete promenades lapped by the mysterious ocean. Vinny, the knight-errant, comes down from London to console and advise Isabella, a recently widowed friend. He is high-minded, kindly, sensitive, and his bachelor life appears to be an open book—a book that seems a *trifle* too faultlessly organized. Then he meets Isabella's neighbor Emily, who, because of a near-fatal motor accident, is an apathetic recluse in the home of her querulous, predatory sister. Vinny, captivated by her remote loveliness, draws Emily out of her sleep-walker's role, back to emotional reality, and becomes released himself in the process.