The Wedding Group, By Elizabeth Taylor

As a Home Counties housewife married to a chocolate manufacturer, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor was never taken as seriously in her lifetime as near- contemporaries, Olivia Manning and Rose Macaulay.

The Wedding Group, first published in 1968, is typical of her later work - an elegiac tragi-comedy about the ways in which the parental mould is not easily broken.

Teenage Cressy, brought up in an artistic family compound, longs to escape the clutches of her famous grandfather, a priapic sculptor with more than a passing resemblance to real-life artist Eric Gill.

She finds a job in an antique shop, where she meets and marries David, but thanks to his intense relationship with his owns family, Cressy exchanges one kind of bondage for another.