Introducing Taylor’s “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court”

← v16n2, Fall 2017

Introducing Taylor’s “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court ”

In the summer of 1992, New Virginia Review first published Peter Taylor’s novella, “The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court,” and in 1993 Knopf presented the piece as the title story in what was the last collection of stories to appear in Taylor’s lifetime. Blackbird subsequently republished the story in v7n1 in the spring of 2008 as a part of a reading loop dedicated to Taylor’s work, which included texts from a 2007 AWP panel, “Peter Taylor and the Lost World of the Modern.”

We are offering the story here again to celebrate the fall 2017 publication in two volumes of the Library of America’s edition of Peter Taylor: Complete Stories , edited and introduced by Ann Beattie.

The Library of America committed to presenting the book in the spring of 2016, spurred on by support from Beattie, Robert Wilson (editor of The American Scholar and a former student of Taylor’s), and Phillip Lopate.

Beattie had been a colleague and friend of Taylor at the University of Virginia beginning in the mid-1970’s, and her advocacy is in large part responsible for the stories’ appearance in the Library of America series. That series, according to its mission statement, “helps to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.”

“The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court” came to New Virginia Review when editor Mary Flinn requested a submission of work from Taylor, and he graciously made the story available.

Taylor was a complicated and accomplished writer of short fiction whose work Blackbird is honored to support.

In the first paragraph of her introduction to the book, Beattie notes:

Matthew Hillsman Taylor Jr., nicknamed Pete, decided early to become simply Peter Taylor. The name has a certain directness, as well as a hint of elegance. Both qualities were also true of his writing, though his directness was reserved for energizing inanimate objects, as well as for presenting physical details. (His sidelong psychological studies, on the other hand, take time to unfold.) It was also his tendency to situate his characters within precisely rendered historical and social settings. His stories deepen, brushstroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering—by the verbal equivalent to what painters call atmospheric perspective. Their surfaces are no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake.

We invite you to reenter here “The Oracle of Stoneleigh Court” and to go to the Library of America to immerse yourself in the work of a true American master.

history art place

Peter Taylor

Peter Taylor (1917–1994) established himself as a master of short fiction and was the author of short story collections, novels, and plays, including In the Tennessee Country (Knopf, 1994); The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (Knopf, 1993); A Summons to Memphis (Knopf, 1986), winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, the 1987 Ritz-Hemingway Award, and Italy’s Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize; The Old Forest and Other Stories (Doubleday, 1985), winner of the 1986 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; In the Miro District and Other Stories (Knopf, 1977), winner of the 1978 Gold Medal Award for the short story from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969); and A Long Fourth and Other Stories (Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1948). The Library of America published Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories in 2017. Taylor’s stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and other magazines. He received wide recognition through grants and awards during his career, including a 1950 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a 1952 grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the 1993 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, a 1985 Governor’s Award for the Arts from the Commonwealth of Virginia, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1969. He concluded a long teaching career as the Henry Hoynes Professor of Writing at the University of Virginia and lived in Charlottesville with his wife, the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, from 1967 until his death.