She shared a flat with Hilda Margaret (Pran) Pyper and Barbara Blackburn, who later appeared in fictional form in her novel No Goodness in the Worm.
[4] In April 1920, she married Hal Taylor, who was struggling to start a commercial orchard on property he had purchased near Waltham St Lawrence in Berkshire.
As Taylor recounts in both No Goodness in the Worm and A Prison, A Paradise, the couple shared little in common aside from creative aspirations.
The affair was a central experience in Gay Taylor's life and she recounted it twice, once in fictional form in No Goodness in the Worm (1930) and later in A Prison, A Paradise (1959).
Frances Lamont Robbins, on the other had, dismissed it: "If English feminism has a literature, this novel must represent its lowest point; for it is one of the rankest pieces of nonsense that this patient reviewer ever read.
Raine later wrote that Gay Taylor "understood me better than I did myself; sustained me in times of deepest spiritual danger, never condemned or relinquished me.
"[14] In 1959, Gay Taylor published A Prison, A Paradise under the name of Loran Hurnscot, an anagram drawn from what she considered her worst sins, sloth and rancour.
In her introduction, Raine linked the two parts, writing: "The same thirst for perfection, the same capacity for truthfulness that led the young woman into the toils of earthly love, was to lead her beyond this first phase of spiritual awakening to the reality of which the natural world is but a shadow or reflection.
"[10] In The Times Literary Supplement, Elizabeth Jennings called it "a faithful, highly subjective account of a restless, tormented life.