Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

Continuum Literary Studies Series Related titles available in the series: Doris Lessing Edited by Susan Watkins and Alice Ridout Fictions of Globalization James Annesley Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist Miles Leeson Women’s Fiction 1945–2005 Deborah Philips

Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon

Nick Turner

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www.continuumbooks.com © Nick Turner 2010 Nick Turner has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-3454-8 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: The Field of Modern Women Writers 1. Theories of the Canon 2. Iris Murdoch 3. Anita Brookner 4. Ruth Rendell 5. Emma Tennant Conclusion: The Contemporary Scene

1 11 35 62 86 112 136

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

145 158 166 187

Acknowledgements

I am grateful more than I can say to many people who have helped with this work, particularly Dr Bill Hutchings, who has been endlessly supportive and read drafts several times. Professor Jackie Pearson, Professor Patricia Duncker and Professor Richard Todd have also given invaluable advice along the way. Thanks are also due to Emma Tennant, for agreeing to be interviewed, and to A. S. Byatt, Peter Conradi, Susana Onega, Anne Rowe and Patsy Stoneman for contributing ideas and references. I would also like to thank the team at Continuum Books for taking on the project, and particularly Anna Fleming and Colleen Coalter for their help. Many friends and family members have been supportive and encouraging in ways that cannot be repaid. Joan Addison, Julian Alderton, Tony Coombes, Alex Delap, Sonia Dry, Paul Dundon, Anne Harding, Kate Hart, Magdalena Kata, Linden Lack, Jon Lucas, Caroline Russell, Adam Stephens, Jean Turner, Peter Turner, Ania Wasielewska and Frances White deserve particular mention. You, and many others, have made it all seem worthwhile when things weren’t easy. Countless other people have helped and advised, both with the Ph.D. and the book. I thank you all. You know who you are. Chapter 2 is an extended and revised version of an earlier article, ‘Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon’, in Anne Rowe (ed.) Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 115–123, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction: The Field of Modern Women Writers

This book originates in various instances of self-questioning. Deciding which new play or film to go and see, or which new novel to read, I found myself choosing works because they had won prizes. Dancing at Lughnasa and Closer had won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, therefore they must be worth going to see, as must films such as Forrest Gump, Titanic or Chicago, all Oscar winners. Likewise, since Diana Rigg had won a BAFTA for her performance in the television drama Mother Love it must clearly be an outstanding piece of acting, and Booker Prize winner Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac the best novel published in 1984. Or must it? Unsurprisingly, I was often disappointed, and felt let down; the stamp of quality conferred by these prizes seemed misplaced. Like many, I suspect, there was an unconscious desire to flatter myself that I was doing something culturally worthwhile, and I came away instead feeling that these things were not the best productions in their field. Who was making these decisions, and how? In terms of literature, I began to be fascinated by the novels that were chosen, not only by the Booker committee, but by academics for research, and by universities and colleges to place on their syllabuses. It seemed a tricky matter. Assembling a course on the Victorian novel appeared relatively easy: Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, Hardy, and, to be up to date, Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins. All these novelists are familiar names, widely available, frequently filmed and televised; their names are synonymous with their period. But what to do about the novelists of the past 30 years, and the novelists being published now? How would a course director make choices from the thousands of available items? Modern and contemporary fiction is increasingly coming on to A-level and undergraduate courses: selections have to be made, and certain figures seem to crop up again and again. I wanted to know why, and I wanted to obtain further evidence to support my feeling that there might be people slipping through the net, that choices were being made for reasons that had nothing to do with literary merit. This is a book, then, about the canon, about the choices and value judgements which writers, readers, critics and teachers make; it asks some very large questions about how literature operates. Of the many large ideas that hover

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around this questioning of the canon, the largest and vaguest is ‘greatness’. It was a common assumption – until about 30 years ago – that writers survived because they were great. It was not a matter for debate. But this has now changed, and here we should pause for a moment over the nebulous term ‘greatness’. Art critic Jonathan Jones defines it as follows: If greatness in art has any meaning it is at odds with an opinion poll that throws it open to the people’s choice. If greatness exists it must be objective and absolute and therefore not ours to vote for. Greatness suggests a world historical significance, a sublimity. It has nothing to do with competition. It is, I suspect, a German Romantic idea. Greatness stresses the existence of a power – in this instance aesthetic – that transcends and dwarfs the individual. (2008, p. 10) German Romantic geniuses and power, transcending and dwarfing: it would be hard to think of a concept more masculine. It goes hand in hand with traditional cultural ideas of ‘Old Masters’, masterworks, masterpieces. We have immediately, then, a question of gender and the canon to be explored. Are women celebrated as cultural achievers? Are there Great Women in the canon? The concept seems sadly oxymoronic; great seems to equal Napoleonic. It is not new to say that women are and have been undervalued in literature; however, it does still need to be said. We can turn, though, back three centuries to the Bluestocking movement in Britain, recently celebrated in an exhibition and book titled Brilliant Women (2008). So perhaps there is evidence of female writers being acclaimed, and before Jane Austen. Brilliant Women highlights a painting of 1778 by Richard Samuel, ‘Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain)’. Here, painted allegorically, are Elizabeth Carter (poet, classicist and translator), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (poet and essayist), Angelica Kauffmann (painter), Elizabeth Sheridan (singer), Charlotte Lennox (novelist and poet), Hannah More (then known as a playwright), Elizabeth Montagu (literary critic), Elizabeth Griffith (novelist and playwright) and Catherine Macaulay (historian) – a selection from across the arts. This is not the first instance as such of women artists being acclaimed, and of course the concept of the Muse brings its own problems; nonetheless, it is heartening evidence. The problem is that, outside the academy and specializations, these names are no longer familiar. Yes – a novelist such as Charlotte Lennox may have been praised in her time; no – even her most famous work, The Female Quixote (1752), is solely the property of academics and postgraduates. Here, then, is a selection of eighteenth-century intellectuals who have been neglected, while Samuel Johnson, David Hume and Richard Brinsley Sheridan have prospered. A contrasting but equally important matter arises if we move to the last third of the nineteenth century, years when there were a very large number of novels

Introduction

3

by women being published. In 1893, Helen C. Black published Notable Women Authors of the Day. Who were they? According to Black, the list is as follows: Mrs Lynn Linton, Mrs Riddell, Mrs L. B. Walford, Rhoda Broughton, John Strange Winter (Mrs Arthur Stannard), Mrs Alexander, Helen Mathers, Florence Marryat, Mrs Lovett Cameron, Mrs Hungerford, Matilda Betham Edwards, Edna Lyall, Rosa Nouchette Carey, Adeline Sergeant, Mrs Edward Kennard, Jessie Fothergill, Lady Duffus Hardy, May Crommelin, Mrs Houston, Mrs Alex Fraser, Honourable Mrs Henry Chetwynd, Jean Middlemass, Augusta de Grasse Stevens, Mrs Leith Adams and Jean Ingelow. An initial reaction is the failure of Marie Corelli, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Ouida and Ellen Wood to feature on the list – all were writing at the time. Mona Caird, who did not publish her most famous novel, Daughters of Danaus, until 1894, was probably not included owing to her radical politics – for which she has been remembered. More obvious is the Ozymandias-like, but inevitable, situation where we see a list of once popular writers now almost totally forgotten, a fate that also befell Eliza Haywood, and many other women popular writers, in the eighteenth century. But novelists such as Braddon and Corelli, not included by Black, have had something of a revival. What is the reason for this? Are they better than the forgotten names above? And do they deserve this attention? If a writer of the past has been forgotten, there is often quite naturally a desire by scholars to resurrect them because of this, and sometimes by publishers to bring them back into print. This happened to Eliza Lynn Linton, and her novel The Rebel of the Family (1880), owing to its treatment of an issue: lesbianism. Rhoda Broughton, one of the most commercially successful authors of her era, has similarly been in print recently, as part of the academic interest in sensation fiction and portrayals of women in fiction. Here is a typical extract from her first major success, Not Wisely but Too Well (1867): Oh, the sea! the unpalling, the opal-coloured, the divine! What a thing a sea-place is in the summer weather! What does it matter if it is the most frightful collection of unsightly houses that ever disgraced a low coast – if dreary flats, than which nor pancakes nor flounders could be flatter, stretch away behind it, flank it on either side; if not the most abortive attempt at a tree is to be had, for love or money, within a circle of ten miles round it? . . . But anyhow, have we not got the dear, dear sea, and what can we want beside? (1993, p. 6) Scholars of Broughton’s work have never pretended that she was a ‘great’ writer; her faults, such as overwriting, excessive sentiment and bad grammar have been excused in favour of the social and historical interest her novels provide. Broughton’s work, and its reception, is fascinating in what it tells us about ideologies of the time and popular taste; however, a passage such as the above shows us exactly why Broughton disappeared. No one would deny the appeal of the novels as entertainment; but that does not mean they deserve cultural

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preservation in themselves. The historical and social circumstances provide an interest which we read into the text. These ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, as George Eliot saw them, and an established tradition of realism, were what Virginia Woolf wrote against; Woolf would find acclaim through experiment, innovation and analysis of the problems of women’s writing. Woolf has become nothing short of an icon, St Virginia perhaps, and following her a group of lesser known but still accomplished women, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamund Lehmann and Dorothy Richardson. But then there is Rebecca West, an equally dazzling figure, whose writing covered in fact a much wider range than Woolf. Rebecca West’s name features in literary histories, and some of her novels are in print, yet she is little read and studied. Similarly, Dorothy Whipple, a highly popular figure in her time, was almost forgotten, and even rejected by Virago, until Persephone books took up Someone at a Distance (1953). We can see, then, a pattern emerging of accomplished, innovative intellectual women who are allowed to fade and, equally, bestsellers who disappear totally. Perhaps, though, this is inevitable; perhaps there is only room for so many writers in the world, and only a few can survive the test of time. We should question, though, who survives, and why; the problem becomes more evident when we move to the period on which this book focuses, the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. Literary histories are the most useful guides to who is favoured, and Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel (1993) is representative. For Bradbury, the central women novelists of the period 1950–1990 are Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter and Margaret Drabble. Bradbury’s opinion is one shared by many; it is evidenced in a piece written by Rebecca West for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974 (p. 779). Here, although she has qualifications, West has particular praise for Lessing (‘this splendid figure may be styled the English George Sand . . . her strength is as the strength of ten’), which is not surprising, given the political passion of both novelists. West also admires Murdoch (again, with reservations), and talks of Drabble, Edna O’Brien and Penelope Mortimer, in addition. But the most interesting observation comes towards the end, when West discusses A Source of Embarrassment by A. L. Barker, ‘a novel as good perhaps as any of the novels written by the contemporaries here noted’. She had earlier described The Middling (1967) as ‘the finest book written by a woman in our time’ (Berridge, 2002, p. 22). Now this is, of course, just one person’s judgement, but it is the judgement of a respected literary figure. It may be wrong, and there is no reason why academics and readers should agree. Nonetheless, if someone as eminent as West praised Barker, and if the latter had won not only very favourable critical reviews but a place on the Booker shortlist, should not her work be still alive, studied, read, talked about? This does not seem to be the case, for Barker’s work is only just about in print, and she has next to no scholarly work published on her. One partial explanation may be the fact that Barker preferred writing short stories, and only produced novels on the insistence of

Introduction

5

her publishers; increasingly, in the second half of the twentieth century, the novel has become the dominant literary form, and it has become harder and harder for short stories to gain really serious respect and attention. Because we are close in time to A. L. Barker, perhaps, she has not had the chance to be taken up for historical reasons, or to have been absolutely forgotten and then unearthed again. Nonetheless, within this period, choices are made by academic institutions as to who is ‘worthy’, and it is right to question them. It is worth staying in 1974, a quarter of a century ago, the year of Barker’s novel, and also, in terms of the ‘leading’ post-war women novelists, the year of Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor and Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe. But it also the year that saw the publication of Days, by Eva Figes. Figes had won the Guardian Fiction Prize for her novel Winter Journey (1967), and had also published the highly influential feminist critical work Patriarchal Attitudes (1970). Unlike the other books of 1974 just listed, Days is no longer in print (the last edition came out in 1983), and, like the work of A. L. Barker, it has disappeared from academic view. The most fruitful comparison to be made, of these novels, is between those of Figes and Lessing, for both writers have a strongly political agenda, although in this particular work Lessing is interested in much larger questions of society and consciousness, and is beginning to embrace Sufism. They are the most experimental novels of the group, and the toughest on the reader. Lessing’s novel is in print, and is also much studied. One reason for this must be its difficulty. But difficulty does not necessarily equal merit, and there is a case to be made for The Memoirs of a Survivor being a failure, for it lacks all the following, things which many say novel should have – narrative drive; tension; linguistic inventiveness or flair; polemic and passion; character; intricacy and formal innovation or beauty. Lessing’s Sufist vision and rejection of realism are interesting, but they do not sustain a full novel. It has often, in fact, been remarked of Lessing that her style is poor. Lessing is at her most accomplished within a narrative framework driven by mystery (such as The Grass is Singing (1950)), or in the short story. Figes’s novel, however, is avant-garde, demanding, and satisfying. As with Lessing, we follow the thoughts and memories of an unnamed character. Figes’s woman is in a hospital bed: she is powerless, abandoned and imprisoned, as heroines have been as far back as Wollstonecraft and Burney. The use of stream of consciousness evokes Woolf, while Figes also manages to evoke a sense of mystery, and to make the woman representative of other women, and of humanity in general, ensnared in repetition and tedium and the approach of death. What is more, Figes’s stylistic experimentation, swapping of pronouns and playing of games with narrators both illustrates the shared female predicament, and contributes to the tension and aesthetic unity, as we see a sense of cycle, repetition and progression in the movement from mother to daughter. I have used deliberately evaluative language above, and some readers are likely to disagree with the claims; but I believe strongly that this kind of evaluation is lacking in much contemporary criticism, and the comparison highlights

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my conviction of the problems inherent in the literary reputations of modern British women novelists. We should return now, though, to the question of gender, and look at some evidence of just how well – or not – British women writers, artists and intellectuals per se have fared against their male counterparts, over the past half century. In 2004, Prospect magazine published a list of Britain’s top 100 intellectuals. This 100 included only 12 women (in terms of novelists, the inclusions were A. S. Byatt and Jeanette Winterson). The likely reason for this tremendous imbalance is not so much deliberate sexism, but the fact that, despite all that the women’s movement has achieved, cultural (as all forms of) life is still dominated by white men. Also, a shorter, more specialized list, where The Guardian chose only one woman (Sylvia Plath) for its 7 booklets on great poets in 2008, should be considered. Even more interesting was another list published by The Times of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Here, of course, the 50 comprised authors of not merely novels (often seen as something produced by and for women, suggesting that women should do well in the poll) but poetry and drama (traditionally identified as masculine). Worryingly, there are only 14 women here. Lessing is No. 5, with Spark at 8, Angela Carter at 10, and Murdoch at 12. The choices confirm Bradbury’s preferences, in effect. Further women novelists are as follows: Jan Morris (15); Penelope Fitzgerald (23); Philippa Pearce (24); Barbara Pym (25); Beryl Bainbridge (26); Anita Brookner (33); A. S. Byatt (34); J. K. Rowling (42); Alice Oswald (47); and Rosemary Sutcliff (49). There is something, clearly, unsatisfactory about this imbalance, outside of the disagreement that such lists always generate. This long-standing feeling that ‘brilliant women’ were not being recognized, borne out by evidence from the disproportionate number of women being shortlisted for and winning the Booker Prize, led to the creation of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996. This prize has generated enormous amounts of media coverage and argument; the reasons for its existence, and what it tries to do, are at the heart of the questions this book asks. Increasingly, being a prize winner seems to be the only guarantee of merit in the literary world, certainly in terms of booksellers, who use the Booker and the Orange as a stamp of quality, branding a book rather like an item of clothing. The good thing about this is that accomplished and interesting writers can be brought to public attention; the bad thing is the way in which writers who either do not win prizes, or are never entered, disappear from view, for if literary prizes are commercial stamps, then they are inherently geared towards audience satisfaction. Difficult, truly original writers, likely not to sell well, may consequently be unlikely to find their books even being considered for longlists. Rather worryingly, the British Council’s Contemporary Writers Database states that it works with ‘major prizewinners from the UK and Commonwealth’, as if winning a prize necessarily equates with literary excellence (http://www. contemporarywriters.com). Thus, in a long list of writers, there is no mention of Eva Figes, Emma Tennant and Christine Brooke-Rose, all of whom are

Introduction

7

alive and have produced books in the last decade, and all of whom have been identified as serious and original writers. The post-war canon on a wider level – to include America – is usefully evidenced by the contents page of Olga Kenyon’s Contemporary Women Novelists (1991). The key figures are Angela Carter (‘Fantasist and Feminist’), Alice Walker, Toni Morrison (‘The Great American Novelist is a Black Woman’) and Buchi Emecheta (‘Black Immigrant Experience in Britain’); Micheline Wandor, Bernice Rubens and Elaine Feinstein share a chapter titled ‘Jewish Women Writing in Britain’. Further chapters are titled ‘Black Women Novelists: An Introduction’ and ‘Caribbean Women Writers’. The organization of this material inspires, initially, delight: it is as much to be celebrated that Toni Morrison is perhaps the world’s leading woman writer as it is that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. At the same time, though, there is something a little depressing about this contents page. These writers are all interesting and should be read and studied, but there seems an overeagerness on Kenyon’s part to drive the study by issues. This is something we shall see more of later; there is an uncomfortable link between a need to right social and cultural wrongs, and a desire to teach and study literature with political correctness as a driving force. We should look at why Morrison is praised as she is. Has she been subconsciously feted because she is black and, if so, is there something patronizing about this? While Margaret Atwood, Morrison, Carter and Lessing rise, novelists who do not foreground issues such as race, gender and class, or embrace post-modernism, are not seen as worthy of being studied or written about. This can explain A. L. Barker’s marginalization; a recent example of the same problem is Candia McWilliam, while Brigid Brophy, another serious and critically esteemed writer of the 1960s and 1970s, is totally out of print and academically ignored. Brophy’s interests lay chiefly in the aesthetics of literature.1 It is not possible, from this brief discussion, to make firm claims, but while there has been and continues to be a huge market for popular fiction by and for women, and while many women have pushed the novel forward, being treated seriously and surviving the test of time are trickier matters. It is a problem for male writers too, of course, but we have seen, and shall continue to see, that women suffer more. So far I have only spoken generally about complicating factors; as the book progresses, we shall see in closer detail the problems encountered by four post-war British women novelists: Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Ruth Rendell and Emma Tennant. There would be an argument for analysing any novelist of this period, in fact; any literary career will have highs and lows, and produce evidence of changing fashions and differing interpretations. Lessing, who might be argued to be the ‘greatest’ British woman novelist of her generation, has encountered problems in her reputation owing to her seeming disavowal of feminism, and her embracing of science fiction; Carter troubled academics because of her playful stance, and her refusal to commit more strongly to feminism. Pat Barker found fame when she stopped writing social realism focusing on women, and wrote about

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men at war; A. S. Byatt did not become the subject of both academic and public attention until Possession (1990) won the Booker Prize – a novel that made use of (even if it did not endorse) post-modernism and structuralism. Byatt’s sister, Margaret Drabble, achieved success, both critically and in terms of popular esteem, by writing accessible realist novels about the domestic lives of educated women, but became unfashionable in the 1980s; at the same time Penelope Lively, a writer treading a line between liberal humanism and post-modernism, won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger (1987), yet is somehow viewed as middlebrow; not ‘sexy’ for study or research. There is Barbara Comyns, whose inventive comic fiction is only alive thanks to Virago; there is Alice Thomas Ellis, a highly individual stylist who is somehow not interesting to scholars and students. Most puzzling of all is the case of Zoë Fairbairns, a key feminist writer of the 1980s whose politically challenging and highly readable novels about women in the working world have been allowed to go out of print. All these writers, and others, deserve more analysis in terms of their status than can be given here; the appendix should be consulted for information about the standing of these and many other post-war British women novelists. One figure will recur again and again in this study, though: Angela Carter. Since her death in 1992, Carter has been a solid part of critical activity and is a favourite choice for teachers at A-level and undergraduate level. My assumption is that it has increasingly been Carter, rather than Lessing, who is the centre of the canon of post-war British women novelists, and thus I frequently test the figures in question against her. In effect, by choosing these four novelists, I am creating a personal canon, as open to debate as any other list. I selected Iris Murdoch for the simple reasons that I found The Sea, the Sea (1978) a moving and beautiful piece of work, that it had won the Booker Prize, and that its author was often claimed to be the best of her generation. This is a belief I support: Murdoch should survive, and in Chapter 2 I map the rise and fall of her academic and popular reputation, concluding with the assertion that her linguistic inventiveness, comic sense, and ability to create dramatic situations that transcend the local and specific make her great. Anita Brookner was selected because of the intriguing, old-fashioned oddity of her fiction, and because she too had won the Booker. In Chapter 3 I investigate how, like Murdoch, Brookner seems to embrace genre, although this is deceptive: in the end, I find that the author is contemporary and, again, universal in her portrayal of alienation and loss, while again writing with flair. In Chapter 4, I interrogate why a leading crime novelist such as Ruth Rendell has not been taken seriously by the literary establishment. Rendell, I find, is an accomplished genre writer; under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, she has also produced a series of highly successful fictions that, while being satisfying and innovative, are good without being great. Chapter 5 takes as its subject Emma Tennant, the most puzzling figure, in that she has done everything that would seem to promise literary success, yet remains marginalized. In the conclusion, I take my findings from these case studies, and the questions I have asked in the

Introduction

9

introduction, and apply them to visible examples of contemporary women’s writing. The very title of this book implies choices, and some clarification is needed as to its terms. For ‘Post-War’, I mean, simply, the period from 1945 to the end of the century, with reference (particularly in the conclusion) to the contemporary scene; it is not meant to convey that I am selecting novelists who write with a sense of being ‘post’ the Second World War and its effects. ‘British’ is a possibly dangerous term to use; it is very hard to assess, in many cases, if a writer is British (and indeed it does not really matter); the deciding factor for me has been whether or not the large part of their work has been produced in Great Britain (writers such as Deirdre Madden, born in Northern Ireland, would surely be happier being associated with Ireland). There is, as we have seen already, frequent reference to women writing in English overseas; but, for a form of comparative empirical study to be worthwhile, the test cases should have something in common. So we have four British novelists of the same period in time. The novel as a form has been chosen, since it is the most culturally and commercially visible literary form at the moment, as has been the case for some time, and it is, as previously stated, one particularly associated with women writers. All these writers have had uneasy relationships with the canon; all have either been, or been accused of being, generic; all seem both part of the establishment, yet have roots outside, and show feelings of ‘otherness’ in their fiction. As stated earlier, very large cultural questions are at stake here; the canon lies within larger matters for debate. In terms of ‘greatness’, the matter can be problematized beyond questions of gender. At the start of the twenty-first century, the drive to find greatness around us seems increasingly intense and often banal. There are quasi-academic productions such as 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006), with accompanying volumes discussing architecture and art and such; newspapers and television channels are crowded with lists of the hundred greatest films, or books, or songs, or sitcoms, or even Christmas television moments. These endless lists may be driven by commerce and their inherent entertainment value, but they are increasingly democratic: the people are choosing whom they wish to monumentalize, it seems, and deciding what is ‘good’. Does that mean, then, that anything goes? Can anything be art? Has art been dumbed down? That might have been a reaction to the intriguing Carsten Höller Slides in the Tate Modern in 2007 which were, in effect, a collection of metal tubes down which visitors young and old hurtled. Their existence demonstrated one argument: art is art when an institution names it as such. The slides also showed that art does not exist unless it is being read, looked at – or slid down. Without the audience, it is dead. Art needs to be interpreted to exist, but it also will bear more interpretation if it has ambiguity, complexity – and excellence, in short. This book, then, questions the concept of the canon, and the processes of ‘canonization’, but also argues that certain things should survive. These books

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are works of art – sometimes minor works of art, but works of art nonetheless. While recognizing that judgements are to some extent determined, and agreeing that canonical works have in the past solidified the position of the patriarchy, the existence of the art object in itself must be recognized (as Iris Murdoch argued). The book supports and, in effect, tests out Paul Crowther’s thesis in Defining Art, Creating the Canon (2007) and, particularly, his suggestion that metaphor is at the forefront of literary originality. Likewise, Richard Bradford is absolutely right to say that ‘academic critics should tackle literature on its own ground’, be ‘as amusing, as thoughtfully available and shiftlessly elegant as their subject’; that they ‘should evaluate and assess the qualities of fiction rather than treat it as a springboard for intellectual prating’ (2007, p. 247). This does not mean, however, that ‘theory’ should be seen as a destructive monster: simply, as both Terry Eagleton in After Theory (2002), and Valentine Cunningham in Reading After Theory (2005) argue, that other avenues should remain open. Cunningham believes in close reading, which will play a part here; for Eagleton, words like ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ need to make a return to discourses. This book supports what has become known as the ethical turn, and desires the return of liberal humanism to the forefront of British fiction. Murdoch’s defence of the human, below, is now starting to find favour, in the changing political climate of the new millennium, when multiculturalism and postmodernism alike are being challenged: statements are made, propositions are uttered, by individual incarnate persons . . . it is in the whole of this larger context that our familiar and essential concepts of truth and truthfulness live and work. ‘Truth’ is inseparable from individual contextual human responsibilities. (2003, p. 194) Writers both high and low must be given a hearing, for genre has its own rules, and Agatha Christie, although outside the remit of this book, is a brilliant practitioner. And women’s voices must be heard as much as men’s, for, no matter how optimistic the liberal press may be, we still live in a society which favours the white, middle-class male above all, and these politics demand continual investigation in every facet of life. I am also arguing for the recognition of good writing, for novelists who create a style of their own, for originality. The novel is alive and well, and is still the bright book of life; some of its purveyors have been forced into the shade, however, and this book, as well as asking why, hopes to bring them into the light: the ‘brilliant women’ novelists of our age.

Chapter 1

Theories of the Canon

Suppose a student were to approach you with the following (rather unlikely) problem: they were considering tackling the work of either Elizabeth Jane Howard or Zadie Smith, and were undecided as to whom they should study. Whose work could be explored most neatly in terms of current theories? The answer would partly be a subjective one, but Smith certainly pushes all the right critical buttons, while Howard lies somewhat forgotten and unread. This book interrogates the complex reasons which cause literary reputations to rise and fall, through case studies of individual novelists and the circumstances in which they have been studied and read. By the end we will be able to see exactly why somebody like Zadie Smith has been ‘canonized’ at the start of the twentyfirst century, and why so many writers, past and present, are not seen as the appropriate focus of scholarship. The canon wars, which have raged for a quarter of a century now, illustrate and parallel enormous changes in literary studies. A common assertion is that debate properly began with the publication of Leslie Fiedler and Houston A. Baker’s English Literature: Opening up the Canon in 1981, followed by a rapid succession of scholarly activity typified by Robert von Hallberg’s essay collection Canons (1984). This debate accompanies the politicization of literature and the apotheosis of post-modern scepticism, whose centrifugal tendencies are, depending on one’s beliefs, either carnival or anarchy. In the light of this extensive debate, we might wonder if there is anything left to say about the canon: has it not been questioned, attacked, demolished and rebuilt to the point where any traditional ideas are now an anachronism, and all the points for the prosecution and the defence have already been made? The problem for a twenty-first-century reader is picking through the chorus of voices, far too many of which are purely partisan and fail to weigh evidence adequately. Nonetheless, there are some pertinent arguments to address, before coming to my own conclusions about what the canon means today. This chapter will summarize the etymology of the word ‘canon’, trace its application to religious and secular texts, and then navigate some leading arguments in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century battles of the books. I do not propose an answer to the question of what the canon actually is, nor do I believe that, in fact, the academy would like the shutting of the book that would be the result, should

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anyone be able to provide that answer. The matter is endlessly complex: critics might, in fact, find their literary views at odds with their political ones. George A. Kennedy provides a useful summary of the history of the word canon: The word ‘canon’ comes from the Greek kanon (perhaps derived from a Semitic word for ‘reed’), meaning a straight rod or bar used by a weaver or carpenter, then a rule or model in law or art. In the fourth century B.C. Polycrates carved a statue called ‘The Canon’, which established aesthetic rules for the representation of the human figure. The earliest application of kanon to describe written texts is a statement in the third chapter of the Letter to Pompeius by Dionysus of Halicarnassus that Herodotus is the best canon (that is, ‘model’) of Ionic historiography and Thucydides of Attic. (2000, p. 106) In the Oxford English Dictionary, the words ‘canon’, ‘canonicity’, ‘canonical’, ‘canonize’ and ‘canonization’ are defined as follows (with reference to law, literature and value): canon, n.1 1) a. A rule, law, or decree of the Church; esp. a rule laid down by an ecclesiastical Council. the canon (collectively) = canon law: b. canon law (formerly law canon: cf. F. droit canon): ecclesiastical law, as laid down in decrees of the Pope and statutes of councils. (See Gratian, Dist. iii. 2.). gen. a. A law, rule, edict (other than ecclesiastical). b. A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or c. A standard of judgement or authority; a test, criterion, means of discrimination. scientific treatment of a subject; e.g. canons of descent or inheritance; a logical, grammatical, or metrical canon; canons of criticism, taste, art, etc. 4. The collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired. Also transf., any set of sacred books; also, those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic. 1885 Encycl. Brit. XIX. 211/1 The dialogues forming part of the ‘Platonic canon’. 7. Mus. a. A species of musical composition in which the different parts take up the same subject one after another, either at the same or at a different pitch, in strict imitation. ADDITIONS DECEMBER 2002: canon, n.1 a. Literary Criticism. A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now freq. in the canon). Also (usu. with qualifying word): such a body of literature in a particular language, or from a particular culture, period, genre, etc. b. In extended use (esp. with reference to art or music): a body of works, etc., considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field. Freq. with qualifying word.

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canonicity Canonicalness, canonical status, esp. the fact of being comprehended in the Canon of Scripture, or in any other sacred canon. canonical, a. (and n.) 1. Prescribed by, in conformity with, or having reference to ecclesiastical edict or canon law. 2. Of or belonging to the canon of Scripture. (Also used of other sacred books.) 4. gen. Of the nature of a canon or rule; of admitted authority, excellence, or supremacy; authoritative; orthodox, accepted; standard. 1796 Monthly Rev. XIX. 545 He remained the canonical geographer of the antients canonize, v. 1. trans. To place in the canon or calendar of the saints, according to the rules and with the ceremonies observed by the Church. 3. To deify, apotheosize. Obs. or arch. 4. fig. To treat as a saint or glorified person. 5. To make canonical; to admit into the Canon of Scripture, or (transf.) of authoritative writings. Canonization The action of canonizing; esp. formal admission into the calendar of saints. (Oxford English Dictionary
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Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon or Latin. Hence, a. Any ancient Greek or Latin writer; frequently in pl. for: The general body of Greek and Latin literature. b. in other literature. 3. One who adheres to classical rules and models (Opposed to romantic). (Oxford English Dictionary < http://dictionary.oed.com/)

These definitions of ‘classic’ as a noun and adjective show that it means, in literary terms, works of approved value and standard, originally seen as those of antiquity. The difference between ‘canon’ and ‘classic’ is the lack, in the latter, of notions of law and rule, although we see that a classic has to be ‘approved’ and of ‘acknowledged’ excellence. The definitions imply that it must be authentic. The definition of a classic work of literature has been explored notably by T. S. Eliot, Frank Kermode and Umberto Eco; we should acknowledge the shared features of the two terms, but note that ideas of ‘authenticity’ have been problematized by post-modernists. Post-modernism, in fact, will be seen to be the chief enemy of the canon and the classic. It is noteworthy that we have witnessed not classic wars, but canon wars, despite the fact that the texts being either attacked or defended are classics as well as canonical works. Canonical arguments have arisen, it seems, as a result of the word’s connotations. Why is the literary canon called what it is? The first use of the word in a secular sense can be traced back to David Ruhnken, as Jan Gorak has proved (1991, p. 51). Ruhnken wrote, in his Critical History of the Greek Orators (1768), ‘From the great abundance of orators . . . [the great Alexandrian teachers of oratory] drew up into a canon at least ten they thought most important’ (Pfeiffer, 1968, p. 207). This understanding of the meaning of ‘canon’ was, nonetheless, not a widely held one: the Oxford English Dictionary, as quoted, gives 1885 as the first instance of its having a literary application. This can be aligned with Matthew Arnold’s pleas in Culture and Anarchy (1882) and the words of George Gordon, an early Professor of English Literature at Oxford: ‘England is sick, and English literature must save it’ (Baldick, 1981, p. 156). For Arnold, and, later, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, the loss of religion as a moral centre to society meant that a replacement must be found: a set of values and standards, a collection of the best of artistic productions or, as Terry Eagleton has suggested, ‘a moral ideology for the modern age’ (1983, p. 27). The rise of English literature within universities did not, in fact, magically accompany the decline of religion in the nineteenth century: the process was very gradual, and certainly at the end of the nineteenth century the number studying English was relatively small, within a handful of institutions. It has been convenient, however, as Frank Kermode does, to see the academy as an institution which replaces the Church, operating with the same rules: the institution with which we have to deal is the professional community which interprets secular literature and teaches others to do so. There are better-defined and more despotic institutions, but their existence does not

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invalidate the present use of the expression. . . . In so far as it has, undeniably, a political aspect, it trespasses on the world of power. (1979, pp. 72–73) Kermode is right to an extent: he also admits that the power of the institution is, in fact, rather weak. Nonetheless, the making of religious and secular parallels needs care. We need to question just how much power an institution does wield, and whether it is feasible to see literature as a tool of oppression, a view which has taken hold with some force. Canon-making is not a new activity, although it is only recently that it has been conventional to call it such. To better understand how it takes place, we should consider two examples of canon formation from the past. The first is the case of Marcion, who was instrumental in the forming of the modern Bible. In the second century AD, Marcion, believing the Old Testament to be inherently false, attempted to impose an abbreviated version of Luke’s gospel and ten purged Pauline letters as an alternative. He was viewed as a heretic, and the Church set about constructing an alternative canon in opposition. It is temptingly easy to view this as an obvious instance of the suppression of radicalism by conservatism but, as both Michael Payne (1991) and Kermode (1979) show, the process was dialogic: an alternative canon was proposed to counter Marcion’s. It also took a great deal of time: Kermode notes that, even for Roman Catholics, the canon was not closed until 1546, while the Protestant Church considered reopening its canon to admit the gospel of St Thomas, discovered in 1945 (p. 77). As Wendell V. Harris argues, the biblical parallels used in arguments against the canon are not helpful, if even theological debate allowed room for manoeuvre (1991, pp. 110–121). The second example is that of the canonization of Classical texts in very early times. Kennedy finds that In literate cultures, the role of priests and chiefs in canon formation is often replaced by that of scribes, grammarians, teachers, philosophers, or theologians. . . . Scribes in ancient Mesopotamia canonized The Gilgamesh; Confucian scholars in China canonized The Book of Odes. . . . In Greece, there was an informal process of canonization of the Homeric and Hesiodic poetry in the sixth century B.C, and in less than a century after their death Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were regarded as the three unrivaled writers of tragedy. (2000, p. 105) He goes on to explain how, in the third and second centuries BC, librarians and scholars in Alexandria made selective lists of the ‘poets they judged to be most deserving to be studied and edited’ (Kennedy, 2000, p. 105). Ruhnken’s 1768 work uses as its base the selections made by Aristarchus and Aristophanes of Byzantium: both scholar-teachers, and of a still earlier period.1 This activity has thus long been part of educational practice; it is partly ‘a natural human instinct, an attempt to impose order on multiplicity, to judge what is best out of

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many options, and to preserve traditional knowledge and values against the erosion of time and influences from outside the culture’ (Kennedy, 2000, p. 105), although it is pertinent now to ask if there is such a thing as a ‘natural human instinct’ in the light of post-modern problematizing of the subject. Canonmaking is also connected with the teaching and formation of language and, beyond that, the concept of nation. Although there are voices to the contrary, many scholars argue that what we now call the canon arose in England around the middle of the eighteenth century.2 This is certainly the view of Jonathan Brody Kramnick (1999) who, building on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), sees the canon as formed by a literary culture under duress. These cultural processes are complex and are not confined to the eighteenth century: they can be traced back to the Reformation and earlier.3 However, Kramnick makes several points which are important to the question of canon formation outside the eighteenth century as well as within it. The Augustans had, of course, revived the use of Classical literary models: Horace and Cicero were ‘classics’ in every sense of the word. Yet we see, as the eighteenth century progresses, a desire to find English rather than Classical models. Kramnick agrees with Anderson that the need for a canon came from the new, rising middle classes, seeking a tradition and literacy to give them an identity. As was the effect of Marcion’s endeavours, scholars attempted to form a canon (demonstrated by the canonization of Milton) as a response to the increasing commercialization of literature and the rise of the novel: an example of this would be Robert Anderson’s The Works of the British Poets, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical (1792–1807). Thus, by the end of the period Kramnick examines, the three ‘great’ writers are Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. For Joseph Warton, in his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope in 1756, only these three are ‘sublime’ and ‘pathetic’ (1969, p. xii); Kramnick sees Warton as ‘the great canonizer’ (p. 12), and for the former these poets evidence the ‘difficult and rarefied value of the past’ (p. 53). Antiquity is important, then; but sublimity is equally so, an idea with which Harold Bloom agrees, and to which I shall return. Such writing, illustrated more famously by Samuel Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare in 1755, shows a scholarly desire to form a literary tradition in opposition to market-place activity. The debates of this time repeat the response to Marcion’s canon, and also parallel literary debate in the last quarter of the twentieth century and beyond. One of Kramnick’s chief points is that the rise of the print culture enabled the formation of the canon: it is an obvious truth that a text needs to be available to be deemed a classic. The importance of the commercial element here, the emergence of literature into the marketplace and the tension between popular and classic, is illustrated by the scathing treatment of Eliza Haywood by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad (1728). For Pope, Haywood is an overt participator in what we now call popular culture, by writing primarily for money, and having nothing original to say. Business and

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aesthetics can be proved to have been as closely entwined in the eighteenth century as they are now, for the many published literary collections such as the 49-volume The English Poets (1765–1776), and biographical endeavours such as Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–1781), could not have come into being without commissions from booksellers and assured public demand. Further, Anderson’s idea of the emerging nation-state can be linked with the desire to standardize English. The immediate example is, of course, Johnson’s Dictionary. This application of rules and ordering goes hand in hand with Johnson’s view of great literature as transcending the historically specific: ‘nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature’ (1968, p. 263). Both show a desire to unify disorder. The desire to standardize English was shared by the rising middle class, who ‘embraced a more refined, upper-class speech as one means of expressing its political and social aspirations’ (Guillory, 1990, p. 241). The many anthologies of the time, as well as fulfilling a commercial demand for the best of each genre, were used in schools to teach and disseminate English. This parallels the activity of the Alexandrian and Byzantine scholars. Canon-making is proved to be a pedagogical activity, carried out to teach language and grammar.4 At the same time, the eighteenth century witnesses, broadly speaking, the movement of a generic see-saw where, as Alistair Fowler (1979) notes, the epic falls and the georgic and satire rise, the latter in turn declining towards the end of the century. The novel, as is well known, was regarded with suspicion, and, although Samuel Johnson had kind words for Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, it was not really until well into the nineteenth century that novelists were uniformly seen as engaged in serious literary activity. The work of Walter Scott caused this change in perception, whereas Jane Austen’s work was not truly celebrated until much later in the century; the conflict between the ‘small’ feminine domestic novel, and the ‘large’ masculine historical epic had begun. This brief analysis of eighteenth-century activity can be fruitfully aligned with the modern sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, in The Field of Cultural Production (1993), works of art have no value in themselves, and only acquire meaning when placed in a social context (thus, obviously, any object can be deemed a work of art should a cultural institution deem it one). Further, the production of art is equated with position-taking in a field. ‘High’ art – literature – is ‘autonomous’ and is allegedly not produced for commercial reasons, but to acquire only ‘symbolic’ capital (i.e. acclaim and respect). ‘Low’ art – popular fiction, in our case – is ‘heteronomous’ and is designed to gain ‘economic’ capital. Productions from either side of the field, as they gain power, build up their own capital, while the work of autonomous artists, as it is circulated through scholarship and education, attains what Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’. These works are invested with value such that other works of art acknowledge their influence and status. Cultural capital is thus, loosely speaking, a more thorough, socially based definition of canonicity.5

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The tension between the different positions in the field is visible in the eighteenth century, as we have seen: the careers of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood, both very early professional novelists, are just one example of it; the whole widening gulf between poetic and novelistic activity in the nineteenth century shows how it was ingrained in cultural life. The ‘Battle of the Books’ is a recurring event. By the end of the eighteenth century we can see a pattern where highly visible contemporary works occupy a ‘nonce’ canon (a rapidly changing periphery) as opposed to an emerging ‘diachronic’ canon (a ‘glacially changing core’) (Harris, 1991, p. 113). In this period novelists such as Haywood and (later) Ann Radcliffe are commercially successful, but only become part of an academic canon with the rise of scholarly interest in popular fiction and the Gothic, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Having traced what the canon means and has meant, and when canonization has taken place and why, we can now turn to the question of how this process takes place. A great many explanations for this have been offered. At this point it is worth reiterating that the term ‘classic’ might be used with the same effect. Equally, we might investigate how works become invested with ‘cultural capital’ or ‘value’. Payne’s Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (1996) links the entry on ‘canon’ to a much longer one on ‘value in literature’, and it is apparent that the latter term is in a sense more useful for scholars: it can have aesthetic or commercial meaning, and is thus close to Bourdieu’s ideas. Value is as problematic a term, now, as canon and classic, and various theorists have explicitly explored its implications at length: both Steven Connor (1992) and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988), for example, reject the idea that there is any such thing as a solid idea of inherent artistic value. Smith is the most extreme, in her refusal to permit the art object any solidity, and her views have indeed been argued with by Connor (1992) and Guillory (1993). All these critics should be consulted. As I suggested earlier, though, no matter how convincing these assertions may be, it is time to go back to the idea of art as something that can be measured in itself; recognition of the partially determined nature of evaluation must be balanced with assertion of the independent qualities of the artwork. Many, aside from the recent work of Crowther (2007), have argued along these lines, as we will see. We have already seen that works were canonized because they were seen to be the best: they either fulfilled a required standard for pedagogical use, or had what we would now call intrinsic value. This was the case with Johnson’s elevation of Shakespeare. Putative intrinsic value was the implied focus of Matthew Arnold’s work in the nineteenth century, where, in the introduction to Literature and Dogma (1873), he speaks of ‘Letters’ as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold, 1895, p. 19). It is widely accepted that Arnold was the founder of the ‘academic’ canon in his plea for the value of aesthetics against the rising philistinism and sensationalism of Victorian art. In direct descent from Arnold, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition asserts the

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moral value of literature through a very short list of novelists: Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad. However, there also arose ideas of art as an inherently non-moral activity: thus Oscar Wilde, in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, writes that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all’ and ‘All art is quite useless’ (2003, pp. 3–4). Wilde, unlike Arnold, and rather like the recent assertions of John Carey in What Good are the Arts? (2005), did not believe that art was a moral ideology. This position is shared by Harold Bloom in a number of his works, most significantly in The Western Canon (1994). Bloom tells us that he has selected his list of writers for their ‘sublimity’(1995, p. 2), paralleling the words of Joseph Warton, arguing that ‘aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions’ (1995, p. 7); and, further, stating ‘I myself insist that the individual self is the only method and the whole standard for apprehending aesthetic value’ (1995, p. 23). He finds that ‘The Western Canon . . . exists precisely in order to impose limits, to set a standard of measurement that is anything but political or moral’ (1995, p. 35). What Bloom does not manage to do, unsurprisingly, is offer a definition of what aesthetic value actually is, although he does make the interesting suggestion that ‘greatness’ might be shown by ‘strangeness’ and ‘originality’: ‘When you read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfilment of expectations’ (1995, p. 3). The problem here is an obvious one. While originality might give a work inherent artistic value, how much do that and ‘strangeness’ convey artistic merit? Would it not be possible for a novel to be strange and original and yet derivative in its use of language, too? Bloom would probably not agree with this, yet the question illustrates that both these judgements are ultimately subjective: it is as if a work has intrinsic value, and that is that, the matter being referred to some invisible, higher court of judgement, as Guillory finds (1990, p. 236). We shall see, in Chapter 5, how the work of Emma Tennant at times exemplifies postmodern refutations of the concept of originality, rejecting the romantic view of the artistic genius which Bloom seems to hold. It is also the case that Austen, often called the greatest female novelist, and sometimes the greatest novelist, works within established modes such as the courtship novel, investigates a small and recognizable world in the realist mode, uses comedy as a device, and supplies apparently consolatory happy endings. Although Bloom includes Austen in The Western Canon, her work sits somewhat uneasily with his definition of canonicity; we should not expect it to thus be always a reliable marker in contemporary cases. The sublimity of the aesthetically valuable work of art means, of course, that art is not quite useless, for it involves some idea of transcendence. For Bloom, art is a solitary activity, non-social (‘all that the Western Canon can bring one is

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the proper use of one’s own solitude’ (1995, p. 30)), and ‘The Canon, once we view it as the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written, will be seen as identical with the literary Art of Memory’ (1995, p. 17). A reader can join the great, then, in a way suggested by Alan Bennett in The History Boys: The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours (2004, p. 56). For Bennett, and his character Hector, this is not so much transcendence as companionship, yet it echoes Bloom’s sentiments: the position does not depend on historicity or what Bloom disparagingly calls attempts at ‘social selflessness’, but on a solid conception of author, character and reading subject as entities who can communicate with each other (p. 31). This is at odds with notions of the self as formed by ideological discourses, pre-eminent in post-modern criticism, which problematize this idea of canonical communication and transcendence. While this latter deterministic view of the subject cannot be denied, there is surely something patronizing in not allowing for the individual feelings experienced by readers. A text might be seen by some, then, to have intrinsic value if it speaks (now unfashionable) ‘universal truths’. Thus, for Johnson, Shakespeare rose above the historically specific; for the Romantics his eminence was retained while Pope (among many others) fell in favour. This sublimity might be either secular (as we have seen with Bloom), or religious, in the case of both T. S. Eliot and Northrop Frye. For Eliot, a profoundly Christian critic, in ‘What is a Classic?’ the ultimate and only classic writer is Virgil. Because of his lack of ‘provincialism’ he is seen to transcend the historically specific, in the same way as Dante.6 Eliot speaks of ‘a great ghost who guided Dante’s pilgrimage: who, as it was his function to lead Dante towards a vision he could never himself enjoy, led Europe towards the Christian culture which he could never know’ (1975, p. 131). The equally Christian Northrop Frye, according to Gorak, ‘projects an open canon emanating from desire, the universal desire to project mind into matter and the universal hope of self-transformation across space and time’ (1991, p. 150). The faith in the power of the artist, the vision of the sublime, and the religious possibilities of art can be viewed as a desire to write a grand narrative of the human condition, borne through artistic tradition: this concept is generally now treated with scepticism, although Charles Altieri notably argues that only models from the past that survive judgements can be moral arbiters for the future . . . the high canon transmits contrastive frameworks, exemplifies forms of imagination considered valuable in a culture, and provides figures

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of judgement for our actions. . . . Canons themselves may form the very society they lead us to dream of. (1984, pp. 56–59) Altieri, here, provides a recent addition to the conception of the canon followed by Arnold, Eliot and Leavis: for him literature, to pass the test of canonicity, must have been subjected to the test of time and repeated audiences. As we shall see shortly, Samuel Johnson, earlier in time, believed the same; as an idea it is close to Bloom in its neo-Platonic view of ‘forms of imagination’, and is utopian, suggesting (in contrast to Bloom) that works of art participate in society. Only the ‘high canon’ can do this: implicitly, the statement identifies ‘low’ culture as inferior, and rejects any idea of new works of art attaining high cultural capital. Bloom’s theory of artistic influence is well known: the creation of art comes from a struggle against ‘precursors’, where a son rises against a literary father, and produces work in competition (The Anxiety of Influence, 1973). This reiterates the idea that art is inherently non-social and, as Bloom terms it, elitist. A writer, by this argument, is canonized when another chooses to read or misread their work. For Bloom, ‘greatness recognizes greatness and is shadowed by it’ (1994, p. 10). This is seen as being the case with almost every writer who succeeded Shakespeare: ‘Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism and is founded upon a reading that clears space for the self, or that so works as to reopen old works to our fresh sufferings’ (1994, p. 11). This theory is generally understood to be a psychological one, but can be seen to hold outside this: Henry Louis Gates Jr agrees that ‘writers make canons, too, both by critical revaluation and by reclamation through revision’ (1992, p. 32), while A. S. Byatt agrees that ‘A canon is . . . what other writers have wanted to keep alive, to go on reading, over time’ (2001, p. 2). An artist may write in competition with another living or dead writer, or may acknowledge or attempt to recreate the style and practice of a literary ancestor or peer. There are countless examples of this, in cases varying from Walter Scott’s indebtedness to Maria Edgeworth, to the creation of the genre known as ‘chicklit’ by Helen Fielding in the 1990s, where a rush of near copies of her novel Bridget Jones’s Diary followed in quick succession. We should call to mind T. S. Eliot’s idea of the poetic and artistic tradition in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). Here, the writer is seen to add to and continue a process that can be likened to the idea of a universal, grand narrative; Eliot is right in suggesting that an author is not a solitary figure, his work independent of all other creations. Clearly, Bloom’s notion of artistic struggle is more likely to be historically specific, and does not allow room for ideas either of struggle between women writers, or for any contrasting idea for a community or sisterhood of them. As a thesis it is gendered in favour of the male, and has been argued against by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), and by Nina Auerbach (1978), among others. Nonetheless, although Byatt and Gates do not explicitly allow for gender, they can be proved to be right: Virginia Woolf can be seen to be a writer by whom subsequent novelists, both male and female, have been influenced.

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Mrs. Dalloway is a structural model for, among many, Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, while a longer genealogy can be found linking Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to Forster’s Howards End and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Although a feminist novelist may attempt to write against the canon, this is not always the case: there may be postmodern parody and pastiche; there may also be the use of classics as models, thus reaffirming their canonicity. Classics like the works of Austen and Woolf thus becomes Classics in their original meaning and understanding – worthy models for contemplation. ‘Originally the Canon meant the choice of books in our teaching institutions’, finds Bloom (1994, p. 16). Certainly, we have already seen that the drawing up of lists of great writers was inextricably linked to pedagogical notions, in very early times. Yet, are the canon and the curriculum the same thing? For Mark A. Eaton, ‘to become canonical a work must be taught over and over again’ (2001, p. 306); this builds on the views of Guillory (1993), who is in turn influenced by Bourdieu. Guillory finds that the educational system, as its most important function, distributes cultural capital and that the canon is ‘an effect of the syllabus as an institutional instrument’, for the educational system largely determines ‘who writes and who reads, as well as what gets read, and in what contexts’ (p. 19). There is an argument, indeed, for educational activity controlling the commercial side of literature: Jessica Munns finds that ‘anthologies, the modern vehicle of the canon’, are driven by ‘the economics of publishing, which is driven by what is taught’ (2001, p. 25). This is an exaggeration: it is not only what is taught that influences the market, but it certainly does have some effect. Thus, the institutional context is required to canonize. This reads value as attributed not personally, as Bloom suggests, but socially. Guillory suggests that An individual’s judgement that a work is great does nothing in itself to preserve that work, unless that judgement is made in a certain institutional context, a setting in which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the work, its continual reintroduction to generations of readers. (1993, p. 28) This links with Kermode’s ideas, as we have seen, and implies that success – reproduction – of any work will depend on current practice and interest in the academy, on scholarly activity beyond actual teaching practices. It has meant that previously forgotten black writers have been resurrected, novels previously deemed sensational have been re-examined, and once minor works, a notable example of which is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, have become canonical. A good British example of this type of canonization is Ann Radcliffe. Academic movements of the past thirty years, such as post-modernism, feminism, cultural materialism and post-colonialism, while demanding the destruction of the canon, have actually just created alternative canons (or, to put it more simply, lists). Following this line, rather than the academy teaching canonical works, it canonizes the works by teaching them and analysing them.

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Certainly, no matter how much we might disagree with the idea of the university as a power-wielding institution, it does make decisions that confer value on texts and, as Smith finds, the establishment at large is unlikely to sanction work that seriously challenges its own existence (1983, p. 34). It is worth considering how prepared academic institutions would be to teach and analyse non-standard English in the form of heavy dialect, slang, or even offensive work: the academy is perhaps not as open as it thinks. Critics who find that there is an essential difference between the canon and a curriculum tend to be those who are wary of recent academic tendencies to encompass formerly marginalized works. A. S. Byatt believes that making a canon is a very different thing from making a syllabus, and that the latter is a political activity (2001, p. 2); Harry Levin is in agreement with this idea, finding that ‘the books assigned for reading are not necessarily Great Books, whereas the very greatest masterpieces are allowed to go unread’ (1981, p. 360). Critics such as these are, perhaps, refusing to acknowledge that all art is political, for the creation of a canon can be just as ideologically loaded as the creation of a syllabus. Their arguments are familiar as a defence of the intrinsic value of literature above social and political concerns; however, there is a line of thinking that asserts the construction of the canon in quite a different way. The notion of the common reader is a tricky one that has been pondered since at least the eighteenth century and Samuel Johnson. It is linked, to put it in modern terminology, with the idea of a product being created to satisfy a reader’s expectations and needs: thus the rise of the novel, in Ian Watt’s famous thesis (1957), was a result of the rise of the middle classes. Editions of poetry, as we have seen, did come about for commercial reasons; however, the rise in book buying was reflected chiefly in the growth of circulating libraries and the profusion of novels that tried to emulate the pattern and success of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and, later Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic tales, among many others. The idea of a common reader has connotations of universality, today, and the ‘universal’ has been seen as no longer valid as a concept; yet, it does take us to the question of why works continue to have appeal over successive generations.7 We cannot, then, stress enough the role of the reader in the creation of a canon, for beyond commercial imperatives lie the changing literary tastes of the public. This has been discussed as early as 1757, by Hume, and in 1791 by Isaac d’Israeli; both found that literary fashions and tastes are what we would now call ‘relative’, and quite obviously vary from era to era.8 Activity within the academy may well exactly parallel topical issues in the media, as is the case today with multiculturalism, but the high place in bestseller lists of works of the fantasy, thriller and crime fiction genres has nothing to do with scholarly work. The fact of the clear popularity of these works has led to their absorption by cultural studies departments: still, they remain the property of a large reading public, in the same way that Warwick Deeping and P. C. Wren did early in the twentieth century, as did Marie Corelli and Ouida in the nineteenth. We should

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acknowledge, then, the ‘power of the people’ in forming what I call, in this book, the popular canon. This field defines itself against what is not, highbrow literary fiction, as Carey demonstrates in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). It is common, now, to assert that popular fiction is canonical. I think we need to remember that many writers of high literature have always been canonical in the sense that they have been extensively read outside the academy: the obvious examples are Austen, the Brontës and Dickens. Austen’s work has been identified as ‘popular literature’ by Ken Gelder, a useful term for this bridge between high literature and popular fiction (2004, p. 11). We have noted the rise of Shakespeare’s reputation in the eighteenth century: this was strongly dependent upon public appreciation.9 Much later, George Eliot’s novels continued to be read in the period between her death and the rise of critical interest in her work, while, however, the number of people actually reading Joyce has never been high, despite his high critical acclaim. Susan Gallagher (2001), in a perceptive article, uses the case of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) to suggest that a work can only function within the (undergraduate level of) the university if it does appeal to some level of common experience: Gallagher finds that the encountering of cultural difference within the novel is paralleled by the presentation of cultural similarities. The common reader is not the same as the public outside the academy: we do, however, encounter the idea of different ways of reading, of analytical analysis, perhaps, against the desire for narrative progression, encountering of conflict, or portrayal of material or emotional loss or gain. In the same way, one could argue that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) has become a canonical work not simply on the basis of its representation of colonialism, but through the story of Okonkwo and his family, a drama that is not culturally specific but recognizable universally. Reputation, as is well known, is a fleeting thing, whether it is seen in terms of the critical or the popular. Many critically esteemed writers of the post-war generation are only just about in print: a good example of this is Angus Wilson.10 Bestselling children’s writers such as Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl have been overtaken on the bookshelves and in the libraries by Jacqueline Wilson and J. K. Rowling, while one would be lucky to find a copy of anything by Marie Corelli anywhere. New generations often frown upon what their parents have liked, and it has been remarked that nothing can damage writers’ chances of survival more than popular approval in their own lifetime. Yet some ideas have been put forward as to why some authors do survive. Christopher Clausen, in ‘“Canon”, Theme, and Code’, builds on the writing of the philosopher Stein Haugom Olsen (1984) to offer us the idea of perennial thematic concepts. For Clausen, literary works can have universal features: he is interested in ‘why some books continue to be read and admired in a time or culture that is drastically different’ (1991, p. 202). He finds that A timeless theme is one that reminds us forcefully of the basic conditions of human life – its aspirations and its limits. Those conditions are larger and

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deeper than any culture or historical period. The broadest context that all men and women share is an ambiguous world into which we are born helpless; in which we love, hate, struggle, and suffer; in which we grow older and die. All cultures interpret these irreducible facts, often in strikingly different ways, but no culture can change them. For human beings, they are universal in the strictest sense. (pp. 208–209) Once again, the word ‘universal’ raises its problematic head. Clausen is not concerned with formal aesthetic value, but with placing individual works within a larger network of narrative. This is close to the work of Frye and, more recently, Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots (2004). It reiterates the human need for myth and narrative, whether it be to console, or to mirror experience. For Clausen, the great canonical work is Homer’s Odyssey, the originator of the archetypal quest narrative, which finds descendants in everything from Rider Haggard’s romances of Empire, to the Hollywood Indiana Jones film series. If we follow Clausen we can read Austen’s novels as love stories, dramas of struggle between young and old, and searches for material security: these matters are (as was the case with Nervous Conditions and Things Fall Apart) universal concerns, as are the integrating of love story and the struggle for survival in Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847).11 The arguments of Clausen and Gallagher are unfashionable in the light of post-modern relativity, and their points are hard to prove without conducting an impossibly wide survey of the reading public and asking questions of the dead. Yet they are ideas that need consideration; the work of Anita Brookner, for example, can be read in terms of perennial thematic concepts, as well as topical renderings of the experience of the exile. Works that are established as being the property of the non-academic public, part of the popular canon, may have their eminence increased by being transferred into other art forms, becoming films, plays, television adaptations, or by being represented visually in the fine arts. The novels of Austen and the Brontës have been repeatedly televised and filmed, and in fact have developed an industry of their own, based in Bath and Haworth respectively. The public now knows Austen as an example of Regency elegance, and the Brontës as Romantic spirits of the moors: the Brontë name, especially, is used as tag for local businesses.12 No matter how dubious this activity, it does mean that the cultural visibility of the author increases. Literary works, works understood as being canonical, can do this only if they operate within Bourdieu’s field of the popular. Thus, Virgil Nemoianu writes: Canons [are] an outcome of democratic pressures. I refer to canonical works as mediating between highbrow and lowbrow, or between curricular and commercial works. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales contains both courtly and popular literature, Shakespeare was imposed by popular demand against academic demurral. . . . It is not the case that canonical authors are imposed by oppressive elites. On the contrary, it is exactly when and if canonical authors

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For Nemoianu, unlike Bloom, the canon is the property not of an elite, but of a wide reading public: it parallels Gelder’s idea of ‘popular literature’. Nemoianu would surely argue that Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and Hardy are canonical, owing to the mediation between high and low. But what about Proust, James and Woolf? Although there have been recent films of novels by James and Woolf, their work could never be argued to be popular literature; however, they are continually investigated by scholars, and literary histories cite their achievement as great. Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748) is sometimes called the greatest novel ever written: yet the length means that the number of people reading it today is low. By this argument, Richardson, Proust, James and Woolf are not canonical: this is surely wrong. We should say, instead, that they belong to an academic canon, whereas Austen and the Brontës form part of both an academic and a popular canon.13 This idea reiterates some earlier points made about the fiction the public wants to read, and the novels in which publishing firms will invest. What I want to stress here, though, is that a text can be canonical only if it exists as a material object. It must be available in libraries, in bookshops for readers and students, and, perhaps now, online: the power of the internet and its resources, where so much is available, in fact challenges in itself the idea of the closely guarded canon. The availability of a piece of literature will depend upon several factors, the most obvious being printing, and Kramnick’s thesis shows that the rise of printing in the eighteenth century equalled the emergence of the canon. The importance of print culture is illustrated, further, by the economic boom of the 1980s, the growth of independent publishers and the rise of the high street bookshops, leading to the increased production and publishing of fiction.14 Equally, educational policies of the 1990s have seen more people than ever before studying literature at undergraduate level. We see a clear case of supply meeting demand, as courses change to include the work of once-forgotten writers. In the case of poetry, a study of the contents of anthologies will indicate literary fashion: a good example of this is David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (1999), a work which acknowledges recent interest in women poets and makes them available. A second factor is censorship, of which the most famous British example is Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960). The banning of a book may ironically work to increase interest in it, as was undoubtedly the case with Lawrence, and, more recently, with Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses (1988).15 Likewise, in earlier times before the onset of printing, works ‘fell out of the canon’ because they were either lost or were not copied, as Kennedy notes. For example, ‘Sappho of Lesbos was the only woman writer included in any of the ancient canons; none

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of her works were copied into codex manuscripts and as a result most were lost’ (2000, p. 109). This takes us back to the question of taste and the matter of genre. Early medieval scribes, as Kennedy notes, in effect censored Greek lyric poetry through distaste for many of its themes: taste and censorship overlap (2000, p. 109). Likewise, although it is unusual for works in twenty-first-century Britain to be banned (the theatrical production of Bezhti in 2004 is a rare example), work that celebrates Western expansion and globalization, or that is out of touch with the advances in feminism and politics, is unlikely to fare well in the academy.16 In the publishing world, the pluralism we currently experience means that there are few unavailable genres: the novel, the biography, the history and the self-help book triumph in the bestseller lists, however, while poetry and the short story languish. As Alistair Fowler maintains, generic change shapes canons of taste and availability, and market forces determine a writer’s status (1982, pp. 214–215). For Samuel Johnson, literary worth depended on the test of time: To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative . . . no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem . . . what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood. (1968, p. 263) This has been a long-standing qualification for canonicity, where literature is valued because it has appealed to countless generations; it also links to the idea of universality, where appeal transcends specifics of time. For T. S. Eliot it was only ‘by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such’ (1975, p. 116); Bloom finds that ‘canonical prophecy needs to be tested about two generations after a writer dies’ (1994, p. 522): it is implicit, as Kennedy maintains, as early as the time of the Alexandrian scholars and Longinus’ On the Sublime (2000, p. 108). This idea was easy, really: it was a simple case of wait and see. The problem now becomes the posing of questions such as: how do we know if this writer is being read? At what point do we decide that they have crossed the margin of success? Does it matter if the academy has no interest in them? A further change is the growth of something which was omnipresent into something of a social phenomenon: the desire for new works, new faces and celebrity. Certainly, the publishing industry, from its inception, has thrived on novelty and even scandal, whether it be discussion as to the veracity of Pamela, the titillation in Ann Radcliffe, or the identity of the Brontë sisters. A work could attain high literary visibility by being a publishing and critical success, but it would not have a place in a serious canon. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s inclusion of then recent women such as Radcliffe, Burney and Edgeworth in her

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51-volume The British Novelists (1810) was a novelty: as John Skinner finds, she was a keen advocate of contemporary fiction, in a climate where anthologized work, given classic status by appearing in collections, would normally follow the rule of passing the ‘time test’ first (2001, p. 46). Similarly, scholarly work has for the greater part of its history focused on the ancient: it is only in the middle of the twentieth century that George Eliot and Charles Dickens appeared on syllabuses, for an Oxford student of English as late as the 1920s would find study stopping at 1830. In the past 30 years, the study of living writers has greatly increased: this has arisen as a result of the growth of theory and the politicization of literature. Writers might now be chosen for a syllabus because they appear to have something to say about issues of race or gender in the world we live in. This is a familiar idea: what is really interesting is the way the choice of these texts has paralleled events in the commercial world of publishing. The Booker Prize, which during the 1970s was a respected and lucrative prize, grew in the 1980s into a media-friendly event and maker of a contemporary canon. Its televising from 1980 coincided with a battle for the prize between two major figures, Anthony Burgess and William Golding; the following year, Salman Rushdie won with Midnight’s Children, an event often seen to herald the recognition of post-colonial fiction as a serious force. Rushdie went on to win the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993, and again ‘Best of Bookers’ in 2008; there is little doubt that, whereas for Iris Murdoch, William Golding and Paul Scott the award had been to some extent a recognition of lifetime achievement, here was a case of a reputation being made. Rushdie is one of the most studied of contemporary writers, with an MLA ‘score’ of 951, more than Doris Lessing, who has been publishing for nearly 30 years longer. His canonicity is assured by his influence on new novelists (as we shall see later); the Booker cannot but have helped his successful trajectory. The Booker is surrounded by countless literary prizes: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize is older, the Costa Prize (formerly the Whitbread) gives a bigger financial reward, and the David Cohen Prize is more valued by writers: it is as if, as James English (2002) amusingly puts it, we have an Alice in Wonderland situation where everybody has won, and all must have prizes (p. 109). Writers who win are now being chosen for syllabuses because of the merit attached to winning the Booker, particularly if they in turn are writing in line with currently fashionable academic theories. However, only a minimal number of novels are actually put forward for consideration for the Booker longlist: commercial preferences will, to some extent, mould what we see as the contemporary canon. This may be contingent on, to take a cynical view, the marketability of the writer, and how much media interest they can generate (as was probably the case with the revelations of D. B. C. Pierre’s drug-filled past when he won the prize in 2003). In short, the persona of a writer is becoming increasingly more important: Iris Murdoch became ‘famous’ for her illness and decline, rather than for her literary work.

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Nonetheless, although the Booker can increasingly be viewed as a commercial exercise, Bradbury is surely right in asserting that anyone trying to keep the accountancy of good recent fiction will find the record of the Booker – so long as one includes shortlisted titles as well as winners – a useful, illuminating chart of good fiction published from Britain from the turn of the Seventies onward. (1993, p. 381) As English (2005) demonstrates, if we move in time from a wide post-war canon to a contemporary canon, the literary prize is the chief force governing prestige; in a world where the amount of fiction published is so huge, it can help to highlight the work of original writers and can, in the case of the Orange Prize, bring forward work that has been underrepresented. This, surely, is something to be applauded. The Harvest of the Sixties (1995) is Patricia Waugh’s term for the changes in culture, society and scholarly activity in the latter part of the twentieth century, and as a phrase it is as good as any to suggest the process of ‘looking to the margins’ which began in the 1970s. This has meant that the cultural authority of established literary figures such as Shakespeare, Dickens and D. H. Lawrence has been historicized and questioned, while interest has grown in marginalized literature: black, Asian, gay, lesbian, working-class and women’s writing, for example. The reputations of post-war writers who both write from the cultural centre, and are burdened with the additional weight of previous popularity, have suffered duly: perhaps the most notable instances are William Golding and Kingsley Amis. A typical statement is this from Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Nothing so well exemplifies the exclusion of women from the profession of English studies as the Penguin Modern Masters series, edited by Frank Kermode. Kermode proclaims his task thus: ‘By Modern Masters we mean the men who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age . . .’. . . . Need I say that all, in both lists, are male? Nor is the exclusion of women from either list immediately self-explanatory. . . . There is no male or female viewpoint; there is only the human viewpoint, which happens always to have been male. (1986, pp. 22–23) Heilbrun is undoubtedly right here: to quote just one example of many, it is interesting that Clausen, in his defence of the universal narrative, celebrates the male hero of Homer. Notable objectors to the canon, dubbed by Bloom the ‘School of Resentment’, have included Tompkins (1985), Gates (1992), Kolodny (1985), Lauter (1983, 1987) and, much earlier, Gramsci (1971). What Bloom sees as ‘resentment’ is a commendable and necessary attempt to rewrite literary history and find a place for formerly marginalized voices in syllabuses and scholarship; the problem is one of aesthetic quality. Faced with the choice of two texts, do we ask a student to study an accepted classic by someone such as

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Henry James, or a work by a little-known woman writer such as Rhoda Broughton or Eliza Lynn Linton, when, no matter what our political inclinations, the classic seems of a higher literary quality than the non-canonical work? The problem facing women writers is that there has been a long-established tradition of female novelists, although they were seen to have been doing essentially the same thing as their male counterparts. This is certainly Ian Watt’s view of Austen; his view of the novelist, like that of Bloom and F. R. Leavis, has come to be seen as conservative. A consequence of Austen’s place in a ‘conservative’ canon has been the attempt to rewrite the novelist and see her as a subversive feminist, or to dislodge her from her centrality, and start the female tradition much earlier with Aphra Behn. As a result, through the work of Dale Spender (1986), Janet Todd (1989) and Jane Spencer (1986), and the publishing houses Virago and Broadview, writers such as Sarah Scott, Charlotte Lennox and Jane Barker have become a common part of syllabuses and scholarly work. The tendency of this work is to historicize the novelists, and analyse them in terms of the social and cultural conditions within which they wrote, or to see them as part of a female tradition or community, rather than evaluating them through formalist readings, a practice which fell out of favour for some time but is now making a welcome return. The excavation of marginal, once-forgotten women writers has been accompanied by re-readings of central figures: the famous example, applying to a later period, is the hidden anger uncovered by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). This work is absolutely vital in terms of literary history and politics, but the discoveries are not necessarily masterpieces. An example of this might be Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall (1749), a book which is highly interesting as a concept – an early female utopia, almost – but lacking style, substance and narrative drive (as is often the case in utopian and dystopian fiction). This academic ‘decentring’ finds its popular equivalent in the rise of publishing houses such as Virago in the 1970s, the material publication of the rediscovered texts, and, on a contemporary level, the much-disputed Orange Prize for fiction from 1996. This prize, which is given to women novelists writing in English from any country, is acknowledged to have arisen owing to the fact that, in 1991, only one woman (Michèle Roberts) made the shortlist for the Booker Prize, while Angela Carter was yet again excluded. The Booker was, in the eyes of Fay Weldon (1994) and many others, an unfair reflection on women’s literary achievement. Yet objectors, many of them women writers such as Byatt and Brookner, felt that, once the new prize was established, it was ghettoizing women in a dangerous way and suggesting they were unable to compete with male writers.17 The opening out of the literary canon and the inception of the Orange Prize both show the same procedure at work: the politicization of literature, and great concern about how evaluation has taken place. The Orange Prize has scored some considerable points, not the least of which is the selection of Andrea Levy to win the prize for her 2004 novel Small Island, a tale of racial

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tension in post-war London that broke records by winning the Whitbread Novel Prize too. Yet it seems that Levy could not but be a political choice, given the subject matter. No one would want to deny Levy her acclaim – but was Small Island the best novel written by a woman in 2004? The most dangerous and silly evidence of the use of literature to fight ideological battles came with the famous events at Stanford in the mid-1980s. John Sutherland (1991), himself a notable advocate of the democracy of popular fiction, gives a useful discussion of this in ‘Down with DWEMs’: a visit of Jesse Jackson to the Stanford campus was greeted by 500 students chanting ‘Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Western Culture’s got to go!’ (pp. 17–18). Sutherland’s verdict is that the story is a product of overblown media sensationalism; that practices are neither swamped in political correctness, nor reactionary, but much as they always have been, accommodating change in a rather boring way. Yet the protests illustrate the degree to which literature has been hijacked, to fight political battles with which it is not altogether concerned. Contemporary fiction which is overinvolved with politics can become didactic and diagrammatic, lacking in imaginative resonance; for now, I think we should admit that if we take a canonical eighteenth-century novel such as Tom Jones (1749), it is hard to find a work by a woman writer of the time that is as good, at least until we get to Burney, a quarter of a century later. There is a reason for this, of course: most women of the time lacked both educational opportunities and mobility in life, factors which enriched Fielding’s powers. These are matters for investigation in terms of cultural history, and we can applaud the fact that, with increasing social reforms, novelists have appeared of the calibre of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch; nonetheless, faced with Tom Jones or the best of its nearcontemporaries, The Female Quixote, I would, despite the merits of the latter, argue that Fielding’s is the classic, canonical work. Some of the reasons for this are that Lennox’s work is a burlesque and works only on the level of comedy, whereas Fielding’s novel is impressively, symmetrically structured, builds on the development of the ‘comic epic in prose’ begun in Joseph Andrews (1742) (and is thus original), and reflects on the society of its time, beginning perhaps the tradition of the ‘state-of-the nation’ novel. In terms of contemporary writing, the result is that there has been an explosion of interest in studying women writers who either can be fitted to a political position, or are in line with current theoretical trends: obvious examples are Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters. These theories – in the case of women novelists, a notable one is Hélène Cixous’s ‘écriture feminine’ – are in themselves, of course, political. The tendency has been to push forward Carter, Lessing and others who disavow the realist novel and the omniscient narrator, and evidence of this scholarly trend can be found in the monographs which are now starting to appear at a somewhat faster pace than before; in the chapters that follow we will discover how the novelists in question either feature or fail to feature in these works, which are strong evidence of what the academic canon is today.

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To conclude this chapter, we turn to what I see as one of the most useful theories of canonicity, the idea of ‘perpetual modernity’ propounded by Frank Kermode in Forms of Attention (1985). Kermode’s position is an unusual one. Seen earlier in this chapter as the advocate of ‘masters’, and frequently a hearty defender of the canon (in Forms of Attention, Hamlet is chosen as an exemplary canonical text), he insists nonetheless that value is not intrinsic to any work of art, and that literature can only be canonical by being interpreted by successive generations: ‘Opinion is the great canon-maker’, he finds (p. 4). A text is seen in terms of the ‘shadow and substance’ metaphor: it is incomplete without its shadow of discussion and interpretation. Thus, sacred writings have, in the past, become ‘as good as dead’ when people have stopped talking about them (p. 74). These discussions are not dependent upon the academy, for Botticelli is proved by Kermode to have been brought back into the canon by passionate, nonacademic artists. For Kermode, each time a text is interpreted, it becomes a new object; it therefore has an inherent openness, an ability to be constantly remade. There can be no interpretation that cannot provoke a contrasting argument: once this stops, and the matter is closed, the text is dead. This emphasis on the reader as creator of meaning puts Kermode in line with post-modern theory while defending the value that surrounds classic texts. In short, ‘the only rule common to all interpretation games, the sole family resemblance between them, is that the canonical work . . . must be assumed to have permanent value and . . . perpetual modernity (which is really the same thing)’ (p. 62). Kermode’s words are strikingly similar to those of Italo Calvino in Why Read the Classics (2000). For Calvino, a classic text gives a ‘sense of discovery on each re-reading’, and has never exhausted all it has to say (p. 5). It is thus, again, perpetually modern. Further, ‘A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off’ (p. 6). Calvino sees the meaning of the text as more solid than Kermode, but both believe that the classics do survive by being read and interpreted anew. They are classics both within the academy and for the successive generations who interpret them; this idea of perpetual modernity in fact shares much with both Johnson and Clausen’s ideas of survival over time and universality; as before, Austen (who, it should be clear by now, I am seeing as the canonical female novelist) survives testing by this theory, for different studies have proved that she is both a reactionary Tory and a latent feminist, while recent adaptations have brought out post-colonial elements in her work.18 There is, it seems, still plenty to say about Austen; she is debated, and thus alive, modern and canonical. Attempts to try to state what the canon(s) is (are) have resulted, in one case, in the following: 1. Potential Canon. The entire surviving written and oral literature. 2. Accessible Canon. The available portion of the above. 3. Selective Canons. Lists: In syllabi, anthologies, reviewers’ choices.

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4. Official Canon. A blend of these lists. 5. Personal Canon. What individuals value. 6. Critical Canon. Works, or parts of works, repeatedly examined in articles and books. 7. Canon. A closed, authoritative set of texts, for example, The Bible. 8. Pedagogical Canon. Not the same as the critical canon. 9. Diachronic Canon. A ‘glacially changing core’. 10. Nonce Canon. A rapidly changing periphery, for example, highly visible contemporary writers. 11. Monolithic Canon. Explained by manner in which certain texts swiftly enter diachronic core, or move to edge (Harris, 1991). This list, where Harris has added five categories to the six suggested by Fowler (1979), illustrates that there is no such thing as a canon, but instead various bodies of work important to different groups of people, and existing at different times. How, we should ask, though, can there be eleven types of canon? As Hawthorn writes: After all, although the Protestant and Catholic Churches may disagree about canon and apocrypha, they all agree that only one of them can be correct. But were a church suddenly to state that no one canon had absolute authority, as canons only represented the needs and viewpoints of particular churches, then the idea of the canon as somehow linked to divine origin and authority would inevitably be open to question. . . . This at any rate is what appears to have happened in literary-critical circles. For when feminist critics started to construct a rival canon or canons, not always as a replacement for the official canon but as an alternative to it, then this struck at the claim to universality that lay behind the idea of a single canon. For if there were several canons, then, in the traditional sense, there was no canon. (2000, p. 35) We might argue from this that the term canon has become meaningless, after its long journey from 1768; surely, though, it is at the very least a convenient term in literary study. As this book progresses, we can acknowledge and demonstrate the existence of an academic canon (high literature) and a popular canon (dependant on commercial forces, and often embracing high literature through the large sales and cultural visibility of literary prize winners). Kermode wisely states that ‘A canon was originally, and still in principle is, a list; and any such list, to be useful, has to be selective. That is why the opponents of traditional canons usually seek to replace them with new ones’ (1993, p. 19). Doris Lessing, in the following, is eloquent and inspiring, but just how applicable is this dream to education today? It did look for a while as if the recent student rebellions might change things, as if their impatience with the dead stuff they are taught might be strong enough to substitute something more fresh and useful . . . during the lively

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Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon time in the States, I had letters with accounts of how classes of students had refused their syllabuses, and were bringing to class their own choice of books, those they found relevant to their lives. The classes were emotional, sometimes violent, angry, exciting, sizzling with life. Of course this only happened with teachers who were sympathetic, and prepared to stand with the students against authority. (2002, p. 18)

Within the academy, like it or not, lists and selections have to be made. These are syllabuses: they are political, and today wonderfully varied and open, where a student is likely to read Joseph Conrad alongside Chinua Achebe. A canon, however, has always been an imaginary concept – Clausen and Nemoianu are surely right. Listing and classifying is part of a human desire for order and tidiness, and it is very culturally apparent now, with the BBC Big Read being only one example. There is so much fiction being published, around 7,000 titles a year, that the Booker Prize and its offshoots are if nothing else a simple way in: a guide. We have seen only some of the many arguments that have been made about the canon, but we have discovered that works may become valued through a mixture of scholarly and pedagogical activity, commercial manoeuvring, inherent following of hidden themes, or perpetual modernity, and that authors receive and have always received acclaim in either academic or popular fields. As we continue, and consider how Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Ruth Rendell and Emma Tennant fare in line with these theories, further specific ideas will come to light. Canonicity, it is becoming apparent, is a complex affair. I think it is our duty to admit, meanwhile, that we are sometimes attracted to works that establish transcendence, or that can make some sort of artistic order out of the mess we see around us; to works where a hand reaches out from the past. We cannot possibly know whose work is going to survive, but let us bear in mind that Kermode’s theory of perpetual modernity proved good when Henry V, in a National Theatre production in 2003, made its implicit subject the invasion of Iraq. There may not be a canon in its original sense, but it can be proved that some texts become classics, constantly remade and rebuilt. If the answer to the theory of the canon question is that there is, in fact, no such thing, we have a conclusion where nothing is concluded, as in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. It does mean, instead, that we inhabit pluralism: as Jessica Munns rather nicely puts it, ‘The canon is dead: long live pick and mix’ (2001, p. 26). The onus is on the audience, as it always has been, to choose Shakespeare, or Zadie Smith, or Elizabeth Jane Howard – or all three.

Chapter 2

Iris Murdoch

Theories are only theories until they are applied: it is time to turn to the central figure of this book, the late Iris Murdoch. Murdoch’s work and literary reputation deserve detailed examination, and now is, perhaps, a particularly useful time to consider her oeuvre and her literary legacy: it is over 50 years since she published her first novel, and 10 years since her death. Her reputation is currently problematic. Although her philosophy has played an ever larger part in leading debates, her novels, viewed by some as the best of their era, are seen by others as outdated and unfashionable. If, as Bloom and Byatt have suggested, canonical work is work that new writers read and respond to, then Philip Hensher’s words might be significant: he felt that ‘her serious reputation is at a low point, and the flaws and longueurs of her work are all too evident’ (2001b, p. 36). In his introduction to A Fairly Honourable Defeat he writes that he has variously thought of Iris Murdoch as a bad good writer, a good bad writer, and that he can’t describe the novel as ‘great’ (2001a, p. ix). A. N. Wilson, novelist and long-time Murdoch champion, is seen to acknowledge that her reputation is low (2003, p. 11). This, of course, begs a certain question. Hensher and Wilson’s words are sweeping and do not explain how they arrive at this summary. We need to remember that both Hensher and Wilson are novelist-journalists (they might, in earlier times, have usefully been called ‘gentlemen of letters’). Their work reviewing new fiction brings them into contact with current literary ‘chatter’, but this is far from being the same as scholarly opinion. Nonetheless, as a halfway house between the purely commercial and the literary, this ‘quasischolarship’ is indicative. It reveals something about the current thinking of novelists and of readers, so can shed light on both contemporary literary activity and the reading public which creates the popular canon. For a long period, from the publication of Under the Net in 1954, until the mid-1980s, Murdoch was seen as one of Britain’s most important contemporary novelists. Reviews of her early novels praised her work. She was seen as ‘the most gifted of young English novelists . . . no other novelist now writing in England except Elizabeth Bowen can match her in her ability to draw characters completely’ (Poore, 1957, p. 34); the Times Literary Supplement found that ‘The Bell places her without doubt in the front rank of British novelists working

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today . . . the conjunction of a brilliant imagination and a passionate concern for conveying intellectual and moral concepts is so rare among young contemporary novelists’ (Review of The Bell, 1958, p. 640). This novel cemented her serious reputation: Anthony Burgess, for example, included it in Ninety-Nine Novels (1984). As academic work was published on Murdoch, the claims to greatness continued. To cite just a few of many: Kingsley Widmer felt that the ‘sheer intelligence of A Severed Head and An Accidental Man could not be found among her contemporaries’ (1982, p. 37); Louis L. Martz called her ‘the most significant novelist now living in England’ (1986, p. 57); Bloom identified her as having the style of the age (1986, p. 7). She was given serious attention by Lorna Sage, Bradbury and Joyce Carol Oates; for Byatt she was ‘aware, in a way I think no other English novelist is aware, of the importance for our cultural life of the decay of believed Christianity, the loss of a sense of central authority’ (1994, p. 317). Murdoch’s death, unsurprisingly, resulted in glowing tributes. The front page of The Guardian, on 8 February 1999, included comments from Bradbury – ‘if I was to compile a list of the best five English writers since the war, she would be up there’, A. N. Wilson – ‘She wrote about six very good novels which will still be being read in 50 years time’, and from Ruth Deech (principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford), – ‘I think her work immeasurably improved the canon of great English works of literature and philosophy’(all quoted in Ezard and Gentleman, 1999a, p. 1). In the same edition, Byatt called her ‘the most important novelist writing in my time’, and Sebastian Faulks felt that ‘the perspective of time will place her magically bewitching but intellectually austere novels at the top of British fiction in the second half of the twentieth century’(Ezard and Gentleman, 1999b, p. 3). Melvyn Bragg likewise found her ‘one of the greatest novelists writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century . . . her place in English literature is secured’ (Ezard and Gentleman, 1999b, p. 3). Peter Conradi (1999) went still further and opened his obituary with the claim that she was one of the best of the entire twentieth century; Bloom felt that, after her death, there were ‘no first rate writers left in Britain’ (Coles, 2000). This is, however, only one side of the matter. For all the times in which Murdoch has been seen to have the seriousness of Golding, or the dark comedy of Dostoevsky, she has been derided for her melodrama, heavy-handed symbolism, style, poor characterization and implausibility. The following is representative of a feeling that took hold as early as the 1960s: ‘The appeal . . . is to a readership which seeks the pleasures of fashionable fiction tempered by a flattering sense of intellectual weight’ (Dawson, 1983, p. 224). The writer then quotes an extract of Murdoch’s prose which he calls ‘banal’, and closes with to what extent is Miss Murdoch as a novelist worth our serious and sustained attention? The implicit claims her novels make, their increasing portentousness, bear no relation to the quality of the writing. The farcical liveliness has

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faded, and it seems that she has immersed herself so completely in the ludicrous that she can no longer see that it is ludicrous. (p. 231) As we shall see, Murdoch’s serious reputation, equivocal from early in her career, took a nosedive in the 1980s, and claims are made now both for assured canonicity, and for her status being in question. Let us turn to some further evidence of Murdoch’s canonicity over the years. Measured against other post-war women writers in English, for amount of books and published articles, Murdoch is beaten only by Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.1 Since the early 1960s, there has been, and continues to be, a burgeoning scholarly drive to investigate her novels. The published criticism ranges from Freudian and mythic studies, to intertextual analyses and Derridean deconstruction. There have been five conferences on Iris Murdoch – the first two overseas, the latter three a now established event from the Iris Murdoch Society. These conferences now pay their own way (a rare occurrence), and are oversubscribed: papers are rejected. The proceedings of the 2004 conference were published (Rowe, 2006) (again, this is not always the case); at the same time, Kingston University celebrated the opening of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, owing to its acquiring of Murdoch’s unfinished manuscripts, and of much other material. This solidifies the potential for scholarly interest to continue. During the 1980s, academic activity on Murdoch was at its peak, allowing the publication of ‘Canonizing Iris Murdoch’, a meta-critical article analysing recent scholarly activity (Burke, 1986). Such an article could only come to fruition if the body of work on a writer, and interest in them, were high. Further evidence of Murdoch’s canonicity is indicated by Ph.D. theses on her work being published, and the republication of Byatt and Conradi’s monographs.2 Nonetheless, there is a problem when we come to Murdoch’s standing in critical literature on post-war fiction, and among other women novelists. Murdoch, Spark, Lessing and Drabble are no longer the centre of these studies: the field is led by the late Angela Carter, with Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters and Zadie Smith providing strong support. There is one notable exception, Dominic Head’s Cambridge Introduction to Modern Fiction (2002), in which Murdoch’s moral philosophy of fiction, the capacity she saw in the novel as a form, supports Head’s argument, with a section on Murdoch closing the book. Head does, however, right from the outset, acknowledge that his thesis is an unfashionable one (p. 2). From 1999, Vintage reissued Murdoch’s novels in handsome new editions, as part of their Vintage Classics range. The status of classic is, of course, a marketing ploy here – being seen as a classic will, presumably, persuade a reader to buy a novel, as the work has a cultural stamp of approval. The editions come with introductions by some high-calibre novelists and critics: Elaine Feinstein, A. S. Byatt, Valentine Cunningham, Philip Hensher, Karen Armstrong and Candia McWilliam. Vintage have reported that the novels are selling ‘steadily

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and well’ (Byatt, personal communication, 27 October 2003). The steadiness of Murdoch’s readership is indicated by the existence of the Iris Murdoch Society, which has branches in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, its members being both scholars and non-academic readers. In the recent 1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die, we find six of Murdoch’s novels included – the same number as Atwood, more than Toni Morrison, and more in fact than any other post-war British woman novelist. A poll from Orange to find the greatest novels by women writers placed The Sea, the Sea at 29th, and The Bell (1958) at 48 (Matthews, 2003, p. 5). None of Murdoch’s novels featured in the top 200 of the BBC Big Read. However, her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as 1 of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century (The Modern Library: 100 Best Novels, http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/ 100bestnovels.html). Murdoch’s work, then, is in print: it is part of what Fowler (1979) calls the ‘accessible’ canon. There is a steady scholarly interest in her work, yet the novels are not at the forefront of literary discussion. They have been, and they could be again, for Murdoch was, in her lifetime, the focus of a great deal of academic attention, and her novels elicited enough discussion to form a solid part of Fowler’s ‘nonce’ canon. Under the Net, in 1954, was not Murdoch’s first published work. The previous year, she had brought out Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, which was the first work on the philosopher published in Britain: with hindsight, we can say that Murdoch brought Sartre to Britain. Her twin career as a philosopher and as a novelist cannot be stressed enough. Although the reading public of Britain have been known to view philosophers with a mixture of nervous respect and disdain, it meant that Iris Murdoch’s was a name associated with intellectual seriousness and, it may have been thought, ‘high’ literature. For the rest of her life, Murdoch continued to read and write philosophy, and was, in fact, preparing a work on Heidegger until Alzheimer’s overtook her. She had read Greats at Somerville College, Oxford, and taught philosophy at St Anne’s, there, until the 1960s. Later published philosophical works were The Sovereignty of Good (1970), The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). Murdoch, over the years, would vehemently deny that she ‘put’ philosophy into her novels: I feel in myself such an absolute horror of putting theories or ‘philosophical ideas’ as such into my novels. I might put in things about philosophy because I happen to know about philosophy. If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships; and in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. (1997, pp. 19–20) This has not, however, convinced her readers and critics. The first published books on Murdoch, those by Byatt (1965) and Peter Wolfe (1966) made their

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central point the investigation of Murdoch’s philosophy in her fiction: this would continue to be the central focus of scholarly work until the late 1970s. A novel such as The Time of the Angels (1966) is seen by Martz (1986) and Rice (1995) as a truly philosophical novel; Martha Nussbaum would offer readings of The Black Prince (1973) and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) as part of a conference on Murdoch’s moral philosophy in 1994.3 Philosophers such as Stuart Hampshire (2001), Alasdair MacIntyre (1982) and Simon Blackburn (1992), by way of review, also offered commentary on her work. Murdoch, as has been well documented, was an opponent of the thencontemporary trends in philosophical thought, which focused on language, and a deterministic conception of the human. Her moral philosophy was unfashionable, until at least the 1980s; with the ‘ethical turn’, an interest in humanism has returned, allowing things to be said such as the following: Murdoch has anticipated and shaped many of the issues central to recent ethics, including the relation between human identity and ideas of the good, the effect of the modern critique of religion on moral life and thought, the relation between ethics and literature and the contemporary debate about liberalism. Over the past forty years Murdoch’s diverse writings have influenced a generation of moral and religious thinkers. (Antonaccio and Schweiker, 1996, pp. xi–xii) The situation we are at now is one where, judging by activity such as the spread of papers offered at a conference of the Iris Murdoch Society, interest in Murdoch’s philosophy equals and possibly overtakes that in her novels.4 In philosophical terms, she was ahead of her time. In spite of Murdoch’s insistence, it seems that most critics would agree with Rubin Rabinowitz: The futility of Murdoch’s masking of the ideas in her novels, of her denials in interviews that she is a philosophical novelist, should be obvious to the reader who has managed to get through the necessary background material. . . . Murdoch is as involved with ideas as Conrad was with the sea. (1976, p. 330) or with Ray Monk: Iris Murdoch’s repeated insistence that philosophy and literature are quite distinct, and that her novels should not be read as if they were philosophical treatises, is one to which she herself did not always adhere . . . while it [A Word Child (1975)] is assuredly not a ‘novel of ideas’, one would have to be entirely ignorant of Murdoch’s non-fictional writing not to notice that it is suffused throughout with the themes that dominated her philosophical thinking. (2002, p. vii) Murdoch can clearly be read as a philosophical novelist, then, which allies her work with Bourdieu’s concept of autonomous art. A further, connected

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reason for this would be the overall and more general complexity of the works. Here is Byatt, in 1965: I began with a very simple, nagging curiosity to know exactly what Miss Murdoch was talking about, what sort of moral statement she was making, what were the ideas behind her novels. They presented themselves, it seemed to me, like puzzles out of which a plan of ideas, a scheme of references could be extracted for examination, with some effort. (p. 206) Conradi feels that ‘If Iris had a “discoverer”, A. S. Byatt might merit the title’ (2002, p. 518): we should question, then, what prompted the seminal work to be written. For Byatt, the novels were problems, and needed solving. The difficulty of the ideas behind the novels becomes a challenge for the scholar; if Murdoch is a philosophical novelist, she does not appear to be a simply didactic one, and the complexity actually proves a bonus in terms of academic attention. Although Rice remarks that The Time of the Angels is Murdoch’s ‘most intellectually demanding work’ (1995, p. 130) and is puzzled that there has not been interest in it as a philosophical novel, we might note by way of contrast the fact that The Unicorn (1963) is the subject of two published books solely on that novel (Detweiler (1969); Backus (1986)). If we include articles and papers, it is the Murdoch novel with one of the highest amounts of published criticism; it is also one of her most baffling books. The same is the case with The Black Prince, the novel at the centre of the Murdoch canon, winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and seen by many scholars as Murdoch’s finest work. Although it has the narrative drive of a thriller, it is the novel which is furthest away from popular fiction, announcing its fictionality, and closing with four ‘postscripts’. It uses the myth of Apollo and Marsyas, makes reference to Hamlet, and is acknowledged by Rowe to be ‘even more baffling than The Unicorn’ (personal communication, 3 June 2003). A Severed Head (1961) likewise has a strong sense of underlying pattern, which Byatt decodes in Degrees of Freedom (1994) in terms of Freud. Both these novels have more material published about them than the rest of Murdoch’s oeuvre. The complexity does not have to be simply a case of intricate philosophical ideas. The Black Prince has a complicated narrative structure; An Accidental Man (1971) is singled out by Heusel (1995) in a chapter on Murdoch’s novelistic discourses. The points made are illustrative of the tendency to read Murdoch in the most sophisticated terms possible. Heusel finds that ‘each of Iris Murdoch’s novels is a social phenomenon that celebrates language in use . . . her fiction is a critique of monologism’ (p. 100). Calling Murdoch a ‘choragos’ (architectchoreographer), she notes that there is a juxtaposition of elements in the novel as a result of Althusser’s proposition that all humans are subjects of ideology (p. 101). Finding that ‘in enjoying the pure jouissance of intertextuality, Murdoch wantonly catches readers in traps or boxes’ (p. 113), Heusel’s overall feeling is

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that An Accidental Man ‘is about the contingency of the 1970s, when morality is no longer at the centre of philosophy: the novel and its worldview require eschewing the illusion of unity and struggling with the lack of organic unity’ (p. 106). Although I have some issues with Heusel’s overtheoretical and dry (yet admittedly impressive) reading of this monumental work, the argument she pursues does indicate the direction Murdoch criticism had taken by the closing years of Murdoch’s writing life. There is a great deal of academic work which usefully decodes Murdoch, searches for buried ideas, and sometimes makes complicated fiction even more complicated. Such is the extent of this that there are a number of meta-critical works and guides to secondary material. The existence of these highlights the amount of ‘Kermodean’ discussion that has taken place; they solidify the ‘shadow’ to the ‘substance’ of the fiction.5 But it is worth at this point going back to Burke and his article ‘Canonizing Iris Murdoch’. Burke finds that, from Elizabeth Dipple’s (1982) Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit on, there is the newly settled conviction that she is a living writer whose work will almost certainly last and that there is beyond that a strong probability she will be thought of as one of the most important writers in English of the last part of the twentieth century. (1986, p. 486) He closes the article with his view that Iris Murdoch truly is a philosophical novelist if ever there was one, and the publication of such philosophical pieces as The Sovereignty of the Good, The Fire and the Sun and Acastos along with the novels only strengthens the case for seeing her that way. She is by almost any measure a remarkable writer, the kind of writer we ought to canonize. (p. 494) The article, and the above quotations, suggest several things of note: first, that it has taken time (approximately 30 years of the novelist’s career) for canonicity to be possible; secondly, that evidence of that canonicity is found in critical work; and thirdly, by the tone of Burke’s concluding remarks, that Murdoch’s philosophical career cemented her serious reputation. Murdoch’s academic canonization, then, took place partly as a result of critical activity, instigated by Byatt’s Degrees of Freedom. Each time there is a conference, or a new publication, it is what we have seen Kermode (1985) call a ‘form of attention’ surrounding Murdoch’s fiction. It may be the case, however, that certain forms of attention have more power than others; that opinion in certain quarters will accelerate the process of canonization. While it is true, as Fowler (1979) argues, that there are many types of canon, including ones personal to individuals, a small local body of interest in a novelist will not solidify a reputation, unless that attention comes from what Kermode (1979) calls a power-wielding institution.

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Byatt herself makes an interesting observation about the academic activity surrounding Murdoch, remarking ‘I think Murdoch was made canonical by the early essays of Malcolm Bradbury – a great constructor of both syllabuses and canons’, and going on to mention Bradbury and Lorna Sage’s ‘enthusiastic’ teaching of the fiction (personal communication, 27 October 2003). This suggests that there is a strongly personal element involved in canon-making; obvious as it may seem, this is worth remembering. If this scholarly activity is combined with teaching, canonicity will be strengthened. Murdoch, for some years, has been a fixture on A-level syllabuses: novels such as The Bell and The Green Knight (1993) have been taught. The earlier in educational life one is introduced to an author, the more canonical the author: thus, Shakespeare has often been a set part of English classes in the 12–16 years, while one would not expect to be taught a specialist, little-known author until university. Iris Murdoch’s appearance on A-level syllabuses confirms the seriousness with which she has been viewed. We might add the special options on Iris Murdoch that have run at Kingston University, taught by Conradi and Rowe, from as far back as the mid-1980s: they indicate that the institution deems Murdoch worthy of investment, and that there is enough interest from students for the courses to fill, and then to run in subsequent years. Likewise, Murdoch’s work has featured in courses on post-war fiction and women novelists, and she has been taught overseas. It is in the intense teaching and scholarly activity combined, however, of Bradbury and Sage, that some of the origins of canonicity may lie. Certainly, Bradbury is effusive in his praise of Murdoch in both The Modern British Novel and his obituary (1999), and his various articles shed light on what Murdoch is doing, identifying her as moralist in the tradition of Austen. Equally important is the fact that Sage’s article ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection’ (1977) is seen by Stevens Heusel to herald a change of direction in thinking about Murdoch. The now firmly established idea that Murdoch celebrated ‘mess’, the impossibility of transcendence, might be seen to stem from this one work: certainly Conradi is indebted to Sage in The Saint and the Artist. Not only were Bradbury and Sage scholars and teachers: Bradbury was also a novelist himself, and both were involved in the establishment of creative writing courses at the University of East Anglia. Here, then, was potential for Murdoch’s work to be communicated to new novelists – and for Bloom’s theory of canonicity to be tried and tested. Byatt, from the outset, was quoted as saying that Murdoch was her ‘literary mother’; Conradi, at the end of his biography, agrees with Sage’s list of writers whom Murdoch influenced: Byatt, A. N. Wilson, Candia McWilliam, Alan Hollinghurst and Marina Warner (2002, p. 595). Byatt suggests Alice Thomas Ellis as another literary ‘daughter’ (personal communication, 27 October 2003). In addition to her fiction and philosophy, Murdoch is notable for two essays which, although also interweaving her philosophical concerns, debate the nature of contemporary fiction, and the artist’s duty. These are ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) and ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959). Both essays lay

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out what Murdoch sees as her own great tradition (she is in effect in agreement with Leavis, but adds to his minimal initial selection), and suggest what is wrong with the novel as it then was. For Murdoch, we had been left with an inability to picture and represent evil, were still suffering from the solipsism of the Romantics, and were left with novels that were either ‘crystalline’ – modern myths, as in the work of Spark and Golding – or ‘journalistic’ – blandly reporting, social realism. For Murdoch, the novel must be a ‘house fit for free characters’. The artist must be impersonal, invisible, and the novel should mirror an ideal liberal society, where artist/narrator/reader recognizes the otherness of the world around him, giving it loving attention. This idea stems from the philosophy of Simone Weil, by whom Murdoch has been shown to be influenced (Byatt, 1965). Now, the most obvious fact is that, at the time she was writing these essays, Murdoch’s work was very far from populated with ‘free’ characters – novels such as The Unicorn and A Severed Head seem to us elaborate games, with characters performing a dance, in a heavily symbolic atmosphere. As James Wood observes, much of the fascination lies in the disparity between Murdoch’s aims and results (1996, p. 120). It might seem that a more successful period is ushered in with the novels from The Nice and the Good (1968) on; it might also seem that the late novels have too much character, in the manner of a rambling family saga. However, the question should not be one of whether or not Murdoch always acted as she advised: it should be the general relevance of what she said, and how it has been commented upon. The era was one of the many in which the novel was being mourned as dead, when any promising activity seemed to be happening over the Atlantic; in Britain the battle was between realism and experiment and, in critical terms, it was the experimental (and later) post-modern fiction of B. S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, John Fowles and their successors that showed the only signs of progression, in the eyes of many. In the field of fiction as well as that of philosophy, then, it appeared that Murdoch was clinging to an outdated ideal. For Murdoch, the great novelists were Austen, Scott, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens and George Eliot, while above them all rose the genius of Shakespeare. Murdoch shared Bayley’s belief (throughout his The Characters of Love, 1960, for example) that a writer should love their characters, as these did. Her praise of the established members of the canon was mirrored by her deliberately invoking their techniques, using classic realism and an intense focus on the consciousness. The evidence of Murdoch’s canonicity would be the claims that she was like her forebears. Let us illustrate this. Imitation and allusion are dangerous ground. Too much of it can cripple writers’ originality (if, unlike Carter and Tennant, originality is something they are striving for); they can be trapped within their model. It can alienate an audience, and risk pretentiousness; it can result in unintentional parody. Murdoch, however, manages to transcend this. The Italian Girl (1964), a work almost always ignored by scholars, is in fact a remarkable fusion of the novelist’s

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typical hothouse melodrama and an atmosphere of Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: characters venture into a magical wood, become enchanted, and wake up to reality. The air is quite deliberately unreal. From The Nice and the Good on, scholars would recognize that Shakespeare was an influence and read the novels through his works.6 By the time Murdoch entered her third decade of writing, favourable commentary on Shakespearean allusion was becoming a means of eulogizing comparison: Byatt (1994) opens a review of The Good Apprentice (1985) with the claim that it is ‘a comedy, in places a fairy-tale, about horrible and unbearable things. It is like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a myth about death and rebirth’ (p. 291). Conradi talks in his Preface to the third edition of The Saint and the Artist of that novel and The Green Knight as having ‘a disregard for plausibility and a closeness to allegory that recall Shakespeare’s late romances’ (2001, p. xviii). His reading of The Green Knight draws strongly on Shakespearean allusion, finding that in both this novel and The Winter’s Tale ‘the storm of diseased passion is comparable with the Biblical Fall’ and concluding his reading with the following: The resurrection of Moy and Anax from the sea at the end echoes the lost sea-washed princesses of The Tempest and Pericles. Like Shakespeare’s romances, The Green Knight plays with the idea of man’s innocence before the Fall. Both Shakespeare’s late plays and Murdoch’s The Green Knight bring characters near to death and feature miraculous resurrections, ending with healing and reconciliation after destruction. . . . All feature guilt and repentance, the finding of the lost, the forgiveness of enemies, the renewal of the world, the benevolence of unseen powers. Like Shakespeare’s romances too, The Green Knight resembles a dream, and is often intensely theatrical. . . . The Green Knight . . . achieves the naiveté, and the radiance alike, of great art. (2001, pp. 359–361) This is no small claim: the implication is that by the end of her career Murdoch’s art, by playing with allusion and evoking Shakespearean romance, has actually attained a greatness comparable with that of the playwright. Conradi is not alone here. A similar manner of comparison is evident in Valentine Cunningham’s introduction to the Vintage edition of An Accidental Man: ‘If we think Shakespearean models – and Iris Murdoch often did – then this novel is not so much a tragedy . . . but rather a kind of problem play, in the line of Troilus and Cressida no less’ (2003, p. vii). Likewise, a reviewer of Henry and Cato (1976) in The Spectator finds that ‘It could be seen as her All’s Well That Ends Well, perhaps – a major, mature and characteristic work, but not destined to be anybody’s favourite’ (Totton, 1976, p. 19). Engagement with the canon has thus, for Murdoch, resulted in becoming part of the canon herself. Unlike many other contemporary writers – and, as we shall see later, Emma Tennant is a prime example of this – Murdoch does not

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want to rewrite the canon, but to keep it in place. There are many other examples of Murdoch being ‘Jamesian’, or showing the influence of Dostoevsky or Dickens: Todd concludes his Iris Murdoch along these lines: The repository of greatness on which contemporary writers can draw has become . . . reduced and curiously familiar, but responses to it may need to become increasingly iconoclastic and, by this token, may contain obscure dangers. Yet it is still available as a repository, and Iris Murdoch has not shrunk from its touch. (1984, p. 100) Kermode has recently acknowledged that there is an element of chance in all canon-making (2004, p. 34). This may be true: there are also circumstances which are fortuitous, that can easily be proved not to have worked in other cases, yet deserve attention. One of these is Murdoch’s use of male discourses. Under the Net was identified, on publication, as the work of an ‘Angry Young Man’. It was seen to fit into the new movement of fiction being produced by Wain, Amis and Braine, and, mistaken as the tag was, it generated some scholarly activity.7 We should ponder: would things have been different had Murdoch used a female narrator for her debut? The question is not so much one of the gender of the narrator/lead character, as one of style of writing and of form. Doris Lessing’s early novels always used female protagonists, yet the discourse was clearly political, within the realist framework. It took Lessing until the revolution of the 1960s to be the subject of scholarly work: work did not appear in any significant amount until the 1970s. We can say that Lessing became canonical after around 20 years, then. Barbara Pym, however, produced fiction that was utterly domestic in focus, simple in style, and easily targeted at a middlebrow audience. There was nothing published on Pym until the 1970s, and then only two items before her death in 1980. The year 1960 saw five papers published on Murdoch – and these were not the first. This seems to illustrate that male discourse, or writing which involved itself in traditionally masculine arenas such as politics and history, was more likely at the time to be taken seriously than fiction which focused on domesticity, rural life and love. In Under the Net, Murdoch creates a discourse for Jake Donaghue that is sharp, witty, erudite and reflective. It appears truthful – the thoughts seem to be those that a bohemian yet puritan artist in the London of the 1950s might have: It is a characteristic of central London that the only thing you can buy there at any hour of the day or night is a stamp. Even a woman you can’t get after about three-thirty a.m. unless you are bien renseigne. . . . I took a swig from my bottle. As I did so I realized I was already very drunk indeed. (p. 113) And later: ‘A female who was obviously a char then appeared at the top of the stairs, and had to have the whole matter explained to her’ (p. 133). It is notable that the only subsequent occasions where Murdoch uses a first-person

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male narrator – A Severed Head, The Black Prince, A Word Child and The Sea, the Sea – result in works that are often reckoned to be Murdoch’s best. She never, in fact, used a female narrator, and observed that she actually felt most comfortable with a male figure as narrator (Biles, 1987, p. 303). Under the Net, acknowledged by Bradbury to be one of the most important debuts of the 1950s (1993, p. 330), can be argued to be a ‘masculine’ book in two ways: its narrator is male, and it is a response to Sartre, Wittgenstein and Beckett, participating in a philosophical discourse that can be argued to be patriarchal. The same energy, and discussions of power and freedom, illuminates The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). Although The Bell (as we shall see later) places a young wife at its centre, and introduces the Gothic to Murdoch’s fiction, it is to the work of a writer already being viewed with critical respect. Murdoch became canonical by various means, then: her parallel career as a philosopher; her complexity and experimentation; her theorizing on the novel; her use of the canon; her male discourses. There are some other factors to note: her use of canonical models was accompanied by frequent reference to art and music, which has resulted in some scholarly work; Murdoch also declared her belief in the work of Freud, which can be seen to influence her novels, along with that of Jung: there has been fodder here for psychoanalytic investigation.8 She was also Irish, a fact which has been disputed (she has been identified as Anglo-Irish), but is settled by Conradi in his biography: Murdoch was an outsider and felt out of place during her early years in England, and the comedy and fantasy inherent in her work, the Gothic tendencies, place her in a tradition which can include Edgeworth, Wilde, Joyce and Yeats, while the Irish setting of The Unicorn and the focus on the Easter uprising in The Red and the Green (1965) places her fiction in the arena of debate about the Ireland–Britain struggle. Although Iris Murdoch has never been explicitly identified as a post-colonial writer, it is possible to see within her work a presentation of ‘otherness’ on occasions, which contradicts the solidity of the male discourses for which she is most known. Jake Donaghue is Irish, living in London, but rootless; The Flight from the Enchanter includes various European refugees, in a book stemming from Murdoch’s work with the displaced in the UNRRA after the Second World War. One of the central characters in Nuns and Soldiers (1980) is a Pole. And Murdoch was well known for her frequent inclusion of homosexuals in her novels: A Fairly Honourable Defeat was seen as especially revolutionary in America, for placing a male homosexual couple at the centre of the story. The fact that these various forms of attention around Murdoch would fill a whole book illustrates why she attained canonicity so easily: there was an abundance of interest for academics and critics. Unlike Edna O’Brien, say, she could be seen not just as a Gothic/comic/Irish novelist, but as a philosopher, humanist, theorist; as an investigator of power, myth and Freud. Many of these claims brought Murdoch to the centre of academic discourses; some of these factors caused her reputation to wane, while some continue to solidify her canonicity. One matter does demand a moment’s pause: Iris Murdoch died.

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Now, a writer’s death need not necessarily produce a rush of scholarly homage. Muriel Spark’s death in 2006 produced some respectful obituaries, but her work was already in print, and as yet there seems no evidence that her status, that of a respected novelist who set useful post-modernist precedents, and has 200 entries in MLA, will alter radically. The difference in Murdoch’s case was that she had been a bestseller, and her physical decline had been brought to public attention. Thus, when she died in February 1999, it was a story. We should note that the opening of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston in 2004 was a result of the author’s death: it seeks to preserve the author’s reputation. Similarly, the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies in 2001 devoted to Murdoch acknowledged her passing. The interest was already there, but death led to biographies and a desire to pay a scholarly homage. Sage’s ‘In Praise of Mess’ (1999) illustrates this: it is partly an obituary, partly a summary of Sage’s ideas on Murdoch’s work. Death, in fact, helped Angela Carter even more: approximately 290 of the 340 MLA items on Carter appear after her death in 1992, and she only became the subject of entire books posthumously. The attention that would come to Murdoch in her last years, however, was little short of bizarre. In Chapter 1, we saw how there exists, alongside the academic canon, what we might call the popular canon. It is a potential oxymoron – the canon was always seen to exclude what was lowbrow, if we read popular as meaning that – yet it is a form of attention as worthy of investigation as scholarly interest. Harris’s idea of the ‘nonce’ canon (1991) is a meeting point of the popular and the academic: highly visible contemporary work which has not yet passed into his ‘diachronic’ canon. Murdoch’s work was always highly visible: we noted, at the start of this chapter, the reviews of the early novels, and the early scholarly pieces. Yet the attention came, equally, from a larger public. Let us consider some earlier evidence of Murdoch’s public acclaim, adding to what we have noted about how she stands today in terms of the publishing industry and polls. An Unofficial Rose (1962) and The Bell were both dramatized by BBC television, in 1974 and 1982 respectively, indicating a belief in the power of these novels, through adaptation, to win a large audience. Similarly, Murdoch herself, with J. B. Priestley, adapted A Severed Head for the stage (it was produced in 1964); with James Saunders, she wrote a stage version of The Italian Girl and, later, The Black Prince. A theatre, but especially a film or television audience, results of course in a far greater public perception of a novelist than if they are known purely through their novels. A simple glance at the inside of a Murdoch edition can tell us something. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine was first published in paperback by Penguin in 1974, and then reprinted in 1979, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1986 and 1988. Alongside this, Triad kept her novels in print (under the ‘Panther’ label) through the 1960s and 1970s, with covers highly illustrative of the commercial fiction of the time. Murdoch’s work has also been very widely translated.9 She was also, as we know, highly prolific, during the 1960s producing an average of one novel

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a year, within a format that, by this time, was recognizable. The result was feelings such as the following from Bernard Bergonzi: Iris Murdoch’s annual novel now seems to have become an established British institution: in private it may be derided or dismissed, but in public it gets the respect customarily given to venerable traditions . . . reviewers tend to receive her novels in an awed and intimidated fashion. . . . Without doubt The Nice and the Good is an unimportant book: readable, certainly, but with all the triviality and pretentiousness that have characterized Miss Murdoch’s novels . . . she has become irredeemably Nice, in love with her own contrivances and the slack cozy prose of commercial fiction. . . . This kind of writing is irreconcilable with the serious practice of literature . . . the qualities of her recent work are precisely those which will give her a wider and less discriminating audience. . . . She is more than welcome to that audience; but it’s surely time that the notion of her literary seriousness was officially settled. (1968, p. 37) Here, then, it seems that, for Bergonzi, Murdoch is no longer a writer of serious literature, but of commercial fiction; she is erring by writing to please a wide audience, rather than a small, discriminating one. For Bergonzi, mass appeal is incompatible with seriousness: he shares the views of Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932). According to the theories of Bourdieu, Murdoch has changed the field she occupies, and become a heteronomous, rather than an autonomous artist: any symbolic capital is ebbing as economic capital increases. This is an early example of comments that recur again and again, over the years. Philip Hensher’s introduction to the Vintage A Fairly Honourable Defeat is unable to say the novel is ‘big, nourishing and grand’ without tempering this with ‘vulgar, careless, embarrassing’ (2001a, p. xv); Murdoch has been likened to soap opera and Agatha Christie. George Stade bemoaned the prose of Nuns and Soldiers (‘writing this bad cannot be faked’) and the outer form (‘Muppet characters and loop-the-loop plots’) (1981, p. 1). However this problematic exuberance has appealed to an equal number of critics ready to respond to the ‘page-turner’ qualities of the fiction; novelist Kay Dick’s review of The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) talked of how ‘once in, it’s difficult to answer the phone or make a cup of tea’ (p. 47); Rosemary Dinnage opened her piece on Nuns and Soldiers with ‘Reading the latest Murdoch novel is one of the things that make book reviewing seem like money for jam’(1980, p. 951); A. N. Wilson’s review of The Green Knight included comments on ‘excitedly comparing notes’ with a friend with whom he read the novel in tandem (1993, p. 23), while his praise of The Good Apprentice went still further: ‘It is compulsive reading. I found myself reading it late into the night, and woken early by the excitement of it, I continued to read at dawn. It is the sort of book which takes hold of you completely’ (1985, p. 25).

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The problem with this is that it no longer seems academic to convey pleasure in the act of reading: certainly, Murdoch’s novels have attracted some highly serious criticism, as we have seen, with which Conradi (2001) finds fault: he is keen to stress the atmosphere and dark comedy of the novels, and Murdoch’s tale-telling skills. The problem seems to be that many critics find the narrative lacking, while the ‘substructure’ or ‘ideas’ remain worthy of consideration. This produces a strange bifurcation in the novels, whose most obvious discourse may deserve the tag ‘sensational’, ‘thriller’, ‘melodrama’ or even ‘trash’. Bergonzi (1968) felt this element overwhelmed any deeper concerns, while Dick felt that this ‘readability’ added to the strengths of a novel she also found ‘600 pages of intellectual pleasure’ (1983, p. 47). Dipple believes that Murdoch’s enormous tale-spinning talents, ironic sophistication and infinite creative fecundity are almost disadvantages – staler, drier tales might be more generally acceptable for the kind of truth-telling she advocates, but they would not lead to such great popularity. (1982, p. 49) The conclusion seems to be that Murdoch’s forte was the type of fiction that depended upon suspense, excitement, tension and sensation – a type of fiction with its roots in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Daphne du Maurier.10 All of these, and Murdoch, are united by one term: Gothic. Murdoch’s first Gothic novel was The Bell and, as we have seen, it has often been identified as her greatest work. Certainly, in terms of wide appeal, outside the academic canon, it is one of the two novels to be televised. It has also been published twice by Vintage (as have Under the Net and The Sea, the Sea): in 1999, and again, with a new cover, in 2004. The success of The Bell has its roots in Murdoch’s use of popular narrative: this Gothicism would become an established part of her work, recurring in The Unicorn, The Italian Girl, The Time of the Angels, The Sea, the Sea and The Good Apprentice. It is these elements of popular narrative that both boosted Murdoch’s reputation (in terms of the wide reading public) and damaged it (according to Bergonzi). However, the rise of feminist studies would lead to an increased interest in the power of Gothic literature to communicate women’s fears and longings, and their criticism of domestic ideology. The result is that there is now a plethora of work on Radcliffe and the Brontës, while du Maurier appears to be crossing the bridge dividing high and low; there would be interest in Murdoch’s use of the Gothic, from scholars.11 Gothicism proves to be both a hindrance and a help to canonization: Tennant deliberately used its tropes in her novels of the 1970s and 1980s, and Rendell, as Barbara Vine, marked her move away from formula fiction by an adoption of the Gothic mode. These narrative devices place Murdoch within a tradition identified, pejoratively, as lowbrow, from the end of the nineteenth century on, as crime, adventure,

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spy and (Gothic) romance establish themselves as genres operating ‘underneath’ highbrow literature. As genres, they would share elements – sensation, excitement – and Murdoch would follow them in producing work which might fall under the definition of thriller, crime or Gothic romance. Here is the opening of The Nice and the Good, the novel to which Bergonzi took exception: A Head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot. At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot. (2000, p. 7) The first sentence is calculated to grab the reader’s attention: something dramatic has happened and we, like this as yet unnamed man, do not know what. It is something violent and is invisible to us. We are encouraged to share his alarm. He is then described as ‘lazy and fat’ – a simple, almost childish evocation suited to popular prose. The contrast between the moment before the shot, and after, is established by a long sentence which tells of his relaxed mood, followed by an abrupt one which simply tells us what happened next. The form thus illustrates the mood, and tension is achieved. The opening of Henry and Cato uses a similar device: Cato Forbes had already crossed Hungerford railway bridge three times, once from north to south, then from south to north, and again from north to south. He was now walking very slowly back towards the middle of the bridge. He was breathing deeply, conscious of a noisy counterpoint of breath and heartbeat. He felt nervously impelled to hold his in-drawn drawn too long and then to gasp. The revolver in its case, heavy and awkward inside his macintosh pocket, banged irregularly against his thigh. (2002, p. 1) Here, we are shown a scene that has already begun. Cato Forbes is in the middle of something mysterious, and the tension increases until we learn that he has a revolver in his pocket. Deliberately, Murdoch has not yet told us why the revolver is there, or what Cato is doing: we are put in the position of a passer-by, a chance observer. The gun indicates that, apparently, like The Nice and the Good, Henry and Cato will partly be a thriller. There is also an error: we read ‘in-drawn drawn’, which should read ‘in-drawn breath’. Some might see this as evidence of the carelessness associated with genre fiction. These narrative devices occur throughout Murdoch’s work. A favourite technique is to end a chapter (or section, if the novel does not have chapters) on

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a note of suspense. The following two moments occur close together, towards the end of The Philosopher’s Pupil: As he estimated the distance involved and braced his body for it he heard from far above a loud echoing clang which he immediately understood. The bronze doors at the top had been slammed shut. A second later all the lights went out. (1984, p. 509) Alex moved fiercely, raising her hand as if to strike Ruby. Ruby pushed her away. In a moment Alex was tumbling headlong down the stairs. She rolled to the landing, then all the way down to the hall where she lay curled and motionless. Wailing, Ruby ran down after her. She pulled at her mistress, trying to lift her head, weeping. Then withdrawing her hands Ruby began to howl like a dog. Alex lay still. (1984, pp. 517–518) We have a sense, throughout, of a great deal happening which Murdoch has to almost breathlessly narrate. The language in the extracts above is simple and works to convey action as succinctly as possible. The thriller aspect is to the fore in The Sandcastle (1957) (which spotlights two schoolboys trying to climb a bell tower, and being near to falling); The Nice and the Good (where Ducane becomes trapped in a cave with rising water); Bruno’s Dream (1969), A Word Child and Nuns and Soldiers (where characters again come close to drowning), and The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) (which includes a suicide pact and a duel). Equally, though, Murdoch has been identified as writer of conventional romance. These observations have almost always come from reviewers, rather than being made in scholarship: Stade found Nuns and Soldiers a ‘harlequin romance for highbrows’ (1981, p. 1); Byatt (1965), considering Murdoch’s third novel, wrote: It has been remarked somewhere that The Sandcastle barely escapes being a woman’s novelette (or perhaps an expansion of a story for a women’s magazine, a slightly higher, because less remotely ‘consoling’ form of literature). I do not myself think that it does escape it. (p. 65) Conradi observes that the setting of the novel is suburban (2002, p. 410). He says this without condescension, but it is notable, since The Sandcastle is the only Murdoch novel that fits that adjective. It is a term, and setting, that John Carey links with mass culture, ripe for attack by an intellectual elite, ready to characterize it as female: passive, emotional, sentimental, unthinking (1992, pp. 46–71). The curious thing appears to be that, as soon as Murdoch adopts the tactics of popular narrative, and writes a romance, her work is criticized. It seems that

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using a gendered genre problematizes Murdoch’s canonical standing. Dostoevsky and Dickens both frequently open novels with scenes suggesting mystery: the protagonist of Crime and Punishment (1866) is a murderer. Is it the case, then, that ‘literary’ male writers are allowed to write sensationally, but women are not? Murdoch’s place in the canon is complicated, then, by the high level of visibility of her work in the commercial field during her lifetime; a further problem is the attention surrounding her decline into Alzheimer’s, which sees the public eye turned on the novelist, rather than the novels. As is now well known, John Bayley published a set of memoirs which depicted his wife’s final years, and the year after her death. These were a commercial success, but felt by some to be sentimental and tasteless: the result was that Murdoch entered the public consciousness as a suffering, tragic figure; the matter was sealed by the 2002 film Iris, a critical and commercial success, with Judi Dench as the older Murdoch: a dame portraying a dame.12 Here, then, was an image of Murdoch totally separated from her career as a novelist and philosopher. Writing in 2003, D. J. Taylor felt that ‘what might be called the legend of Iris Murdoch has been up and running for a good half-decade’ (p. 18). He felt that the biographies by Bayley merely added to a process that had already begun, and, earlier, that Conradi’s biography was ‘testimony to the eagerness with which predominantly non-religious people will use religious language to describe someone or something that inspires in them feelings of reverence and awe’ (2001, p. 7). Commenting on the Murdoch iconography, Taylor linked her to the case of George Orwell: both are individuals who would deplore this focus on themselves. Murdoch’s depiction of the dubious attention given to Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet (1989) and Peter Mir in The Green Knight has proved prophetic; in Murdoch’s case, the media are seen to make her an ‘Alzheimer’s poster-girl’. Perhaps this, and the lapping-up of the revelations about life in the Bayley household, say more about a general public interest in illness, unusual relationships and private lives, explored through biography. Certainly, if Murdoch has been canonized in a literal sense, according to Taylor, A. N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (2003) attempts to demolish the holiness and bring the image of Murdoch crashing back to earth, by dwelling on a secular figure living among mould and grime. The reaction against Wilson’s work suggests that he is a Judas figure, in fact. The curious thing is that Wilson does appear concerned about Murdoch’s literary reputation, which he wants to salvage from the image given out by the Bayley books and the film, although he is accused of a mercenary contribution to the Iris Murdoch ‘industry’.13 Among such media hullabaloo – the film Iris, and several television documentaries in 2002 – the novels can appear to have been taking a back seat. It is tempting to say that the attention given to Murdoch the personality caused this backlash, as a kind of reaction against the popular; but Murdoch’s novels have always had their detractors, and this is nothing new. Iris Murdoch, for many

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younger critics and writers, will symbolize their parents’ generation, and something they may want to escape. She is also a victim of her own reputation as a popular writer. Margaret Drabble – ironically, given the trajectory of her own career – finds with relation to Arnold Bennett that ‘in literary terms it was almost inevitable that his reputation should decline. He had been a popular writer; his popularity was certain to turn against him’ (Mooney, 2000); Mooney cites this and applies it to Murdoch. With The Message to the Planet, Murdoch’s general reading public was, it seemed, beginning to tire of her, a process that had already begun with The Book and the Brotherhood, or earlier. Certainly, although The Message to the Planet had its fans, much of her readership seemed exasperated; one of the most revelatory reviews was that of Jan Morris (1989) in The Independent, a Murdoch lover who felt that her timeless world was beginning to seem dated.14 We can see, then, that Murdoch’s use of popular narrative devices both won her a wide audience, and damaged scholarly interest; this popularity was its own curse, as wide opinion waned. This fall from grace was paralleled by an increasing hesitancy about Murdoch’s body of work, from the 1980s onwards. Byatt, talking of her book Imagining Characters: Six Conversations on Women Writers (1995), reports that her publishers would have been happier with Doris Lessing or Angela Carter, rather than the chapter on An Unofficial Rose.15 Why should this be? The incident is highly illustrative and says much about contemporary interest in novelists. In 1995, the year Imagining Characters appeared, interest in Carter was growing: what was it the latter’s work was doing that Murdoch’s was not? The most obvious initial explanation is Murdoch’s apparent reluctance to engage with feminism. One instance of this is the fact that she never wrote a first-person female narrator, preventing her from exploring female subjectivity; a self-reflexive novel by a narrator-novelist, in the manner of Brookner’s Look at Me (1983) or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), would have allowed her work to be included in debates on feminism and post-modernism conjoined. Murdoch, in interview, remarked that ‘This self-conscious separation leads to rubbish like . . . “women’s studies”. Let’s just have “studies”’ (Biles, 1987, p. 304). Her belief was in equality through education, but what she firmly did not want (along with Byatt and Brookner) was ghettoization. By not writing feminist novels, then, Murdoch can be seen to accept hegemony: for Kenyon, Murdoch ‘accepts patriarchy in that she does not feel excluded from the discourse of philosophy’ (1988, p. 2). There have been attempts to read Murdoch as a feminist writer, but even the full book that takes this stance ends on a hesitant note, claiming that Murdoch ‘cannot ultimately be claimed as a feminist writer’ (Johnson, 1987, p. 112), and reminds us at the outset that an argument is being developed with which Murdoch would not agree (p. x). Murdoch is never consciously utopian or political – often key tenets of feminist fiction – and, unlike the politically more fashionable Lessing, writes of the personal, rather than the political.

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In the same way, and in spite of her use of fantasy and Gothic, Murdoch continued to support the realist novel as a form. The post-war debate on the merits of realism versus experiment accompanied the feeling that the novel was dead, certainly in England, because it was restricted by a realist aesthetic and a belief in the power of language to capture reality. In the wake of work by Belsey and Hillis Miller, novelists such as Drabble, Lessing and Murdoch could only seem outdated. Realism would come to be seen as equated with patriarchal ideologies, and it was the goal of novelists such as Carter, Winterson and Tennant to work against it in post-modern, utopian fiction. Dipple stresses that Murdoch is ‘the best serious realist in our language’ (1982, p. 134): but Dipple belongs to a school which expresses its uncertainty over developments in literary theory. ‘High’ literature has, since the advent of post-modernism, post-colonialism and magic realism, in short seen the realist novel as an anachronism, a device best used by the field of popular fiction. Brookner (within the field of ‘high’ literature) and Rendell (within the popular field) would both espouse neo-realism; Brookner would be seen as outmoded, while Rendell, since she is writing within the field of popular fiction, would be allowed to pursue realism without complaint. Murdoch’s reluctance to engage with feminism, and support of realism, can be seen to go hand in hand with her class and political background. Terry Eagleton sums up this view of Murdoch: the later Murdoch was a hard-line Tory, who may well have been liberal in her aesthetics but was hardly so in her politics. She had right-wing views on most topics, and lambasted the work of Derrida while having only the flimsiest notion of what it was about . . . it is remarkable how stringently unambiguous Murdoch’s vision could be when it came to political views she found distasteful. Socially speaking, the generous amplitude of her imagination was rigorously exclusive . . . some who live in such places [North Oxford] can afford to see life as deliciously haphazard and higgledy-piggledy, a sentiment which might not have struck a Victorian housemaid.(2002, p. 31) For Eagleton, art cannot be separated from politics: his view of her fiction is coloured by his disagreement with her political views. It seems to criticize her work for what it is not doing, in the manner of lambasting Jane Austen for not discussing her servants. Murdoch did move from her Left-wing stance to a support of the Thatcher government in the 1980s, a position totally at odds with the literary world, where almost all contemporary novelists were united by a Left-wing politics and disgust at the materialism of the decade: obvious examples of writers like this are Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Coe and (at the time) Martin Amis. Murdoch, instead of criticizing political developments, or writing post-modernism, was still seen to be evoking a dated, timeless world, which bore no relation to contemporary Britain, and was rooted solely in

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the bohemian middle classes of Oxford and West London. There was a much greater support for novelists who wrote from the margins – be they postcolonial, lesbian, female or working class. Murdoch, along with Drabble, Golding and Brookner was found by Robert A. Lee to ascribe to an ideology of white middle-England, an outdated liberalism (1995, pp. 74–75). For Eagleton, the problem with Murdoch’s fiction was that its writer was white, middle class and financially secure, and did not engage with contemporary literary theory. The term ‘middlebrow’ might be hazarded, suggesting comfort, easiness and reliability. It is a word which has been applied to other novelists of Murdoch’s generation: Penelope Lively, Margaret Drabble, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Barbara Pym, and to writers who are marketed as popular, such as Joanna Trollope and Rosamunde Pilcher. The term suggests a middle-class position, a suburban setting, and a formal failure to be radical and challenging. There are further matters at stake, too. An initial point is the simple fact that Murdoch was writing ‘from’ Britain, when the consensus was that the really notable and exciting developments in fiction were coming from America and the ex-colonies. The great women novelists, globally speaking, might be Atwood and Morrison. Certainly, they were on the shortlist for the first International Man Booker Prize: Lessing was too, but she has always been seen to write from outside Britain, to some extent, given the fact that she only arrived there when she was an adult, and has always actively written against concepts of nation and empire. Muriel Spark’s presence on the list, alongside Rushdie, Roth and Marquez, seemed an oddity. Largeness in scope and political fervour seemed to be a key tenet, and this was something Murdoch did not possess. Secondly, there is a wider cultural point: the increased value placed on youth and novelty in the publishing world, to the point where a movement would be called the Young British Artists, and Granta, from 1983, would nominate the Best Young Writers. Of course, Murdoch had been identified as young in 1954, as part of an earlier new movement: but by the late 1980s she was young no longer. The middle-aged and elderly woman can be seen to suffer in the contemporary canon as she does in life, and run the risk of marginalization, unless she can be portrayed as a lovable eccentric (an example of this would be Beryl Bainbridge). A final point, here, is that Murdoch has never written a novel that is a classic, but has instead produced an oeuvre that counts as such. Despite marketing attempts to name the works ‘classic’, even scholars who praise her work have acknowledged that no novel was ever truly great (e.g. Bloom, 1986, p. 6). Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) has built up a critical discourse, been seen to herald change, in a way that guarantees its academic longevity; Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) benefited from its brevity, wit and immortalization as a successful film. Although Murdoch won the Booker Prize, none of her novels, by themselves, ever captured academic or public attention to the same extent. Brookner’s Hotel du Lac is, arguably, a modern classic; Tennant,

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however, has never produced a great book. If Murdoch has not produced a novel that fits Eliot, Kermode and Eco’s definition of a classic, this does not however mean that there is not greatness in what she has produced. It is time now to pronounce judgement, as it were: Murdoch is a great novelist, and her work has intrinsic value. As a novelist, she is the strongest of those under consideration in this study. It is too early to tell whether or not her work will survive: as Samuel Johnson suggests, we need to apply the test of time. But there are reasons why her work certainly deserves a permanent place in the canon. First, let us measure Murdoch against some of the theories highlighted in Chapter 1. Iris Murdoch’s novels, as we have seen, function both as popular narrative and as philosophical discourse: they are part of both high and low culture, although the work has never actually been marketed as popular fiction. Murdoch follows in the tradition of the Brontës, Dickens and Hardy, all novelists who have been criticized for their use of narrative models such as romance, Gothic, melodrama and myth, and for indulgence in contrived coincidence and sentiment. These writers all had a popular audience and, with time, found a place in the academic canon. The same is true with Shakespeare, with whom Murdoch has (rather extravagantly) been compared: he has always had a large popular following. Nemoianu’s theory (1991) applies here: a work is likely to become canonical if it embraces both high and low. Chapter 1 highlighted the theory that great literature appeals to the universal elements of human experience. Murdoch was, supremely, an investigator of love: like the works of Austen, and many of those of Shakespeare, the novels are love stories, sometimes with the ingredients of popular romance, but always taking a profound, complex view of love and its power over individuals. The uncertainty over the idea of ‘universals’ is starting to disappear, and this striving for love, evoked by Murdoch in terms of a neo-Platonic search for the Good, ought to mean that the novels can cross cultures and times, as have Austen’s apparently filigree, restricted comedies of manners of the world of the middle classes: a description which can apply to Murdoch’s world. Murdoch may not have followed Bloom’s tenet of struggle with her literary ancestors, but she did produce work that was unquestionably original and strange – Bloom’s test of the canonical. The oddity of the Murdochian world would perhaps inevitably fail to please everyone: such is the case with Austen and the Brontës. ‘Original’ and ‘strange’ are hard terms to use, as they are strongly subjective, but most would agree that a Murdoch novel was instantly recognizable: part of a solidly imagined body of work. A. N. Wilson’s argument for Murdoch’s greatness rests on his view of A Severed Head as a novel sure to survive, owing to its strangeness and originality (1999, p. 81). Murdoch also passes Kermode’s test: the conferences and recent publications, the biographies and reprints, show that Murdoch is being read, and discussed, and debated. As long as the novels are in print, and academics are constructing new readings, Murdoch’s place in the canon should be assured.

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It is worth reiterating here that Murdoch has influenced a new generation of novelists: she continues to do so. Zadie Smith, the feted contemporary novelist at the start of the twenty-first century, produced, in White Teeth (2000), a mix of realism with third-person narrator, comedy and contrivance that was distinctly Murdochian. And, in On Beauty (2005), she can be seen to espouse Murdoch’s ethics: theory squashes the individual, and nothing is as important as the human heart. The novel ends with the lead character seeing, for the first time, the detail of individual humanity in a piece of Dutch realist art: this epiphany could have been written by Murdoch. The equally feted Ian McEwan, in a piece written shortly after the September 11 attacks, claimed that if the suicide bombers had been able to imagine themselves into the consciousnesses of the passengers, the atrocities would never have taken place (McEwan, 2001). His words fit in with the ethical turn and the move away from relativism, and are in line with his belief in the duty of the novelist to portray the consciousness, something which is now seen to be feasible, rather than part of an outdated liberal humanism.16 McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), as Rowe (2006) has demonstrated, has its roots in Murdoch’s The Black Prince: the novelist shares Murdoch’s belief in the power of art to transform and provide salvation, and its duty to not flinch from horror and to resist easy consolations. There are, however, more simple and traditional reasons why Murdoch can be argued to be great; we turn to Kermode’s recent writing on canonicity and his evoking of the pleasure principle (2004). Murdoch is a great writer for two major reasons: her style, and her comic vision. First: style. Murdoch’s style can be problematic, for it can be careless and appear uncontrolled. The dialogue can sound unrealistic, and she is prone to using the words ‘sort of’ and ‘kind of’. The excess is deliberate, though: Murdoch is conveying a world that is very passionate and very large. Here is a climactic moment towards the end of The Sea, the Sea: As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing. (1999, p. 475) This is Murdoch at her most lyrical. The writing is deliberately excessive, shown by the repeated vocabulary (‘far far’, ‘billions and billions’), in harmony with the intense feelings of the narrator and the grandeur of the spectacle.

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There is alliteration in the ‘soft slap of the sea’ which is also onomatopoeiac. The stars are ‘silently shooting’ – the image is consciously oxymoronic – and they are ‘falling and finding their fates’, a triple alliteration which is rhythmic. The ‘magical Odeons’ gives both a possible Classical allusion and refinement, and also a more comically banal idea of childhood cinema-going. Finally, the perspective is original, it seems, and distinctive: an idea of being able to see the interior of the universe, which is turning itself inside out. A beautiful night sky is transformed into something lyrical, rapturous and unusual. This is Murdoch the Romantic, and the use of the poetic devices indicated lifts the register to a high stylistic level. In a contrasting way, Murdoch’s writing is also notable for its comedy: even in a weak novel such as The Italian Girl, she can use uniquely successful comic metaphors. For example, a character is described as ‘removing the fragments of biscuit and cheese which had formed a milky way down the front of [his] jacket’ (p. 44). The linking of the idea of the cosmic and the banally domestic is comic; the metaphor works, since we recognize that the mess could look like that. In the same chapter, a character, in a sculptor’s workshop, walks past a ‘little suburb of marble blocks’ (p. 44): two distinct and separate entities are linked in a surprising and potentially disconcerting manner. The stones are not quite personified, but seen in terms of human habitation; by extent, the normally unexciting image of suburbia is suggested to be cold and dead, while the odd linking of images produces a comic effect. This same comedy, with a dark undercurrent, is present within the dialogue of the same scene, a character making the metaphor himself: the sculptor mistakenly and (briefly) thinks that just a single name is required for the grave of a mutual family member, and remarks ‘Lydia. It sounds like a little dog’ (p. 39). In line with her humanistic belief in the importance of the world around us, which accompanied her contrasting Platonism, Murdoch rejoices in things, people and their oddity, and, like Dickens, points things out and deliberately tells us too much, for comic effect. We are informed of the names of Miranda’s dolls in The Flight from the Enchanter: Miranda is very clear about which one is Pousette. In An Accidental Man, Gracie, the small girl with a voracious appetite, has Russian gateau, tennis court cake and milk chocolate kittens around her. We are encouraged to share Murdoch’s view that there is something amusing about the specificity of these items. Likewise, Murdoch recognizes that human beings call each other by odd nicknames: a Reverend becomes the Revvy Evvy; there is Aunt Bill, a girl called Biscuit and a young man, Emmanuel, whose name is shortened to Emma. There is a car called Kierkegaard, and a pet called Mousebrook the Mauve Cat. The Murdochian oeuvre celebrates plenitude, and An Accidental Man is noteworthy here for its constant comic reference to offstage characters and their lives: we have, for example, Karen Arbuthnot (who has taken up pigs) and Henrietta Sayce (who has gassed a cat). Cunningham (2002, p. 165) identifies this largesse in The Philosopher’s Pupil:

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Present were Brian, Gabriel and Adam, William Eastcote and Anthea, Mr and Mrs Robin Osmor, Mrs Percy Bowcock, Nesta Wiggins, Peter Blackett, Mrs Roach the doctor’s wife, Nicky Roach the doctor’s son, now studying at Guy’s Hospital, Rita Chalmers, wife of the Institute Director, Miss London who was a teacher at Adam’s school, Mr and Mrs Romage who kept a grocer’s shop in Burkestown, and a Mrs Bradstreet, a visiting friend who was staying at the Ennistone Royal Hotel and taking the cure for a condition in her back. (1984, p. 199) We do not actually need to know all this detail; we are informed of it, however, since Murdoch believes that a good novelist, like a good human being, recognizes the contingent, busy chaos of human life, and should be able to see it clearly, not distracted by the shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave. The long list is also comic, as it goes on breathlessly giving names, until we get to the last; just when we think the sentence will end, detail is filled in. This comic effect is reminiscent, perhaps, of both Jonathan Swift’s tendency to list, and Ronald Firbank’s reciting of characters’ names in his novels. Murdoch’s style, then, is comic, but so is her vision: the detail of humanity is seen to be amusing, and at times darkly comic, too. This is nowhere more true than in An Accidental Man, where an early scene describes the efforts to understand the word a dying woman is trying to say. Finally believing she has asked for a priest, a priest is duly summoned: he apologizes for tardiness as he has been at a Youth Club’s ping-pong match. Death is bathetically aligned with a childish game. A character observes that, if the Bible is being read, they may as well be reading the burial service. Most of this scene is conveyed in dialogue, which helps its comic–dramatic effect, near to that of farce. Painful things, for Murdoch, can be unintentionally funny, such as when, in this novel, obese Mitzi Ricardo, the failed athlete, gets drunk and has to be put to bed, ‘propelled through the sitting-room, towering over her helpers like the image of a goddess being wheeled slowly along’ (2003, p. 86). The comic metaphor is not just a decoration to amuse: it seems to show Murdoch suggesting that we are comic creatures, nowhere more so perhaps than in love and our inappropriate attractions. Ludwig Leferrier is a scholar, and his girlfriend Gracie, ‘fantastically young’, makes him feel ‘coarse, gross, ancient, dirty’ (2003, p. 3). He is riven with anxiety on whether he should return to America and fight in the Vietnam War; she tells him she has loved him ever since he kissed her ‘behind that tomb thing in the British Museum’ (2003, p. 1). The pairing is ill-matched yet not unreflective of reality, as was the case when George Eliot wrote of the ‘spots of commonness’ that led Tertius Lydgate to be drawn to Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch (1871–1872), a pairing that surely led to Murdoch’s comic Ludwig and Gracie in An Accidental Man. Dickens, however, is the great influence on Murdoch: Dickensian comedy was first visible in the comic figures of Mrs Wingfield and Miss Foy in The Flight

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from the Enchanter; it finds its fullest expression in An Accidental Man, in a range of characters who, like Dickens’s, might seem caricatured, but are no more odd than much of humanity. The most notable in this sense are Mitzi, who after her athletic failures, now works in a photographer’s studio, and Mr SecombeHughes, a robe-clad Welsh photographer, fallen on hard times, who now has to live in his studio but makes a pretence of coming in to work, to preserve his Welsh honour. He has written a long poem to Mitzi, in Welsh. Like Dickens, Murdoch is both sympathetic towards her creations and amused by them. The reader is expected to respond in the same way. I am not attempting to simply eulogize Murdoch’s fiction. What is needed is an honest acknowledgement of the truth in Kermode’s belief in literary pleasure (2004), and of the rightness of Cunningham who, in Reading After Theory (2002), bemoaned how texts are disappearing behind critical discourses. Murdoch’s comedy, as Conradi observes, is frequently laughing at pain, recognizing that it is as impossible to find perfection in life as it is in art, no matter how much we strive for the Good.17 Perhaps it is this ability to recognize imperfection and ultimate failure that produces Murdoch’s most poignant piece of writing; the novel, again, is An Accidental Man: Charlotte sat down on the bed. Tears covered her face as with a veil and filled her vision. She could feel Mitzi pulling to get her coat off and she allowed her arms to be dragged from the sleeves. Love, even fake love, even dream love, was something after all. After all she loved Mitzi, though it was with a fake dream love. And Mitzi loved her and needed her. And what would become of Pyrrhus. And they had paid money and got a mortgage and planted a beech hedge. Perhaps in the end reality would win, smashing it all to pieces. But oh not yet, not yet, while there could still be reconciliation and scrambled eggs and late night whisky and the shutters to be closed and Pyrrhus’s bed to be made. Perhaps it would be worse later, but then perhaps later would never come, perhaps she would die, and it was terrible now and she could not walk through that door and refuse comfort and relief and weary shuttered sleep to herself and to Mitzi that night. Charlotte shed defeated tears, and her tears were already those of married people who love each other, cannot stand each other, and know that they can never now have any other destiny. (p. 259) I have moved beyond matters of comedy and style here, to pinpoint Murdoch’s ability to scrutinize the human desire to love and build a union, alongside the hatred and claustrophobia this can cause. The extract is successful since it moves from a depiction of two characters to a general reflection on human commitment, the narrator confident of the truth behind the scene. Charlotte and Mitzi are important as personages within the complex, busy narrative of the novel, but they are also important as they illustrate something universal about many marriages, for Murdoch: they survive because of mutual loneliness. There is a reflection here of George Eliot’s ability to see individual characters in larger

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terms, and to suggest a general truth in a specific situation, such as in the fall of Bulstrode in Middlemarch, when his past catches up with him. Murdoch, then, is in many ways a traditional, nineteenth-century novelist. The vision that this encompasses, with its unproblematic idea of the human, should be celebrated, as it allows her work to be transcultural and transhistorical. Murdoch is often a realist, but our next writer, Anita Brookner, is a realist novelist through and through.

Chapter 3

Anita Brookner

Having seen how Iris Murdoch’s position in the academic and popular fields was achieved, maintained and, at points, lost, we now move forward one novelistic generation, to the first of three among many contemporary British novelists whose relationship with the canon merits interrogation. Anita Brookner arrived on the fiction scene in 1981, with her novel A Start in Life. In age terms a sister figure to Murdoch (she was born nine years later, in 1928), the gap between their literary debuts makes them mother and daughter. Although Brookner has never cited Murdoch as an influence, the former might be seen as occupying the continuation in the fiction of liberal humanism, which Murdoch advocated. Brookner, along with Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively, A. S. Byatt and Doris Lessing, has written neo-realist novels which (generally) see the subject as solid and language as a reliable mediator. An opposing field, led by Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Eva Figes, Sara Maitland, Ali Smith and Emma Tennant, has embraced post-modern concepts, the carnivalesque, and post-structuralism, favouring experiment over realism. Anita Brookner is, to my mind, an odd and highly distinctive novelist. Her work has been lauded for its style, and attacked for its political conservatism; praised for its depiction of alienation, and criticized for its repetitiveness. Unlike Murdoch and Byatt, who have, on occasions, produced post-modern fiction, Brookner appears to have quite stubbornly not followed academic fashions. This refusal to follow current trends, and the reactions that her work thus produces, need investigation. What is critically fashionable can only be clearly understood in terms of what is not. Just as ‘high’ literature defines itself against what it is not (popular culture), so progressive, ‘fashionable’ novelists can only be measured by comparison with those who advocate tradition: writers such as Anita Brookner. Brookner remains part of the scholarly world; her work has recently been aligned with reactions against feminism, and studies of exile and homelessness. There is a place for an evaluative reading of her work, a defence of its inherent value, and an argument as to why it is both contemporarily relevant and likely to last. Brookner’s 23 novels to date are all worth examination and, as in the case of Murdoch, make more sense seen as one monolithic work of fiction; nonetheless, there are some which seem to be both highly successful artistic executions, and duly representative of her themes

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and concerns. These are as follows: Providence (1982); Look at Me; Hotel du Lac; A Friend from England (1987) and The Next Big Thing (2002). Brookner has an uncertain canonical position, with evidence for and against; her standing is not as strong as Murdoch’s, yet she is more canonical than Rendell and Tennant. We are journeying, in effect, gradually further away from a canonical core. There is some useful evidence to gauge Brookner’s current position in the academic canon. The MLA International Bibliography lists only 67 entries on her, compared to 340 on Angela Carter and 1759 on Toni Morrison. Entries appear at an approximate rate of 4 per year. Much of this work is interesting and diverse, and we shall return to some of the topics. As A. S. Byatt noted, criticism of contemporary literature is a fairly recent phenomenon in Britain (2001, pp. 1–2). Recently, there has been an increase in the publication of books on contemporary fiction: studying the content of these, a pattern becomes visible. Topics such as race, subjectivity, gender politics, post-modernism and history are a focus; novelists such as Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Barker appear very regularly in texts that highlight the British novel. Anita Brookner does not. There is no reference to Brookner in, for example, Nick Rennison’s Contemporary British Novelists (2005), Philip Tew’s The Contemporary British Novel (2004), Peter Childs’ Contemporary Novelists (2005), Jago Morrison’s Contemporary Fiction (2003), Rod Mengham’s An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (1999) and Mengham and Tew’s British Fiction Today (2006). Even Emma Parker, in Contemporary British Women Writers: Essays and Studies (2004) does not include an essay on Brookner in her collection.1 ‘Contemporary’, here, seems to have connotations of new, with an emphasis on new arrivals to the literary scene: however, there always seems to be a place for Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Kazuo Ishiguro, who have all been publishing for as long as, and even longer than, Brookner. A useful illustration and confirmation of critical activity was the inaugural Twenty-First Century Novel conference at Lancaster University in 2005. The point about the rarity of such events was addressed: further, the list of women writers who were discussed in panel sessions is a rather fascinating microcosm of literary activity. They were Pat Barker, Sarah Waters, A. L. Kennedy, Manda Scott, Monica Ali, Annie Proulx, Nancy Smith, Zadie Smith, Maggie O’Farrell, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson, Anne Enright, Ali Smith and Andrea Levy. The list shows a predictable mixture of interest in currently fashionable novelists (Ali and Zadie Smith), recent prize winners or prize nominees (Waters, Atkinson and Levy), debate over those who have been established some time, but have always written of ‘otherness’ (Winterson and Lessing), and praiseworthy attempts by speakers to give attention to then littleknown voices (Enright, Scott and Nancy Smith). A paper on Anita Brookner was, perhaps, rather difficult to assimilate. Zadie Smith, the current centre of the contemporary canon was, unsurprisingly, the writer who appeared most frequently in the programme.

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Pedagogical activity, as has become clear, tends to mirror critical, scholarly activity: lecturers teach what they are interested in, or what fits in with departmental vogues, when planning courses. Anita Brookner, in parallel with the lack of critical interest, is not a highly taught contemporary writer: course leaders are more likely to choose Angela Carter, or to go outside Britain and pick Morrison and Atwood. Maroula Joannou (2000), Brian W. Shaffer (2005), Richard Bradford (2007) and Dominic Head (2002) are the few recent critics who do allow Brookner a place in the post-war and contemporary canon; Patricia Waugh is unusual in being a post-modern critic who allows for the work of Brookner (and Drabble), although these discussions are not recent (1989, 1995). In terms of commercial popularity, and Brookner’s place in the popular canon, matters are a little more positive, if more nebulous, owing to the reluctance of publishers to state sales, and the unreliable nature of other evidence. The bookselling website Amazon gives each title a sales rank: Brookner’s highest, her new novel Strangers, has a ranking of 1,905; one year ago, however, her most recent novel Leaving Home (2005) had a ranking of 85,299. An imminent publication is naturally generating interest, while older books disappear. Carter’s highest ranking however, on the same website, is a new edition of The Bloody Chamber, at 675. Brookner did not appear in the top 200 of the commercially orientated Big Read in 2004, nor did she find a place in the Orange poll of best novels written by women (Matthews, 2003, p. 5), or in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, in which Murdoch had 6 entries. Yet, Head still asserts her popularity, and the novels are always prominently reviewed by newspapers and journals (2002, p. 106). There is no doubt about the fact that made Brookner’s literary name: the winning of the Booker Prize in 1984 for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac. The three preceding fictions (A Start in Life, Providence and Look at Me) had all been very favourably reviewed, but it was this unexpected lauding by the literary establishment that gave Brookner’s work its boost. This is the novel with which Brookner is most associated. The prize, in this case, was operating in a different way from the case of Iris Murdoch: instead of an established writer being given what was almost a recognition of lifetime achievement, here was a relatively new novelist being favoured, in a manner that would be repeated when Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Anne Enright won the prize in later years. The contentious point was that Brookner appeared to be doing something reactionary and even un-literary, for Hotel du Lac, more than any of Brookner’s novels, bears a close resemblance to popular romantic fiction. The author, as Olga Kenyon points out, can be seen to belong to the tradition of the ‘woman’s novel’, part of a literary descent from Elizabeth Taylor and Rosamund Lehmann (1988, p. 149); her work seems to have a generic resemblance to romantic fiction: Hotel du Lac is in fact dedicated to Lehmann. The regularity of Brookner’s output, an average of one a year, which for many seasons appeared every June, and the shared settings and

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themes of the novels, made her work easily marketable as what Triad Grafton call, in their post-Booker reprints, ‘women’s fiction’. These are stories which, in settings of material comfort and respectable wealth, deal in the quest for romantic love and the goal of marriage. At the outset, then, Brookner’s work shares much with popular literature such as the work of Austen and the Brontës, as well as popular narratives of the (sadly marginalized) women novelists of the eighteenth century, such as Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker and Penelope Aubin (Kenyon, 1988, p. 145). A reader can buy the new Brookner novel, in the way that any consumer buys material goods, looking to have certain expectations met. The luxury might be chilly, but we are in safe hands: like genre fiction, Brookner repeats a formula that is always essentially the same. Much of the criticism of Brookner’s fiction has arisen because it appears to be part of mass culture and all its inherent evils: from the time of Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), popular fiction was associated by its detractors with emotionalism and passivity on the part of the reader. The Leavises followed Eliot and Arnold in their insistence on the necessity of high culture: for Q. D. Leavis, ‘the popular novels of the age . . . substitute an emotional code which . . . is actually inferior to the traditional code of the illiterate . . . creating cheap mechanical responses and . . . throwing their weight on the side of social, national and herd prejudices’ (1965, p. 74). The romance was seen as the chief culprit of this, and in the 1980s Brookner’s opponents continued to identify romance and popular fiction as a negative, feminine poor relation to ‘high’ literature. This was most marked in Peter Kemp’s review of Lewis Percy (1989): ‘the novel’s story drips with novelettish romance. . . . Stereotypes and sickliness make Lewis Percy of the same breed as, not James and Wharton, but Mills and Boon’. While genres such as crime and Gothic have received scholarly interest, romance has had very little, with the exception of Janice Radway’s pioneering work (1984). Radway argues that romance reading is an act of defiance and protest by women readers, a claim for a private space away from the demands of patriarchal society, and that these formulaic novels are read in the full knowledge that they are wish fulfilment. The act of reading them thus implies a criticism of the social world. However, the genre of which Brookner forms a part is what might call ‘antiromance’, a term applied as far back in time as Cervantes, but now perhaps something that debunks the certainties of the world of Harlequin, and Mills and Boon. This debunking means that Brookner is, of course, non-generic: yet the formula, and the frequent output, allow us to read her as a generic writer if we so wish for, as Gelder demonstrates, genre fiction is dependent on industry and formulae and Brookner, as I have noted, has often produced one novel a year (2004, p. 1). Iris Murdoch’s reputation suffered, owing to her use of thriller plots, and repeated formulae: the same is the case with Brookner. In spite of the challenge Brookner presents to romantic fiction in Hotel du Lac, one could argue that it is an essentially consolatory, conservative and safe book: Brookner herself states that ‘Hotel du Lac I meant as a love story pure and simple: love

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triumphed over temptation. The ideal of love’ (Haffenden, 1985, p. 73). The world of the Swiss hotel is unthreatened by violence, class conflict and aberrant sexuality: it is, in fact, about as far removed from the world of Britain in the mid-1980s as it is possible to be. It shares this distance with Murdoch’s novels which, as we saw, were criticized for their failure to engage with contemporary life. Even the end of the novel allows Edith Hope some power and choice, unusually for Brookner, as the heroine rejects a mercenary potential husband in favour of her married lover. Love thus wins, which is rare with Brookner: The Bay of Angels (2001) is the only other novel whose end is any way consolatory. Sales of Brookner’s previous three novels had averaged at 2–3,000; Hotel du Lac had sold 50,000 by the end of 1984, and later was made into a suitably gentle television film. Although her hardback sales could not subsequently match this triumph, Brookner captured a steady annual share of the quality paperback market (Todd, 1996, p. 107). My essential point here is that Brookner’s ‘women’s fiction’ is fair game for attack, lacking as it does the more obvious philosophical concerns, narrative dexterity and variety of Iris Murdoch, who weathered the problem of her use of popular narrative devices better. Brookner’s success, then, as a writer of romance, has damaged her reputation in the literary field. As has been proved in frequent analyses of the gap between high and low culture, the academy has celebrated ‘literature’ rather than popular fiction, and even now, when the latter is no longer an aberration, the distinction is clearly marked. The Booker Prize stands as an interesting point of intersection between the commercial and academic canons. Novels might become taught when they win the prize, particularly if the winner aligns with areas of topical interest. J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), which analyses post-apartheid South Africa, fits this argument, as would Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which brims with ‘issues’(race, migration, globalization, history, memory); this interest can lead to increased scholarly activity. However, the prize has with time become increasingly perceived as a marketing ploy, part of the world of sponsorship and an establishment too ready to defend the status quo. For this reason, Brookner’s winning of the award in 1984 is problematic and, in a rather similar way to William Golding’s winning of the Nobel the year before, damaging to reputation: we can see a writer being lifted away from any respect they may have had, further into the realms of the super-privileged. The other point of resentment, in 1984, was the fact that this was the year Angela Carter produced Nights at the Circus, a widely praised, remarkable book that, many felt, should have won. It did not even make the shortlist.2 It goes without saying that the novel that wins the Booker Prize may not be the best fiction written that year (in whatever way we understand ‘best’): it is commonly understood that the choice is simply the joint verdict of a small group of interested people – or a compromise decision. The panel in 1984, Todd (1996) observes, would almost certainly have found Carter too explicit (p. 89). That year, then, the prize, the choice of a middlebrow group, can be

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seen as placing Brookner within the realms of conservative fiction, and affecting the way her fiction would be perceived. The same would happen three years later when Penelope Lively, a novelist actually engaging overtly with contemporary ideas of post-modernism and history, won the prize for Moon Tiger. The Booker Prize, as a mediator between commercial and academic fields, operates not dissimilarly from journalism, which, while aimed at the popular field, will often be written by critics and academics. Brookner’s reputation can thus be helpfully gauged by considering the comments she has received.3 As I have pointed out, the winning of the Booker Prize gave Brookner a highly visible public profile, which means that each new publication is reviewed by major journals and newspapers. Brookner reviewers have always tended to be either for or against her work: while this endured through the 1980s, come 1989 and the publication of Lewis Percy, the knives were out, as they were, in a parallel way, for Murdoch and Drabble. By 1990 we find that ‘The terrible pathos of Look at Me . . . has dulled with repetition’ (Barnacle, 1990, p. 29). Harvey Porlock, summing up in 1991, found that Something’s happened to Anita. She used to be the most popular girl in the school, winning prizes, loved and respected for her style, her cool intelligence. Now she’s bullied in the Sunday Express and The Sunday Telegraph where they used to like her. Worse, she’s celebrated in The New Statesman and Society, a sure sign that she’s out of fashion. What happened? Unlike Drabble and Murdoch, Brookner was a fictional newcomer, and not the property of such a large reading public over a long period of time; it ought not to have been possible for her work to become dated, already. Was it the case that Lewis Percy, Brief Lives (1990) and A Closed Eye (1991) were worse books than Look at Me and Hotel du Lac? Brookner’s close relationship to genre fiction, and her winning of the Booker, were factors which worked against academic canonization, then; further examples might be summed up by one fact: Anita Brookner is not Angela Carter. Here, it is worth returning to the idea of the twin literary poles occupied by Brookner and Carter, poles brought into emphasis in the failure of the latter’s Nights at the Circus to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, and highlighted by Armstrong (1994). Generalizations are risky, but a useful contrast can be safely made between the two authors. Carter’s work engages with feminism, challenges patriarchy, uses a wide register of language from poetic to slang, and inhabits worlds of dream. It is fantastic, comic, baroque, inventive and experimental: it is archetypal magic realism. Brookner’s novels, however, seem to oppose feminism, endorse patriarchal values, use formal, archaic and unvarying prose, and are mostly set in the here-and-now. They are non-fantastic, plain, and neither innovative nor experimental; for many she is a humourless writer. Carter, by the mid-1990s, was at the centre of the female canon; Brookner, therefore, had to be relegated to its margins. Not surprisingly, Carter expressed

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disdain for what Brookner was doing: ‘Her books are all about preparing elaborate meals for men, of standing looking sadly out of the window as she scrapes the uneaten food into the tidy bin when they fail to turn up’(Mortimer, 1982, p. 36). Like Iris Murdoch, Brookner has been chastised for the viewpoint from which she writes. Brooknerland is a moneyed area, comfortably bourgeois, where the rooms have thick curtains, thick carpets and faithful old retainers. As in Murdochland, little work is actually done: there is plenty of time for introspection and retrospection, and even actual boredom. It is not a world of vulgar wealth, but a world where money does not matter, work does not cause anxiety, and the arts are liberally available as a restorative. In short, it is poles apart from the main body of academically canonized contemporary fiction. From the early 1980s we can see this growing dissatisfaction with writers such as Brookner, whom Lee found to ascribe to an ideology of white middle-England, an outdated liberalism, resulting in the growing interest in the fantastical elements of the work of Carter and her peers. Lee (1995) levelled the same complaint against Murdoch, as we saw (pp. 74–75). In the wake of what Patricia Waugh (1995) calls the ‘harvest of the sixties’ we look more and more to the margins, and (quite rightly) read the work of black, ethnic, homosexual and working-class novelists. As literature has become increasingly politicized, political events have determined literary fashion, and multicultural Britain finds its literary reflection in the work of Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Andrea Levy, writers who all set their fictions in a specific time, and often in the present. It is easy to see to what a large extent Brookner fails to follow these trends. There is evidence of downright snobbery in the early Providence, as the protagonist Kitty Maule reflects on the café, which was also very warm, and extremely full. Disconsolate families ate baked beans on toast and wrapped handkerchiefs around the stinging handles of metal teapots, for this was tourist country, Kitty realized, and the season was just beginning. The two waitresses, middle-aged women, called haplessly to one another and forgot orders which they were too harassed to write down. . . . Even I could run this place better, thought Kitty, who was not impressed. (1983, p. 82) While it is true that, by the end of the novel, we have come to question Kitty’s judgements, and that this scene is focalized through her, the setting is clearly socially lower than Brookner’s standard settings, so a feeling of condescension cannot be avoided. If even Margaret Drabble’s ‘gestures to multicultural London’ could be criticized by Lee, then Brookner is not likely to survive attack, for her world is almost entirely white and heterosexual (1995, p. 75). This is a particular problem in A Friend from England, which is set in a Notting Hill that bears little resemblance to that diverse area of London today. One of the few mentions of non-white characters in Brookner, seen through Kitty Maule’s

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words in Providence, does not help matters: ‘The rumbling suburban train was filled with slight dark-skinned men in eccentric hats, looking furtive yet business-like, their belongings, in cardboard suitcases, kept firmly between their knees’ (1983, p. 121). This is an uncomfortable depiction of a scene in Paris, a city where, in 2005, racial tension would violently erupt. If we adopt the view that art and ideology are inseparable, that art cannot be depoliticized, then Brookner is dangerously provincial and reactionary. This can be linked with evidence of Murdoch’s apparent failure to engage with multicultural Britain in a positive way: the Hindu women to whom Gertrude is teaching English in Nuns and Soldiers are romanticized and shadowy; a family in A Fairly Honourable Defeat are at one point Muslim, and at one point Sikh. Sexuality in the novels is almost always hetero; any that is not is treated in an uneasy manner. In A Friend from England, for example, a male character’s hidden homosexuality is revealed by the narrator coming upon him wearing eye-shadow. This is greeted with shock and the assumption that all must be covered up: the atmosphere is sinister. Sexual behaviour per se in fact is seen as unfeminine, or, on a wider level, associated with greed and selfishness, as typified by the deceptive couple Alix and Nick in Look at Me. This is in contrast with Carter, whose modern versions of fairy-tale heroines in The Bloody Chamber (1979), and her characters Fevvers in Nights at the Circus (1984) and Dora Chance in Wise Children (1991), celebrate energy, adventure and metamorphosis. This is the goal of a great part of feminist fiction. Brookner’s literary form is equally problematic. Like Drabble and Murdoch, she is an advocate of the realist novel, and cites Dickens and James as influences: further links have been made to Proust, Flaubert and Stendhal.4 Here is a novelist, then, who advocates tradition and the past, rather than new possibilities in both content and form where, as Bradford (2007) observes, there is an ‘expectation that formal experiment is the only guarantee of significance in women’s writing’ (p. 127). Relying to a great extent on the portrayal of the consciousness seen through time (as in Proust), on the use of an (omniscient) third-person narrator who will balance and judge, and on logical cause and effect in a recognizable world, Brookner is closer in form and style to Jane Austen than to Angela Carter or Fay Weldon. Here is the opening of her novel A Misalliance (1986): Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay. In this uneasy month of the year – cold April, long chilly evenings – she considered it a matter of honour to be busy and amused until darkness fell and released her from obligations. These obligations were in any event minimal, but being self-imposed were all the more rigorous: no one else sustained them. Not quite a widow, and therefore entitled to none of the world’s consideration, she bore her divorce nobly but felt its shame. I am innocent, she felt like proclaiming on particularly inclement days, and I always was. My husband left me for a young woman with a degree in computer sciences

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The style, close to Austen, is formal, with little use of figurative language, and is occasionally archaic (‘betokened’). It slips in and out of reported thought, and has a third-person narrator giving subtle judgement (‘most usefully’), suggesting ironic distance between protagonist and narrator. It uses strings of three adjectives (again, as does Austen, frequently), and uses balance – ‘discreet but amused’. The scene it paints suggests repression – typical of Brookner, disliked by Carter – femininity, and the home, in the world of the realist novel. Brookner has long been chastised for her temporal vagueness: Family and Friends (1985), for example, was her first novel set in a former time, and appeared to centre on a Jewish family between the wars, yet made almost no concrete reference to historical events. Even the novels set in the present are accused of having a curiously dated air, the characters speaking with a stiff formality: ‘my quiche lorraine was thoughtfully and sincerely praised’ (Brookner, 2004, p. 147).5 The novels, then, are neither period pieces nor analyses of contemporary mores. It could almost appear that Brookner and Carter were deliberately constructing opposites. Carter can be seen to be influenced by Foucault, in her depiction of the subject and sexuality determined by ideology, her analyses of power, and the image of the panopticon in Nights at the Circus, which alludes to Foucault’s image in Discipline and Punish (1977). She has also been linked with Cixous.6 Brookner’s work, however, appears to pay no heed to modern literary theory, which has been at the centre of academic studies from the early 1980s, and which can clearly determine canonicity. Brookner’s ‘anti-feminism’ is probably the most important cause of her failure to win a large part in the academic canon. In Brooknerland, marriage and love are the ultimate goals, and there is no sisterhood among women, rather a demarcation into two types, notably identified in Hotel du Lac in terms of the myth of the tortoise and the hare: the passive-feminine heroine, and an aggressive, sexually voracious opponent (1985, p. 27). Moreover, education and academic success mean almost nothing to the heroine, devaluing years of feminist endeavour. A Friend from England contains the following view of contemporary women: These are the ones who would secretly have been happier sitting at home listening to Woman’s Hour, but instead are to be found on the city streets early in the morning, tapping their way along the pavement in the sort of high-heeled shoes that are supposed to go with attainment, on their way to

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another day with the computer, or the Stock Exchange prices . . . their talk resembles the after-hours conversation of men. . . . Bravely they will decide to eat out, although waiters still dislike women diners on their own: they are thought to be a dubious advertisement, spreading the contagion of bad luck around them, not qualifying for the full treatment. . . . No, for such women I would decree a dear little house, in some established suburb, and a leisurely walk to the shops with a basket over one arm, and an afternoon with one’s feet up on the sofa, reading a magazine.(1987, pp. 170–171) Rachel, whose thoughts these are, is an unpleasant character, and perhaps a flawed narrator: how seriously should we take these words? Sara Maitland, the feminist novelist, took noteworthy exception to this presentation in her review of the novel: Possibly a sexist misanthrope could find comfort and confirmation among its pages . . . the book is filled with curiously gratuitous anti-feminist remarks which bear little or no relationship to anything any actual feminist I have ever met would be likely to feel, or express. . . . I cannot believe that a woman of Rachel’s competence . . . would really be so startled and shocked to see a young man in a wine bar wearing eye-shadow that it would trigger a major change in her sense of identity. . . . It is not impossible to snatch a little joy, a little real love, even real pain out of being a woman nowadays. But it is an enterprise not helped by this sort of tight lipped cavilling and pessimism. (1987) Brookner, like Murdoch (again), is a woman novelist who does not engage with gender politics. She has refused to let her books be considered for the Orange Prize for fiction; in interview, she has demurred at her success, claiming that all she ever wanted was to be married with six children (Haffenden, 1985, p. 62). Although she has praised Fay Weldon, she has also said that ‘you’d have to be crouching in your burrow to see my novels in a feminist way. I do not believe in the all-men-are-swine programme’, and, distancing herself from the movement, ‘I think I can take on the feminists’ (pp. 70–71). Hotel du Lac, Haffenden believes, does ‘enter the lists of the contemporary feminist debate to a certain extent’ (p. 70), for Edith Hope exercises free will, has a double identity as a novelist, and rejects marriage for ‘adulterous’ love; yet its sentiments are equally the following words of the heroine: ‘And anyway, if she’s all that liberated, why doesn’t she go down to the bar and pick someone up? I’m sure it’s entirely possible. It’s just that most women don’t do it. And why don’t they do it?’ she asked, with a sudden return of assurance. ‘It’s because they prefer the old myths, when it comes to the crunch. They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a

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These sentiments are not helped by a shocking utterance from a character who is seriously entertained as a potential marriage partner: ‘Please don’t cry. I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her’ (1985, p. 168). This is a disturbing type of high-culture violence, with knives wrapped in velvet, but Edith is not repelled by Mr Neville and only abandons him at the end of the novel. It might appear that Brookner’s reaction to feminism, with the caricatured free woman seen as aggressively touting high heels and briefcase, is actually part of a wider distaste for the working world of the 1980s, capitalism and globalization. The images remain, however. Katy Gibb, in the 1994 novel A Private View, although lacking briefcase, is seen as greedy and aggressive; Claire Pitt, the narrator of Undue Influence (1999), is constrained by passivity, as is the struggling Emma of Leaving Home. Sophie Clay in The Next Big Thing is still clip-clopping her way to work, and the briefcase is back. It seems that Brookner can only see women as tortoises or hares, and is unwilling to explore any options of compromise. It becomes, perhaps, very difficult to believe that young women like Claire in Undue Influence, Zoe in The Bay of Angels and Emma in Leaving Home actually exist. Evelyn Fox Keller and Hélène Moglen would read Brookner as ‘nonfeminist’ in their view that In the prevailing, nonfeminist view of human nature and the world that dominates organizational, economic, and evolutionary thought, individuals are assumed to be essentially autonomous units and the world a finite reservoir of inexpendable and accordingly scarce resources. In the struggle for survival that inevitable ensues, in which each individual is primarily motivated by self-interest, competition . . . is obligatory. (1987, p. 509) This idea is borne out by words such as the thoughts of Emma Roberts in Leaving Home: ‘She would show no mercy if we were ever to be in competition. She knew this. Even I knew it. Both of us accepted a possible antagonism with equanimity. Both of us knew that there is no chivalry among women’ (2006, p. 18). Certainly, all the evidence above is at odds with the goals of feminist fiction from the 1970s on. These aims have been refigured over the past 30 years, as feminism has evolved into feminisms; but I think it is worth citing two examples indicative of the mood shortly prior to Brookner’s first novel. Here is Angela Carter in 1979: All the mythic versions of women . . . are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatary nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the

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price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place. (pp. 5–6) Carter adds that ‘the notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick’ (p. 13), and, talking of de Sade’s Justine, that This good little girl’s martyrisation by the circumstances of adult life as a woman makes her the ancestress of a generation of women in popular fiction who find themselves in the same predicament, such as the heart-struck, tearful heroines of Jean Rhys, Edna O’Brien and Joan Didion who remain grumblingly acquiescent in a fate over which they believe they have no control. (p. 64) Carter would surely add Brookner to this list, most especially as she seems to define Jean Rhys as a writer of a popular fiction. The following year, Sandra M. Gilbert wrote that ‘not only is the personal the political; the aesthetic is the political, the literary is the political, the rhetorical is the political’, and that ‘when I say we must redo our history, therefore, I mean we must review, reimagine, rethink, rewrite, revise, and reinterpret the events and documents that constitute it’ (1986, pp. 31–32). Brookner’s heroines might seem to represent what Carter laments, and be decidedly apolitical and unwilling to reimagine the patriarchal past, as Gilbert would wish. But are they? A telling example is the opening of Brookner’s first novel, A Start in Life: Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. In her thoughtful and academic way, she put it down to her faulty moral education which dictated, through the conflicting but in this one instance united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, but that she emulate those of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. But really it had started much earlier than that, when, at an unremembered moment in her extreme infancy, she had fallen asleep, enraptured, as her nurse breathed the words, ‘Cinderella shall go to the ball’. The ball had never materialized. Literature, on the other hand, was now her stock in trade. (1991, p. 7) This, surely, is a very clear message: the protagonist has been destroyed by the artefacts of culture, by fairy tales, the form that Carter debunked in The Bloody Chamber. This theme will become a persistent one: the fairy tale is an equally dangerous education for Zoe in the recent The Bay of Angels: I read the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow Fairy Book, and the stories of Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault. None of this was groundwork for

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This, significantly, is once again the opening of the novel. The implication seems to be that these women cannot escape their cultural conditioning, that much as they would like to exhibit energy, and become a Carter heroine, in effect, the ideologies in which they have been raised imprison them. Margaret Diane Stetz (1991) argues that Brookner is an unconscious, reluctant feminist, not politically feminist but aesthetically feminist in her belief in the powers of creativity; although Brookner may not acknowledge that she has a political agenda, her awareness of the effects of patriarchal ideologies makes her a valuable contributor to feminist literary debate for, as Williams-Wanquet suggests, ‘The novels illustrate the theories of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that subject formation is a process which must be placed within specific historical and discursive contexts to be understood’ (2004, p. 133). If we look at reviews and other items in journals and broadsheets, we can discover what can be called critical journalism, which is invaluable in gauging the climate surrounding any writer’s work. Often written by other novelists and academics, by its nature it appears more quickly than scholarly investigations and, in the case of Brookner there is much of it in existence. Investigation along these lines yields an argument that Brookner, somehow, is coming back into fashion. Being in fashion implies meeting public taste; it can also suggest the ‘nonce’ canon, and a step towards a more solid literary reputation. Iris Murdoch’s ‘doldrums’ were the novels written between 1962 and 1967. For Brookner, there seems to be a similarly dissatisfying body of work produced between Lewis Percy and Visitors (1997), in the view of critics. Altered States (1996), attracted particular hostility. Here is Rhoda Koenig in The Sunday Times: The opposite number of A. S. Byatt, with her lumpy, indigestible puddingnovels, Brookner is the Jack Sprat of contemporary fiction. No fat for her, nor red meat, nor flesh of any kind, just page after page of vinegary wilted lettuce, as her characters express mild disapproval and mild embarrassment, marry mildly and mildly die. . . . Saddest of all, though, is what this sort of writing tells us about our culture. Just as the respect afforded Byatt shows that we think a leaden and peculiar novel must be intellectual, that given Brookner shows that we think something drained of life must be full of art. (1996) Similarly, The Guardian’s reputable feminist writer Natasha Walter, in a piece often quoted in Brookner scholarship, wrote that

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Whenever I read articles like George Steiner’s recent call to arms about the death of the novel, it is always Anita Brookner who springs to mind. She embodies something frail and decadent about contemporary English literature, and yet her novels are admired because of their ‘literary’ quality . . . it is tragic that we give so much respect to writers, like Anita Brookner, who have really nothing to offer us except a dusty masquerade. (1996, p. 8) These were not the views of everyone, of course; nonetheless, this does signify journalistic boredom, which can lead to public boredom and commercial slumps. Yet, the simple fact that Brookner had become an established part of the world of contemporary fiction meant that enough time had passed for monographs to appear. The first of these was Lynn Veach Sadler’s Anita Brookner in 1990, followed by John Skinner’s The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance (1992). This shows a movement from the nonce to the diachronic canon. However, when the first fiction under its new label Viking (Viking are owned by Penguin) appeared in 1998 – Falling Slowly, with its evocative cover depicting a street scene at dusk, heralding a new pattern, rejecting the use of works of art – the reviews were more favourable than they had been for some time. Undue Influence and The Bay of Angels continued the upward curve, which culminated in the praise given to The Next Big Thing, which won a place on the Booker longlist. This fact should not cause too much excitement, and needs to be treated with care, given the mechanics behind the prize, and the reasons why a publisher may choose to push one title. And a place on a longlist is a fairly minor achievement. Yet this small achievement was accompanied by critical plaudits that suggested that Brookner’s work was more topical and contemporary in its concerns than it might first appear. Julius Herz, the 73-year-old protagonist of The Next Big Thing, is Jewish, although (characteristically) this is strongly implied, rather than spelt out. Herz, reflecting on his life in London, says at one point ‘I feel as if I’m abroad already. London is still strange to me, though I have lived here since I was fourteen years old. Somehow it still doesn’t feel entirely like home’ (2002, p. 45). This homelessness is expressed by Herz’s long evening city walks, walks taken throughout Brookner’s fiction by unhappy protagonists, by an inability to communicate effectively with others, and by a literal homelessness: the novel, through Herz’s memories, leads us from Berlin, to a life lived unhappily in three London flats: Then he would have to find somewhere to live. The prospect posed even more difficulties; he had never exercised his own wishes in this respect. From Berlin to Hilltop Road to Edgware Road all his homes had been chosen for him. And home was such an emotive concept that he doubted whether he would be able to live up to it, to make a place for himself in a world where people exercised choices. (2002, p. 55)

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This powerlessness is illustrated by Herz once again finding that events are controlling him, rather than vice versa; almost immediately his enforced departure begins: In the early-morning light the familiar street looked strange, uninhabited, although there were muted signs of activity . . . the coffee had a valedictory taste; he was in no mood to eat. . . . Raising his eyes from the pavement which he had apparently been studying, he saw with a pang that a van had drawn up outside the shop, that the door was already open, and that inside men were engaged in some sort of activity, one of them apparently going through his desk. (2002, p. 57) The new home has an equally short life for Herz: suggesting, as he contemplates returning to live in Switzerland with childhood love Fanny Bauer, that the boyfriend of a neighbour might lease the flat, he finds himself swept to the side: ‘How could their assurance let them down? Though the decision was theoretically his, Herz found himself in danger of being disregarded. What were his plans in comparison with theirs?’ (2002, p. 196). The outcome is what an experienced Brookner reader may expect: Herz sees Matthew Henderson’s possessions being moved into the flat before he has left it, he himself being urged away, and even the end of the narrative Herz tries to impose on his life proves spurious: about to board the plane for Switzerland, he suffers a heart attack. The end is ambiguous, and we are left to wonder if, for Herz, the next big thing is return to romance, or death. Here, Brookner is coming full circle (in a manner rather like the mental journeys of many of her characters), and returning to the theme of exile that was at the heart of her early novels. Kitty Maule, in Providence, is ‘difficult to place’ (1983, p. 5), the veneer of civilized elegance and Englishness masking a life bound by her grandparents’ ‘French’ London home, an inability to shed the culture and habits of her European ancestry and fully assimilate. The narrator of Look at Me works in a library which, as Cheryl Alexander Malcolm (2002b) has observed, is a microcosm of England, peopled by immigrant characters (p. 50); Hotel du Lac proclaims this preoccupation more clearly still, set in an environment of transition and impersonality, and centring on a character on whom temporary exile has been enforced. Family and Friends is the history of a Jewish family in England in what appears to be the 1930s and 1940s, while Latecomers (1988) takes this further and presents four Holocaust survivors, into whose minds we enter. This was a favourably reviewed novel, and its concerns have made it a central part of the Brookner canon, at the end of her initial ‘strong’ period of writing. In 2002, Malcolm observed that not enough had been made of Brookner as an Anglo-Jewish writer, a fact that could be compared to Murdoch’s AngloIrishness (2002b, p. 18). That she most certainly is: born in London, her

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grandfather and father were Polish, and she has in interviews sometimes referred to her feelings of exile. The biographical links in the fiction are clear and need little comment. What is interesting is the manner in which Brookner has widened this theme and thus made her appeal and relevance more wide. Although Julius Herz is assumed to be Jewish, his status as an exile and immigrant appears more important than any local or historical specificity. As Dinah Birch observed in her review of the novel for the London Review of Books Perhaps the most profound motive for her [Brookner’s] fiction is a commitment to the generations uprooted by 20th-century restlessness, and especially by European war. She identifies deracination as the defining condition of the modern world. (2002, p. 30) For this reason, it is not surprising that, despite the quality of the immediately preceding novels, this was the one that caught the critical eye. It is possible, as Malcolm has maintained, to construct post-colonial readings of Brookner’s oeuvre (which would cement her place in the academic canon): there is ample opportunity for more work here (p. 18).7 Since the events of the early years of the new millennium, in fact, anxiety over the status and role of the immigrant and the exile has increased, which makes the reception of The Next Big Thing partly explainable in terms of contemporary history and thinking, as much as inherent value. Given the passages quoted, there is a case to be made for this work being nonetheless as distinctive as the best of Brookner, in its depiction of a mind that balances emotional disturbance with its rendering in formal language (the coffee has a ‘valedictory’ taste), and in its association of the domestic life with a chill atmosphere. Here, then, is a writer who does not write from within middle-England, but from its icy margins. Malcolm finds that Brookner ‘is not merely writing a novel of manners, but in keeping with a growing number of ethnic British writers today, from Salman Rushdie to Kazuo Ishiguro, from Hanif Kureishi to Timothy Mo, she is treating issues of nationhood and identity’ (2002b, p. 46); similarly, Williams-Wanquet suggests that ‘Issues of nationhood and identity are at the very root of Brookner’s analysis of the inner life of her characters and of the binary vision pervading all her work’ (2004, p. 69). If Ishiguro and Rushdie are the exemplars of immigrant and exile writing, why is not Brookner? There has been a study linking the three, and, the Amazon website sold Leaving Home paired with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005); yet there is still a long way to go, and the balance does not favour Brookner: as we have identified, she writes too closely to romance and realism, and looks like a prosperous, white English ‘lady’.8 I think there is some sexist ageism at work here: Brookner has been charged with writing ‘spinster fiction’, a grossly insulting turn of phrase; is the voice of the older woman taken less seriously than that of her male counterpart? This matter needs further debate, and

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certainly not just within academia: there seems to be an inbuilt view that a woman’s productive usefulness, both biologically and literarily, is restricted to youth. Debates and writing on this must continue.9 Among the dissent created by the putatively anti-feminist statements of Brookner’s characters, and the author herself, in the 1980s, a few small voices did maintain that her position had some value. For Olga Kenyon in 1988 she was post-feminist (p. 164). This idea was introduced through the assertion that ‘sentimental writers are expressing a specifically female response to patriarchal culture which undervalues love’ (p. 145). Brookner is thus part of a tradition, the women’s novel, in its ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, which has always had an inbuilt criticism of patriarchy. Kenyon is able to conclude that ‘Brookner may be called post-feminist in that she observes the constraints on women, yet cannot reject them as a feminist would, because she feels their continuing hold on the female conscious and unconscious’ (p. 164). Head, in a section on post-feminism, observes that ‘where there is apparent continuity, there may be a more subtle challenge that bypasses immediate and evanescent literary fashion’; he agrees that ‘[Brookner’s] exploration of failure and loss [is] necessarily unavailable to a feminism defined in narrower historical terms’ (2002, pp. 106–107). Thus, paralleling the manner in which Brookner’s themes of exile became contemporary, rather than the writer responding to newly topical events, social and political thinking has (although only in a scant way) decided that Brookner’s view is worth consideration. This mirrors the way in which Murdoch’s belief in moral philosophy and liberal humanism, seen as old-fashioned during her lifetime, has recently come back into prominence. Brookner’s change of fortune is illustrated by the first female-centred novel of Brookner’s ‘renaissance’, Undue Influence. Joanna Griffiths in The Guardian wrote that ‘Anita Brookner was specializing in the loneliness of the long-term single female long before Helen Fielding ever unlocked the Pandora’s box of thirty-something “spinster” angst’ (1999, p. 10); Justine Ettler in The Observer felt that ‘Brookner’s heroines continue to captivate and provoke especially given the current resurgence of interest in feminine stereotypes’ (1999, p. 12). On a different angle, it was noted that Brookner was ‘a true poet of the modern city’ (Lively, 1999); Porlock was able to conclude that Anyone who doubts that literary fashion is a wispy, volatile thing might usefully study reviewers’ responses to the annual offering from Anita Brookner. Not so long ago, Brookner was being roundly mocked for being dull, oldfashioned and overrated. This summer, the wind has changed and . . . she is once more a national treasure. (1999) Certainly, post-feminism is an unwieldy concept, but, as well as the notion that some former definitions of feminism were too limiting, placing too much emphasis on a stable subjectivity, and failing to address the different cultural backgrounds of women, from the 1990s on we have witnessed an increasing

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uncertainty over the achievements of feminism. How much equality has really been achieved? And, more pertinently here, where have the battles that have been won left the mother, the daughter, the woman who wants to marry and prioritizes love over work? This is the (albeit) comic subject of Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), and, likewise, of the novels of Anita Brookner. Joanne Hollows (2000) found that feminist theory was increasingly remote from the lives of ordinary women; Rosalind Coward (1999) felt that traditional forms of femininity are meaningful and enriching for many women, and challenged what she saw as ‘feminist fundamentalism’. If Brookner was at odds with radical feminism, and much of the politics of the 1970s and 1980s, she is nonetheless in line with the desire of liberal feminist novelists such as Drabble to place the female subject at the centre, and post-feminists who question the oppositional politics of the second wave. For Head, ‘the direction of her [Brookner’s] work has come to coincide with the post-feminist determination to fly by the nets of gender opposition, and to promote a world-view that is not required to be partisan in gender terms’ (2002, p. 106). Certainly, Brookner’s awareness of the determinism inherent in subject formation is in line with postfeminist thought.10 In 1994, at the time of the publication of one of her weaker novels, A Private View, novelist and poet Blake Morrison had the following to say: She is one of the few contemporary novelists likely still to be read in the next century. What seems musty in the 1990s will seem less so in the future, as the dust blows off to reveal the perennial nature of Brookner’s themes – love, marriage, work, age, solitude, loyalty and innocence; the inevitability of failure; what we owe to others and what we owe to ourselves. (p. 12) If Brookner became contemporary and relevant for critics at the time of the millennium, partial explanation for this may lie in another determining factor of canonicity; her appeal can be argued, in fact, to be transhistorical and even universal. The themes of exile and alienation are, for Brookner, not only a historical fact, but a larger philosophical and religious matter. For Brookner, this sense of isolation is part of the change in thought from the mid-eighteenth century to today, and she is thus not purely contemporary in her concerns. Brookner, as Kate Fullbrook (2000) has illustrated, writes of post-Enlightenment man, atrophied by Romanticism, something from which we have never recovered, a thought the novelist shares with Isaiah Berlin (1999). She asserts that ‘Roman-

ticism is not just a mode; it literally enters into every life’, and that ‘women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man’ (Haffenden, 1985, pp. 68–69). Brookner’s despairing view, expressed through protagonists such as Julius Herz, Ruth Weiss and Edith Hope, is that we are caught between a (necessary) recognition of our duties to the social world, our ‘family and friends’, the wider realm, and a recognition that life may be lived according to

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the demands and needs of the self. We are pulled towards existentialism, and are free of the overarching tenets of God and society: yet, as Herz discovers, this freedom is illusory, and life is contingent. As a world-view it is pessimistic and deterministic, yet through the simple fact of expressing a view, placing a narrative on the chaos of existence, it offers consolation and sense of community to critics and readers. Similarly, Brookner’s oeuvre is profoundly post-Darwin, giving it an anxiety that reads as not merely late nineteenth century but part of an outlook that remains. All the protagonists take cold and solitary walks in a world where there is no hope of anything beyond, neatly illustrated by the way Julius Herz fails to ‘leave Earth’ in the aeroplane at the end of The Next Big Thing. Religious consolation is not available: Kitty Maule, in Providence, enters the basilica of St Denis in Paris to find it ‘a vast necropolis, an indoor cemetery reserved for the rich, the famous and the very dead’ (1983, p. 122). The church, a symbol of lost and dead religion and hope, is empty: ‘She listened, as if taken back in time, for the confident footsteps of the faithful. There were none’ (p. 124). Kitty, watching Maurice in prayer, feels that he has left her (p. 124). At an earlier stage in the narrative, Kitty reflects ‘Oh, I am misbegotten. . . . I am not anywhere at home. I believe in nothing. I am truly in an existentialist world. There are no valid prophecies’ (p. 91). The title of the novel is ironic, and this marrying of cultural isolation with existentialist, post-Darwinian despair has remained constant. Thus, John Bayley was able to assert in 1994 that Anita Brookner dramatises with the finality of Racine the difficulty we have now in living when there is no particular reason to do so, and nothing to underwrite existence – in Sartre’s or in Heidegger’s sense – by forcing us into some sort of struggle to shape and preserve it. (p. 33) And similarly, A. N. Wilson, writing on Undue Influence, found that as the great works of art they are, they are also something much more profound – an analysis of our solitude, our essential and inescapable solitude which will never be more acute than it is on our deaths, but for which life has always been preparing us. (1999, p. 53) This bleak existentialism is in contrast with Murdoch’s cheerful acceptance of muddle and contingency: the closer parallels are, in fact, with Ishiguro, depicting cloned humans gradually realizing the hopelessness of their fate, set against a bleak Norfolk landscape, in Never Let Me Go. As Bayley observes, we are close to Sartre; we could add Camus, Jean Rhys, or even the late nineteenthcentury naturalists Hardy and Wells. In terms of this thesis, we can see a parallel in the Antarctic and North Sea environs used in Barbara Vine’s No Night is Too Long (1994).

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A further argument in favour of Brookner’s canonicity is her use of universal themes, as was the case with Murdoch. Now, the search for love, for companionship and home, is not directly a part of Christopher Booker’s thesis in The Seven Basic Plots (although it might be part of ‘The Quest’), but it is easily recognizable as a clear narrative component from medieval epics, through eighteenth-century novels, to Austen, the Brontës, and later in popular fiction and mass-produced romance. The argument presented in favour of the apparently culturally specific Nervous Conditions holds true for Brookner: these are novels about the relationship between parent and child, between male and female partner, between youth and age; novels about the paths in life one follows, the restraints that govern choice, the debts the world around imposes on us, and the way in which we are bound to the past. Thus, although set in a narrow world of upper-middle-class London, the concerns transcend this, in the same way that it is nonsense to criticize Jane Austen for writing only of three of four families in a country village: her solid place in the canon demolishes criticism of her specificity. Can we go beyond this, though, and say that Brookner’s novels have inherent value? Do they meet Bloom’s criteria, by being original and strange, and therefore canonical? There is, surely, a case for this. The first justification of Brookner’s originality is her successful conjuring-up of an instantly recognizable world. Just as Greeneland was succeeded by Murdochland, so Brookner’s settings and characters are at once familiar, yet also strange and new. The heavily scented interiors, with odours of coffee and almond; the elegant Chelsea and Knightsbridge apartment blocks and streets; the emotionally damaged narrators, daughters, wanderers are a world recognizable yet unknown. The fiction is an unusual combination of a surface formality and balance, and depths of profundity and complex ideas. The form mirrors the protagonists’ outward elegance and restraint, and inner emotional torture: the two levels fight against each other, and, for a reader, it is a dislocating experience. Brookner’s language is not, as we have noted in the example from A Misalliance, original, but insistently dependent on the rhythms of eighteenth-century prose, which, in itself, depended on universal abstracts. There is more variety than this, however. Let us take an example from the 1992 novel Fraud: The windless air made walking almost a pleasure, although the sky was low and grey. Once past South Kensington there was a little more animation in the streets, although the day seemed preternaturally calm, vowed to silence. In Brompton Square a stray balloon was tied to a railing, and there were a couple of empty lager cans in the gutter. Otherwise it was as still as Pompeii. (p. 91) The chief merit of this is the depiction of a lifeless scene: Brookner is an intensely visual writer, and the images of England are reminiscent of those of

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Jean Rhys. The sky is seen simply as ‘low’ and ‘grey’: this economy will be seen also to be a feature of Rendell/Vine’s descriptions of the natural world. However, the writing is elevated by the personification of the day (it is ‘vowed to silence’), and the formality of the somewhat archaic ‘preternaturally’. Economically, Brookner uses two visual details to suggest the atmosphere of celebration past, and to highlight what the protagonist is noticing: a ‘stray balloon’ and a ‘couple of empty lager cans’. The strongest stroke is reserved for the close of the scene, and the metaphor of its being ‘still as Pompeii’. The images are linked by shared qualities of silence and emptiness; the idea of Pompeii, a place of past catastrophe, fossilization, and death preserved, is transferred to the view of present-day London. This should disturb the reader; it should disturb us that the protagonist sees it in that light. The insistence on correctness, on accepted standards of linguistic taste to such an extent, illustrates Brookner the novelist, like Kitty Maule in Providence, striving to assimilate Englishness, from a position on the margins, in rather the same way as does Ishiguro in the formality of his prose, notably in his English ‘country house’ novel The Remains of the Day (1989). Look at Me is, I believe, Brookner’s best novel. It has all the characteristic ingredients of her fiction pushed to their most painful limit: a central female protagonist, Frances Hinton, who is the narrator (Brookner’s first-person narratives are particularly successful); a subtly ironic distance between narrator and implied author; a cast of exiles; a search for love. What is more, Frances is a writer: her cries of ‘Look at me!’ are reflected in the fiction she writes, which to some extent gives her an identity. She is a highly damaged individual, with a particularly painful bond to her dead mother: at the end of the novel, instead of shedding this, she physically moves into her mother’s bed. Thus Look at Me is open to complex theoretical speculation, and is canonical according to Kermode’s criteria: its meaning is fluid, and it bears its interpretations. A desire to do this, to find meaning, appears in the face of work which mystifies, which has ambiguities and concerns that need addressing. This was the case with Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn: it may be true that a novel is simply unwieldy, or deliberately alluding to theories in an unattractive way (as I believe that novel is). It is hard to prove, but Anita Brookner does not appear to write under the influence of theories, but of the history of ideas, and of her own life. This produces a more personal, a more original point of view; and Look at Me sees Brookner at her strongest. Towards the end of the novel, when Frances comes to realize that she has been betrayed by her apparent friends, she is the participant in a strangely disturbing dinner party where the vulgarity and rapaciousness of her acquaintances are symbolized by the arrival of ‘a huge, towering concoction largely composed, as far as I could see, of whipped cream’ (1985, p. 160). Greeted with roars of delight, cries of ‘More, more!’, and nausea by Frances, it is fed by a woman to her lover: ‘I want you to be good and strong tonight. More’ (p. 160). The detritus is used to stub out cigarettes. It is a strange, original and memorable scene. The narrative then moves to Frances’s night walk home through the

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park, seen as a return to the womb, but worth noting also for its evocation of place and mood: I was unprepared for the darkness, and the silence. I had never noticed them before, as I had always been hurrying to Chelsea on a visit, or walking back with James, my face turned towards him. On every occasion, my head had been crammed with words. Now, when I needed them, they had deserted me. Vacant, I was surrounded by vacancy. It was extremely undramatic. . . . Emptiness flowed away from me on either side. The rain was now steady but silent, falling in such thin threads that one was aware of it merely as a coldness descending. There was no evidence of life around me, no rustle in the undergrowth, no reassuring country twitterings. The park, at night, was empty of comfort, a place for outlaws, for those who desired concealment. . . . Lights, in the big hotels, merely served to accentuate the opacity in which I moved. There was a moon, revealed and again concealed by the drifts of black vapour, but it did not reach down into my darkness and was in any case on the wane. (1985, pp. 165–166) The overriding feeling seems to be, to quote the title of a Jean Rhys work, that of a voyage in the dark. The scene makes most sense, of course, taken as part of the novel as a whole, which proves that Brookner does write narratives of action and development: this is the last act of Frances Hinton’s drama, a drama she has been writing herself. The writing of this drama has left her blind to the external world. We are reminded, then, of Jean Rhys, but also of Conrad, with Marlow arriving in darkness to find: nothing. The lexis in the extract tells us of darkness, silence, cold, opacity and vacancy. It is a scene characterized by negativity, by lack (as we shall see again in Hotel du Lac/lack), by an inability to find meaning. Words, we are told, have deserted Frances: she has lost control of her narrative, and is in an existential crisis similar to that of Kitty in Providence. Brookner is averring that life is ‘extremely undramatic’. The manner in which Frances is trapped by her upbringing and her own nature is given memorably in the following: I wanted, quite simply, to spend Christmas with those lords of misrule, in heat and noise, amid platefuls of sucked bones and the collapsing ruins of puddings, at a table awash with glossy leaves and discarded wrappings, the air blue with the smoke from monster cigars, and idle hands searching lazily for nuts, sweetmeat, marzipan. No sacramental Christmas, this. But how much more desirable than my blameless household, with its smell of dead fish, its muffled dusty heat, its untouched furniture, and the shuffle of slippered feet outside my door. (1985, pp. 182–183) Here we have an example of a Brookner heroine longing to belong to the performative world of Carter. It would be highly interesting to see Look at Me

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rewritten by Angela Carter, and to see what she would make of the whipped cream dessert and flaunted sexual desire. It would be celebrated, in the manner of the jouissance and experimentation of much late twentieth-century-women’s writing: this is as it should be. It is not the case that one side is right and one is wrong: there should be equal recognition for both. As Head suggests, Natasha Walter’s dismissal of Altered States as ‘the dead end in English literature’ (1996) denies Brookner a voice: ‘to privilege the most obvious attempts at innovation is, in any case, a dubious critical practice’ (2002, p. 106). Alongside the value of magic realism, fantasy, science fiction, ‘l’écriture feminine’ and experiment, the neo-realist novel of Brookner needs attention, and may have equally important social points to make. The author has described herself as feeling ‘absolutely passive, like blotting paper . . . really invisible’ (Haffenden, 1985, p. 61), and the 23 novels show a gallery of marginalized women, given voice and life by Brookner. In Providence, the starkest figure is of the blind retired academic woman, stabbing the dinner table as she attempts to eat Apple Charlotte, a piece of tomato slowly descending the rugged surface of her cardigan. The blind in the real world tend to manage a lot better than this, but this woman is clearly a symbol of the forgotten elderly woman. In Hotel du Lac Mme de Bonneuil, another pensioner, is a tragic deaf figure, abandoned by her family; in A Misalliance, the heroine is linked to a mute little girl. Later, in Fraud, the premise of the story is that a single, middle-aged woman has disappeared, while an elderly minor character is believed to clasp her cat and weep into its fur. The list goes on and on: as Walter found, Brookner writes of a frightening torpor, close to ghost stories, with ‘characters [who] all share this petrified quality, as though they are caught in a Munch painting, mouths open in a silent scream’ (1996, p. 8). One can back this evidence up with the work that has been done on Brookner in line with feminist theory, where anorexia, melancholy and the creation of identity through the written word suggest that there is strong material there for seeing this as feminist, or post-feminist writing, as we have seen.11 We might remember, as well, that, although it is easy to criticize the Brookner women’s approach to love and marriage as being anachronistic, she is of Polish–Jewish extraction: stopping reading the novels through an Anglophile lens clarifies much, and reminds us that there are many countries and cultures today where the lives and choices of women may not be too far from those of Brookner’s characters. Let us also grant authority to the author and consider the praise given to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: Brookner had some concerns, but acknowledged that it was an extraordinary book, that liberated women must contend with it, and that no book had examined the truths it contained in so rigorous and exemplary a fashion since.12 At the risk of coming to a conclusion on too gloomy a note, no matter how that would honour the subject, the alleged repetition within Brookner is the whole point, for displacement and isolation are ubiquitous, suffering is universal, and the world is populated with millions condemned to silence. Like Ruth

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Rendell, another writer pigeon-holed by genre, Brookner is giving voice to the marginal, the dead and the lost, as we shall see in the next chapter. As a writer, however, she does offer hope: intelligence and academic success in her characters, no matter how they devalue it; financial freedom; even, perhaps, the empowerment of her readership that chooses to view her as romance writer. What is more, there is a tremendous inner strength in the inhabitants of Brooknerland: the strength of the surviving exile, in fact. Stoicism and endurance suggest not passivity but something far above; it is possible to read Fanny Price as the Austen heroine with the greatest strength. Just as, in 1984, Angela Carter showed Fevvers’ triumphant laughter ‘tornadoing’ over the entire globe in Nights at the Circus, so, the same year, Brookner lets Edith Hope choose: she rejects a sterile marriage and returns to live as a professional writer in what is fact an adulterous relationship. Most moving, perhaps, is the end of Fraud where not only does the heroine Anna Durrant escape the entrapment of grey Brooknerland, but she inspires a ‘sister’ to do the same. It is Brookner’s most poignant image, suggesting that, although not a feminist writer, her images belong alongside those of Carter in literary debate: ‘I’ve known you a long time. And I’ve waited. You know where I am. You always knew where I was. Maybe you’ll come and find me one day. But until then it’s goodbye, I think.’ Like Anna, she hesitated, unwilling to take her leave. Then she turned resolutely, and followed the path which Anna had taken, out into the bright, dark, dangerous and infinitely welcoming street. (1992, p. 224) It is too early to predict whether Brookner’s work will survive, but one can hope that the canon will have room for both Brookner and Carter, and many more, thus being able to represent a picture of the many, diverse lives and world-views held by writers and their creations in the latter half of the twentieth century. Brookner is well qualified for admission to the canon; our next novelist, Ruth Rendell, has credentials that are highly problematic, as we shall see.

Chapter 4

Ruth Rendell

One of the main problems I have identified with the fictions of Iris Murdoch and Anita Brookner is the claim that the oeuvre veers close to popular fiction, in both content and output. It should be clear that there is far more to these novelists’ work than that, although any such narrative devices are no bad thing. Despite the problems, Murdoch remains a solid, if not central part of scholarship; Brookner is the focus of more academic attention than one would expect. These are writers who are accepted as being part of the field of post-war twentieth-century ‘high’ literature, even if they are not yet part of Harris’s diachronic canon. This is the point at which we turn to a writer who works solidly within genre fiction, whose works are not marketed as literary fiction, and yet who has followers claiming that she produces novels whose value exceeds her peers on the literary side of the fence. This writer is Ruth Rendell. Examining the novels of Rendell, we can discover how not only gender but genre can influence a novelist’s claims to canonicity. Are ‘canon’ and ‘popular’, in fact, mutually opposed terms? Why Rendell – and why, indeed, crime fiction? It seems to me that, of the various types of genre fiction, crime (in its forms as detective, mystery or suspense fiction) is both the longest established, and the most commercially successful: a look at bestseller lists (and the recent, if bizarre story of Dan Brown) confirms this: Ian Rankin and Kathy Reichs regularly appear near the top. As we shall see, crime, more than its siblings, has gone some way towards entering the academic canon; and, with a career spanning 42 years, Rendell is now, it is claimed, one of the ‘Queens of Crime’. The work of P. D. James is equally fascinating, and, curiously, viewed with more tolerance by the literary establishment than that of Rendell; thus, the reluctance to examine Rendell critically makes her case all the more interesting. By writing three different types of novel, Ruth Rendell is both a leading practitioner of popular, genre fiction, by whose internal rules we can measure her success; and – under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine – a creator of a body of work that is Gothic, fabular, symbolic and intensely moral. This work, marketed as crime fiction, suffers in how it is perceived: the novels of Barbara Vine may stand up against those of Murdoch, Brookner, Sarah Waters, and

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many others. Nonetheless, Rendell is absolutely not canonical, at present. Susan Rowland claims that ‘the lack of critical engagement with the profoundly influential work [of Rendell and five other crime novelists] is astonishing’ (2001, p. viii); Margaret Russett likewise feels that Rendell is ‘a writer overdue for sustained critical treatment’ (2002, p. 143). The Wexford detective fiction, and the ‘romans noirs’, can be read as pure popular fiction; the question remains as to whether the bid for seriousness in the novels of Barbara Vine has paid off, for if Rendell has managed to produce ‘high’ literature, then she is at least qualified to enter the traditional idea of the canon, a repository of originality, profundity, humour and constant modernity, which Murdoch, Brookner and Carter seem to have entered, even if they have not retained a secure place there. A great deal has been written about the vexed relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, a problem that can be traced, as we have seen, to the late nineteenth century, the growing literate public, and the move towards modernism on the part of the artist. The period that sees the rise of symbolist poetry, aestheticism, and, later, modernism, is accompanied by the rise of the newspaper, magazine fiction, the sensation novel and, thus, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (in 1887). As has been ably demonstrated by Carey, ‘high’ literature defined itself against what it was not: feminine, ‘mass’ culture. We see the canon, in the sense of the texts of scholarly life, solidifying itself, a new entity, as the property of the intelligentsia. It took many years for the master of the novel of sensation, who was also the writer of the first detective novel, Wilkie Collins, to be canonized: with the passage of time, not only can his novels be read as expressions of what John G. Cawelti calls cultural archetypes (1976, p. 6), but, with the rise of popular culture as a subject of academic study, and within that the Gothic, they are now firmly established as part of syllabuses, permanently in print.1 The prodigious work begun by Leslie A. Fiedler and others has, over the past 30 years, resulted in a democratization of literary studies; yet, we should still ask ourselves: just how canonized is crime fiction?2 Is it still devalued by the establishment? Do ‘high’ and ‘low’ strain to mingle? And do writers of crime fiction want the acclaim of their ‘literary’ peers? Let us examine some evidence. In journals such as the Times Literary Supplement, crime is normally reviewed separately from literary fiction, often by a fixed reviewer(s): with the Times Literary Supplement, this has often been Harriet Waugh, a crime writer herself. The same is the case with The Sunday Times, The Guardian’s ‘Saturday Review’ and The Observer. The London Review of Books, presumably because of the limited space it has allotted to fiction, does not review genre fiction. The Barbara Vine novels have been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement; the others have not. P. D. James, however, has frequently been reviewed in the London Review of Books. Works of crime fiction have never been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, although this is not the case with the Whitbread and Orange Prizes. Manda Scott was shortlisted for the Orange in 1997 for her crime novel Hen’s Teeth, and

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Rendell made the Whitbread shortlist for one of her Vine novels, King Solomon’s Carpet (1991).3 However, the cultural obsession with reward, recognition and effusion has meant that, within genres of popular fiction, there is a cult of fanzines, magazines and internet debate, and a body of prizes that work against those on the literary side of the fence, defiantly championing the novelists’ equally worthy achievement, as Gelder (2004, pp. 96–100) points out. Rendell has been heavily garlanded: she received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 (four years after it went to James); a Gold Dagger four times (she has won this more than anyone else); one Silver Dagger; and the Arts Council National Book Award for Popular Fiction.4 James, however, despite having written only seventeen novels, against Rendell’s sixty-four, has won more prizes: thirteen, to Rendell’s nine, including a shortlisting for the W. H. Smith Literary Award, which is not a genre prize. Recent books on contemporary British fiction and its purveyors maintain a clear separation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature: the works that fail to include Brookner also fail to include Rendell. We can add to this Rendell’s exclusion from works by Acheson and Ross (2005), Bentley (2005), English (2006), Finney (2006), Head (2002), Parker (2004), Tew (2004), Todd (1996) and Werlock (2000). Rennison does acknowledge the value of genre fiction, simply asserting that it has its own rules, and needs a separate book (2005, p. xiv); Werlock and Leader (2003) both include, interestingly, essays on P. D. James. The only recent monograph which sees Rendell given a mention is that of Bradford; Bradford states at the outset that his work is based upon a ‘contention that while there is a putative hierarchy of major contemporary figures, a book planned around such a “canon” deliberately obscures our awareness both of broader trends and less established figures’ (2007, p. vii). Thus, there are sections titled ‘Excursions from the Ordinary’ and ‘Sex’: the book quite deliberately goes against the norm. Similarly, the chief books on post-war British literature in general, discussing a wider period, such as the works of Bradbury (1993), Bergonzi (1970) and Stevenson (1986), give crime writers only a brief mention, if at all. There are several useful studies of popular fiction, but these work to define it as a separate field, being partisan in the manner of Carey. Notable works are by Gelder (2004), McCracken (1998), Palmer (1991), Pawling (1984) and Sutherland (1981). These critics stress that genre fiction has many pleasures for the reader, and that study of it can serve useful sociological functions. The drive is, it seems, to praise genre fiction against ‘serious’ literature. Within this, and further back, lie many scholarly investigations of detective fiction in terms of psychoanalysis, myth and structuralist narratology.5 Crime, and genre fiction as a whole, has flourished in the wake of cultural studies, and the work of Gramsci and Raymond Williams. There is now a Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003): there is not one for romance. The spate of ‘list’ books, many of which are eloquent, rarely include crime. Thus: Christie is the only ‘true’ crime writer in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Even the dubious BBC Big Read

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avoided genre fiction. Callil and Toibin’s The Modern Library (1999) does include James and Vine. Teaching of contemporary British literature rarely includes writers of popular, genre fiction, although there are courses which teach nineteenth-century popular fiction in terms of historical and cultural context. Again, this is an instance of separation between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Rendell has a mere 31 entries in MLA, significantly fewer than our previous subject, Brookner. P. D. James has 54 and, in addition, 2 books of which she is the sole subject (Siebenheller, 1981; Gidez, 1986).6 Rendell’s status here is low, when we consider she has been writing for over 40 years, and published her first novel in the same year as A. S. Byatt, and 1 year after Margaret Drabble’s debut. The evidence is clear: Rendell is not part of the contemporary academic canon, and this appears to be because of the marketing of her books as crime. What is interesting is that, despite the growth of scholarly writing on crime (and on popular culture in general) there is little desire to look at the works of Rendell and James in themselves. There is another body of evidence, however: Rendell is a bestseller, and although the sales figures for her work cannot compete with those of Patricia Cornwell and Ian Rankin, it does give Rendell a visibility in the market, and in the public eye, far above that of Anita Brookner, Emma Tennant, A. S. Byatt and other leading practitioners of literary fiction. In October 2007, for example, the sales ranking of Rendell’s most recent Wexford novel, Not in the Flesh, was 1,141. Compared with many figures in the appendix, this is quite high. This is cemented by the television adaptations of the Wexford novels (and of many non-Wexford Rendells), a matter whose importance cannot be overstated. The ability of television (even more than that of film and theatre) to keep an author alive in the public consciousness needs consideration, no matter how unworthy adaptations may be; there is no doubt that Rendell’s name is by far the most widely known of the figures in this book, although for some this fame and popularity would be a sign of something too easy and crowd-pleasing to merit serious consideration. According to Bourdieu’s theories, Rendell has a high amount of economic capital, through producing art that is often heteronomous: that is, being produced for money, a product that is aware of its buyers’ expectations. Yet what Rendell does not possess is symbolic capital: the work is not valued within a non-material realm. The economic capital of Rendell leads to a lessening of her symbolic capital, for she has taken her position in a certain field, and moving this is problematic. Surely, then, work positioned within the economic field can be good on its own terms? Stephen Knight suggests that ‘a good literary critic should be able to say why a mass-seller works, and how it works’ (1980, p. 2): Rendell can be proved to be canonical within her genre. Humm, Stigant and Widdowson are right in asserting that popular fiction, like high literature, deserves formalistic and serious reading (1986, p. 2). It has its own set of aesthetics by which it can be judged.

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Rendell’s first published work was From Doon with Death (1964). What is interesting about this debut is that, originally, the novel was not a piece of detective fiction: Rendell manipulated it, as she has revealed, so that it would get published (Brooks, 2002, p. 16). There was safety and security, then, in a well-established format. The Golden Age of Crime Fiction may have passed, but Christie remained as popular as ever, Penguin’s Crime paperbacks were booming, and P. D. James had debuted two years earlier with Cover Her Face. Rendell would, in her very next novel, move away from using her detective, Wexford, but he remains a fixture, both in print and on television. The Wexford novels, of which there are 21 (one-third of Rendell’s work), have all the inherent characteristics of ‘serial’ crime fiction: a recurrent detective, with an established family; the same setting (the fictional Southern town of Kingsmarkham); a focus on action, suspense and mystery; and a final closure where the killer has been identified and order restored. The regular appearance of Wexford and his family provides a reader with comforting familiarity; any violence is mitigated by the knowledge that the perpetrator will be apprehended, and that this killer is at one remove from us: the detective is the mediator. Thus, the Wexford books fulfil the established, recognized paradigms for detective fiction. As Todorov (1988) has demonstrated, this narrative development is a foregrounding of what is inherent in all narrative; similarly, the form can be likened to the medieval morality play, a myth on Original Sin and the desire for Eden, or psychological theories. These pleasures, and the argument that the reading of crime fiction is an escape, need to be acknowledged: yet there is more to it than that. As Julian Symons (1972) shows, from the 1950s in Britain, and the work of Creasey, there arose a type of detective fiction that not only replaced the amateur sleuth with a central policeman, but actively seemed to mirror events in contemporary society: the crimes would take place in a recognizable world. This latter is the tradition to which Rendell belongs. We come here, as we did with Murdoch and Brookner, to the fate of the realist novel in England. Although the use of this mode may not have done the serious reputations of these writers any favours, it is a different case with Rendell. The realist novel flourishes in the popular market (crime, romance, the family saga), while in terms of the literary establishment, it still suffers in the wake of post-modernism and fiction that makes deliberate play with gender, histories and subjectivities. Social realism, such a great part of the nineteenthcentury fictional world, is now found within the crime novel, and it is not only Rendell who does this: Minette Walters, in her novel Acid Row (2001), writes of hysterical societal reactions to paedophiles, and Ian Rankin depicts the problems of modern, urban Scotland. From Simisola (1994) on, Rendell has produced ‘political’ Wexford novels: stories which spotlight topical issues, such as racial tension (Simisola), domestic violence and reaction to paedophiles (Harm Done, 1999), and environmental campaigns (Road Rage, 1997).7 Rendell, always a committed socialist, can use

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the apparently simple and straightforward world of popular fiction to make comments such as the following, in Road Rage: A small crowd of the public, none of whom had known Ulrike or Trotter or had any personal interest whatever in her murder, waited about in time to boo and yell imprecations, while the hooded figure made his short journey. They too would be on television, which was perhaps what they most wanted. (1998, p. 336) As an observation this is neither original nor eloquent, but it does lift Road Rage, and Rendell’s other ‘political’ Wexfords, far above accusations of being mindless ‘trash’. Similarly, if Kingsmarkham is taken to be a microcosm of England, of Blair’s Britain, we have a chapel converted into new housing, a bizarre ‘Euro Fun’ Theme Park, and a wasteland: The barren piece of waste ground where the Railway Arms had once stood was bounded by chain-link fencing. . . . Nettles abounded . . . on the wall of the bus station on the right-hand side graffiti faced faded lettering on the opposite building. Long before the aromatherapist and the photocopiers and hairdresser came, but not before the shoe repairer, the words Cobbler and Bootmaker had been printed on the pale brickwork. The graffiti consisted of the single rubric, Gazza, and the paint used had run from the brush in long red drips. (1998, p. 251) There is real reaction against the modern world here, which brings Rendell close to the conservatism of James in a way which does her serious reputation no favours; however, she does manage to negotiate both positions, making Road Rage a novel that both decries the loss of the English countryside, and sympathizes with the eco-warriors: Isn’t it awful in our society, the way people with morals and high ideals and courage get labelled as subversives and terrorists? The way that happens and other people who never did a thing in their lives for peace or the environment or against cruelty, they’re the ones that are respected? (1998, pp. 113–114) It also ponders the dangers of fundamentalism: the various protestors at points disrupt life in Kingsmarkham, riot and cause damage, and are (mistakenly, however) identified as kidnappers and murderers. Stowe (1986, p. 657) and Knight (1980, pp. 4–5) have demonstrated that this can be a feature of crime fiction: both sides are interrogated, and we see a space for conflicting world-views to be aired, before the comfort of resolution. This resolution may still leave fissures open, however: in Road Rage the police force is shown not to be immune, as one of its members is revealed to be one of the kidnappers.

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I have chosen Road Rage, which is in fact not one of the stronger Wexford novels, as an example since it demonstrates that even a mediocre detective novel by Rendell can have something which lifts it beyond standard genre fiction. There is the potential for Rendell’s fiction, then, even at its most formulaic, to form part of a literary tradition; it may also have, if we wish to justify it, a utilitarian function. This goes with both the desire for and fear of novel reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a ‘new’ Puritan reader could find reading Rendell ‘useful’. P. D. James is herself a believer in the value of the light crime fiction can shed on modern life: I think one of the virtues of detective fiction is that it’s usually set unambiguously in the present world. It deals with men and women at work – and so much modern fiction seems to be very inward. . . . David Lodge is one of the few writers who can write about men in factories. You can criticise Dorothy L. Sayers, but if you really want to know what it was like to work in an advertising office between the wars, read Murder Must Advertise. There is no other novel that will tell you that – just as there is no other novel I know that will tell you what it is like to live in a remote fen village, as The Nine Tailors does. (James and Rendell, 2006, p. 5)8 Similarly, one of the great benefits of crime fiction, novelist Val McDermid believes, is that it can encompass themes too big for fashionable literary fiction: ‘If you go outside crime fiction, there is a dearth of books that treat seriously the wider picture of social realism in Britain today. A lot of mainstream fiction has got very up itself’ (Wright, 1999). Granta’s Ian Jack has been among many to note the failure of contemporary British literature to address the way we live now (Guest, 2002, p. 3). We should balance this added spice given to the form of the golden age detective novel with the fact that books like Road Rage are still detective novels, above all else. This means that, for them to succeed as products within the consumer world – which they most certainly are, sold with the name both of Rendell and Wexford on the cover – the book must be driven by the advance of the plot, the placing of clues, the potential for the reader to ‘play’ in the text, and the unmasking of the villain and the restoration of order. As Cawelti observes, originality may make a piece of detective fiction succeed in its market: but the rules must be obeyed (1976, p. 9). Social realism can never be more than a secondary interest. Road Rage is, beneath its plot, a musing on change and modernity, on the disempowerment of small towns, and even, briefly, on why individuals join pressure groups; it contains two neo-Dickensians, the obese Patsy Panick and her husband, and the figure of Roxanne Masood, whose claustrophobia-induced suicide is surely some symbolic comment. Yet this remains a subtext. Byatt’s words sum the matter up neatly: Advocates of the crime novel argue that it should be taken as seriously as the ‘literary’ novel. . . . It should, of course – but like any genre, its success is

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dependent on the powers conferred by the exigencies of the given form. . . . The crime novel has the great advantage over the traditional novel of having to include death and judgment. It can write of mean streets and petty jealousies, small adulteries and other lapses, but significance is conferred on them by their closeness to last things. The crime novel has the further advantage of being unabashed in its need for plot, narrative and the closed as opposed to the open end. These things are what all compulsive readers need from time to time and the crime novel is committed to providing them. The crime novel has, on the other hand the limitation imposed by the need to provide clues, red herrings, puzzles and solutions for the reader, whose intellectual activity gives her a sense of power. Among other things, this requirement means that all, or almost all characters must be able to slip in and out of the role of potential murderer. In a good crime novel, this chameleon quality can suggest the fallibility and original sinfulness of all human creatures. In a bad one it can reduce all the people to wooden pegs in a board. (1988) The other vital fact about Rendell is that, despite her weariness of him, and her ability to add social interest to the novels, Inspector Wexford remains a fixture, and the reason for Rendell’s cultural visibility: the more challenging, experimental and utopian work would probably not exist had From Doon with Death not been published. Rendell is both a canny player of the literary game, and, the cynical might argue, aware of the financial rewards of giving an audience what they want. Even P. D. James has used, if sparingly, a lead female detective: Cordelia Gray appears in the ironically titled An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), while Adam Dalgleish is both feminized, and assisted by one Kate Miskin. Reg Wexford is shown to be both liberal and educated (his reading matter in Road Rage includes the recent essays of George Steiner), yet these books remain centred on a middle-class white male who is the representative of law and justice. On both sides of the Atlantic, since the very time when Rendell has been published, a great number of women writers – Sara Paretsky, Liza Cody, Amanda Morris, Barbara Wilson and Sue Grafton to name but a few – have produced detective fiction with female detectives, allowing easy rendering of political concerns. Rendell’s failure to do this, combined with her class position, which the extracts from Road Rage illustrate, does not sit with trends in cultural studies. If we examine some of the recent work on feminism in detective fiction, such as works by Munt (1994) and Irons (1995), there is (despite Rendell’s avowed feminism) scant discussion of her. Irons includes an essay on P. D. James: once again, the odds are stacked against Rendell. We should leave Road Rage, perhaps, by measuring it against the standards and requirements of the field within which it is written. In common with all the Wexford novels, it is written in simple language which is not allowed to cloud the all-important advancement of the plot. It offers mystery and suspense, in a recognizable world, and the reader can ‘play’ in the text and attempt to deduce

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the solution. The regular characters are safe by the end, and the killer has been apprehended; on top of this, there is some reflection on contemporary life in an English town. Even more successful is the following novel, Harm Done, which mingles soap opera, social analysis and mystery more successfully by adopting a clear Christie-style plot to create tension: it is a successful hybrid of ‘Condition of England’ novel and ‘whodunnit’. If we measure these novels against Fiedler’s criteria (1975) – ‘release’ is an essential function of literature, and we should be ‘thrilled’ just as the Greeks were by their literature – then Rendell is doing her job. Nonetheless, it is not for the Wexford novels that the novelist has won her prizes, but for the fictions where there is no detective at the centre. From 1965, Rendell has produced 24 novels that have been called ‘romans noirs’, or psychological novels. These works, many of which are critically acclaimed in a way the Wexfords never have been, free Rendell from the confines of the detective framework and allow her to concentrate on aberrant minds. The novels, of which the most notable examples include A Demon in My View (1976), A Judgement in Stone (1977), The Crocodile Bird (1993), The Keys to the Street (1996), A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998) and Thirteen Steps Down (2004), are not analyses of what happened, so much as why. Rendell will often open with a crime, such as the following in A Judgement in Stone – ‘Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write’ (1994, p. 7) – or bring the reader close to the consciousness of a character who is marginalized, isolated and mentally damaged, such as the mad Minty in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001) or the obsessive loner Arthur Johnson in A Demon in My View. Rendell will then manipulate suspense as she works on the reader’s knowledge that a crime will be committed. Two of Rendell’s four gold daggers were won for these books (A Demon in My View (1976) and Live Flesh (1986)); critical praise has sometimes come from surprising quarters, such as Brookner, as we shall see shortly. The ‘romans noirs’, then, allow Rendell a greater potential for social realism, and more freedom with form; they are more troubling for a reader, as we are brought uncomfortably close to the mind of a psychopath, and to scenes which verge on horror. Without the figure of Wexford at the centre, there is much more for the reader to do: the distance between Rendell the implied author and her creations must be measured, and a moral position must be worked out. Rendell has begun to free herself from generic confines and ought, we assume, to be coming closer to writing literary fiction. The suggestion is almost always that society has created these figures and is incapable of dealing with them. Rendell has begun to escape from the problems Byatt identifies and, although there is justice at the end of these novels, it is of an unsettling kind. Free of obvious genre trappings, the author can push her work towards ‘literary’ as opposed to ‘popular’ fiction, and thus nearer to the canon. Rendell, in the novels I consider below, uses the house as a symbol for England, and shows herself to be a moralist, capable of writing with some style; yet different problems from those of the detective fiction arise.

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The social comment that pervades the Wexford novels comes to the fore in Ruth Rendell’s darkly imagined London. A Demon in My View, set in its time of publication (1976), highlights the shabbiness of its West London locale in an era of economic slump and strikes, through the thoughts of a lead character: The pavements everywhere were cluttered with garbage in black plastic sacks. A dustmen’s strike, perhaps. The kids were out of school. He wondered where they played. Always on these dusty pavements of Portland stone? Or on that bit of waste ground, fenced in with broken and rusty tennis court wire. . . . Houses marked here for demolition. . . . Not many truly English people about. Brown women pushing prams with black babies in them, gypsy-looking women with hard worn faces, Indian women. . . . Cars parked everywhere, and vans double-parked on a street that was littered with torn paper and bruised vegetables and silvery fish scales where a market had just packed up and gone. (2004, pp. 30–31) Interestingly, this extract is much less politically correct than R’s recent work; its focalization shows perhaps a rather snobbish lower bourgeois attitude, and the social comment seems condescending. The novel has at its centre a dilapidated house whose mix of inhabitants, the way each perceives the other, and the fates that befall them, make it a symbol of an atrophied England, a device Rendell will use again as Vine in A Fatal Inversion (1987). For Rendell, England is in the hands of men like Stanley Kaspian, sleazy moneymaker, and tenants like Arthur Johnson, the narrowness of whose lower-middle-class upbringing has rendered him unable to communicate and form social bonds. It is through the young – student Anthony Johnson and his work with local children – and non-Whites, such as the tenant Winston, that hope and life lie (perhaps contradicting the extract above). By the end of the book the house is emptying. A house is, again, the sinister setting for Thirteen Steps Down, although here the focus is less on the house as a symbol, as on the bizarre collision of its two inhabitants, Gwendolen Chawcer and Mix Cellini, and the oppressive life of London in the heatwave of 2003. Casting her net wider, Rendell produces a vision of urban life that reads as a dark side to the rather happy multiculturalism of Zadie Smith, and brings her close to the dark visions of Margaret Drabble and Hilary Mantel. This is a world, as Penny Perrick writes, where universal loneliness leads to a kind of moral paralysis . . . in Rendell’s London, uncaringness, although taken to extremes by murderers, is an almost universal affliction. Feelings are so deadened that when police interview a possible witness, he reacts as if in a television detective series. . . . Nerves are shredded by ticking parking meters, cancelled appointments and the constant, hellish noise of the city. (2004, p. 52)

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It would seem that novelist Joan Smith’s assessment of Rendell as a social realist is accurate: she does what the best writers do, which is to notice the subtle changes in how people live, and she uses crime as a vehicle to explore that. If someone from another planet were to ask how the UK has changed over the last 40 years you could do a lot worse than tell them to read the novels of Ruth Rendell. (Brooks, 2002, p. 17) Rendell, in Thirteen Steps Down, is a moralist, as she examines individuals whose sense of social responsibility is destroyed by the ego, by fantasy and by literature: All my work is the expression of my moral standpoint. Though I deal with violence, I want to leave readers feeling their sympathies have been enlarged. If I couldn’t feel sympathy for all my characters, I wouldn’t be able to write about them as I do. (Binding, 1998, p. 31) Rendell’s words here show her to belong to the world of nineteenth-century fiction, to the realist novel and its liberal tolerance of character, its narrative drive; Rendell might be a supporter of the ‘ethical turn’. This means that, like Murdoch, in her projected aims in ‘Against Dryness’, Brookner, and Drabble, she is working against the literary establishment, experiment and the avantgarde, yet in a way that sits comfortably with popular fiction, where the novel of character, family and delineated social setting has now found its home. These nineteenth-century parallels are useful. Much has been made of Murdoch, Drabble, Byatt and Brookner’s love of, and desire to write like, their ancestors; Rendell’s talk of sympathy ties her closely to George Eliot: The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. (1992, p. 263) The manner, however, in which novels such as Thirteen Steps Down are driven by plot, suspense, mystery and melodrama, is far from Eliot and much closer, in fact, to Elizabeth Gaskell. Here is Gaskell in the Preface to Mary Barton (1848): I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men. (1985, p. 37)

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Eliot’s words signify her belief in the ethical responsibilities of art; for Gaskell the aims are more directly political, despite her disingenuous tone later in the Preface. Rendell is doing both: the novelist wishes, while in no way condoning crime, to explain how familial and social factors have led Arthur Johnson and Mix Cellini to behave as they did, just as Gaskell shows us how suffering led John Barton to murder. Like Murdoch and Brookner, then, Rendell is allying herself with the ‘outmoded’ tradition of the realist novel. It goes without saying, however, that simply writing fiction that emulates Gaskell and Dickens does not give it immediate value. The real problem, in the fiction Rendell produces in all three groups, is one of style; it will become a bigger problem as Rendell’s novels become more ambitious. The style might be characterized, at the outset, as clear, easy and simple; is this good or bad? John Carey, in his review of The Keys to the Street, wrote in most favourable terms of the novelist’s style, of its clarity and simplicity (1996). Certainly, in that leisurely novel, which spends much time taking us into the memories of a homeless man who was a member of the middle classes, there are passages such as the following, in elegance far above what one expects from genre fiction, and better than ‘simple’, perhaps: Since then, in this world he had chosen for himself, both unreal and more real than any reality he had ever known, he had re-experienced every day his lovely history, a chapter of it or part of a chapter, and it did not heal the pain or come near healing it. But something else was happening. He was more aware than he had ever been of what it was to be a human being and it was as if, in all his joyous and contented days, he had never really known this before. And self-pity, so rebellious and consuming, was utterly gone. He had become unaccommodated man, perhaps even what those existentialists said man should be – free, suffering, alone, and in control of his own destiny. (1996, p. 33) Here, although the level of vocabulary is mostly not sophisticated, the style is lifted by longer sentences: thoughts and ideas are qualified and mulled over, so that the style mirrors how this educated man might actually write. This is apparent in the reflective phrases: ‘both unreal and more real’; ‘a chapter of it or part of a chapter’; and ‘so rebellious and consuming’. The reported thought shows him (perhaps too pointedly) considering existentialism (he is ‘free, suffering, alone’) and the image of ‘unaccommodated man’ from King Lear. All this both illustrates the mind of the character Roman, and shows Rendell writing for an implied reader of reasonable intelligence. Things are not, however, always as straightforward as this. There is often a feeling, in the Wexford novels, and in many of the ‘romans noirs’, of action and ideas coming too fast, of a need to slow down, which we might also level

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at Murdoch. Rhoda Koenig feels that ‘Rendell’s style is a cool, careful one – a fastidious person can pick up one of her books certain of not only a good read, but also a holiday from vulgar and inaccurate use of language; its quietness intensifies the horrors of the acts it describes’ (1995, p. 7). Like Byatt and Brookner, she is a contributor to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and is known to detest poor use of English; yet she very rarely uses colons and semicolons, and this can give her prose an untidy feel at times, as I shall show later. If Rendell is like Gaskell in her desire to bring to life the people on the street, so too can she be guilty of Gaskell’s rather glib storytelling. Gaskell, in Mary Barton, has her narrator state (of John Barton): You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against the employers. For there are never wanting those who, either in speech or print, find it their interest to cherish such feelings in the working classes; who know how and when to rouse the dangerous power at their command; and who use their knowledge with unrelenting purpose to either party. (1985, p. 61) Like Gaskell, too, Rendell lets her third-person narrator jump in to Thirteen Steps Down and make character judgements, as in the following, where she comments on the behaviour of Gwendolen Chawcer: She wished very much that she hadn’t asked Bertha why she was gaining weight. It never occurred to her to be sorry for this young girl who worked ten hours a day for them and was paid very little for performing tasks their own class would shudder to think of. It never entered her mind to put herself in Bertha’s shoes and imagine the disgrace which would come to an unmarried mother. (2005, p. 131) Here, Rendell moves from reporting thought, in the first sentence, to narratorial comment. This comment, while reproaching Gwendolen, gives explanation for her remissness – ‘it never occurred to her’. This direct appeal to the reader from an omniscient figure evokes Gaskell’s tendency to manipulate sympathy for ‘Poor John’ in Mary Barton. It is clumsy and suggests that a reader cannot be relied upon to make those moral judgements without being prodded. Often, in this novel, Rendell seems to be writing for an implied reader of limited capacity: the way in which literature has destroyed Gwendolen’s ability to see is overstated, and the style in which the narrator reports Gwendolen’s thoughts is neither close to the level of intelligence of which we are told, nor of an elegant style in itself. This narrator comes across as voluble and conversational rather than literary: the line ‘it would probably have killed her to be called by her given name’ (p. 30) does not sound like something that Gwendolen would say or think, and it is informal and colloquial as narrative. Seeing Thirteen Steps Down as a thriller, there is no reason why this should not be the case: in a crime novel, style should not hinder the advancement of plot. But it does mean that works such as A Demon in My View and Thirteen Steps Down,

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because of their language, and their overtidy ends, and in spite of the points in their favour, are examples of original and thought-provoking popular fiction, rather than high literature. As Koenig writes: ‘the writing is not sufficiently distinctive or beautiful for one to be able to call Rendell a great stylist, nor does she have a vision of life powerful enough to overcome that deficiency’ (1995, p. 7). The value of these ‘romans noirs’ lies chiefly, then, in their humanity, in their social vision. According to Brooks, Rendell feels that There are more lost people than we might imagine. . . . ‘Occasionally one comes upon them and one is amazed that people will live like that, people who have no friends and no family, and manage to get themselves into middle age or older never having been married or had children, living alone and coming into old age in surroundings that are getting more and more squalid.’ (Brooks, 2002, p. 18) Brooks adds that ‘Rendell’s characters often live on the margins – of society and sanity – and a constant theme is how communities assimilate those who have lost their way and how they manage the quiet threat they can pose’ (2002, p. 16). This brings Rendell’s work close to that of Anita Brookner: a Rendell protagonist is simply a Brookner heroine such as Frances in Look at Me, or Rachel in A Friend from England, pushed a little further, the mental disturbance going beyond love fantasies to murder, as pointed out by another crime writer: Rendell has a penchant for hopelessness, reminiscent of Anita Brookner. They both write about fixed lives unable to step outside the tangent on which they find themselves trapped; people incapable of turning back the clock set ticking by childhood influences, and therefore prisoners of their circumstances. If the clock should strike, and remind them of the possibility of a great bound for freedom, they are in the kitchen, washing a mug and suddenly beyond hearing distance of the chime. . . . At best, such characters stimulate the compassion that is essential to suspense; or – as they drag others down – they infuriate, in an equally useful way from the novelist’s point of view; or they form part of the plot where others will live beyond them; or they simply have a fascinating life of their own. Brookner does that, creating bleak landscapes full of tears and fury. Rendell and her alter ego Barbara Vine have certainly done it, par excellence. . . . She has written some of the best novels of 20th-century fiction, not confined to the crime genre. (Fyfield, 1998, p. 15) And, in return, Brookner recognizes what Rendell is trying to do: It belongs within that area of her extraordinarily intelligent production that has to do with the aberrant and the marginally psychotic. . . . Such matters are

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the province of the psychotherapist or indeed of the novelist. Rendell stalks her characters calmly, thereby proving herself superior to the psychotherapist who occupies a central position in her narrative. . . . Rendell is now so adept at these twisted scenarios that one follows her unprotestingly into whatever imbroglio she chooses to explore. She convinces us that the world is peopled with eccentrics in the grip of impenetrable secrets. (1998a, p. 19) This is an interesting link, and Rendell and Brookner are, from the evidence of reviews, admirers of each other’s fiction; yet they work in opposing fields. If their concerns are the same, why are not Rendell’s novels treated with the seriousness that Brookner’s are? The crime in the former is one reason; the second is the all-important matter of style. Ruth Rendell, in her Wexford novels and her ‘romans noirs’, excels in the canon of popular fiction, and borrows some moral concerns of high literature, to distinguish her work. Within the field of popular fiction, she had achieved high economic capital by the mid-1980s. The problem of output remained: producing sometimes two books a year meant that she could never be seen as an autonomous artist, not associated with the market. A bid to change this came with the publication in 1986 of A Dark Adapted Eye, under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. The works of Vine have had almost no academic investigation. There are five scholarly articles only, aside from Rowland’s book.9 Let us consider one of the claims that has been made for the Vine novels. I believe Barbara Vine does not enjoy her rightful reputation; many of Ruth Rendell’s novels are just about as good as genre fiction can ever be, but Barbara Vine’s belong to the mainstream of our literature, and not least because of their detective story residuum. . . . The English psyche, obsessed by secrecy, continually impelled towards disguises, has given rise to a curious phenomenon. Many of our greatest novels are concerned with the uncovering of deceptions, with the difficult pursuit of truth in a world intent on obfuscation: Emma, Bleak House, Great Expectations, The Secret Agent, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Darkness Visible. We still inhabit an England where novels like scythes are needed, and here is The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy, to cut a way for us to where truth and clarity lie. (Binding, 1998, p. 31) We can conduct a case for the defence, as it were, of Rendell writing as Vine, suggesting why the novels represent a successful move from popular fiction to high literature. Some of these points, of course, are shared with the rest of her work. The Vine novels are often categorized as ‘suspense fiction’. For Gelder, ‘suspense fiction may well be one of the more literary subgenres of crime fiction, linked as it often is to realism, to ordinary life and everyday characters’ (2004, p. 60). It links Rendell with Patricia Highsmith, another novelist who is seen to

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blur the boundaries between high and low. In Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1990), Highsmith defended this subgenre: the beauty of the suspense genre is that a writer can write profound thoughts and have some sections without physical action if he wishes to, because the framework is an essentially lively story. . . . Crime and Punishment is a splendid example of this. In fact, I think most of Dostoevsky’s books would be called suspense books, were they being published today for the first time. (pp. 3–4) The Vine novels actually work against the action-driven narrative of the thriller and detective story. In the case of novels such as A Dark Adapted Eye (1986), Asta’s Book (1993), The Brimstone Wedding (1995), The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy (1998) and The Blood Doctor (2002), any crime has been committed at least a generation before; the focus is on the relationship between past and present, the dark sides of bourgeois family history, and how criminal behaviour impacts upon perpetrator and descendant. The novels thus become ruminative, psychological and moral. In terms of content, we should note that these novels oppose both the traditional detective story, and the slow-burning thriller based on an aberrant mind. The novels tend to be rooted in normality, not set at extremes: they indicate how passion may cause the ‘normal’ human being to step outside conventional moral codes (something that Murdoch often shows), or how a claustrophobic environment may lead to crime. The former is the case in The Brimstone Wedding, where two lovers, after a car crash, are involved in what is allegedly putting a third party out of her misery, or killing her: the event can be seen both ways. The novel is chiefly concerned with the effect of this action on the survivor over a period of years. A Fatal Inversion illustrates the second point: a group of selfish young people living in isolation are complicit in the murder of the most humane member of the group, and the narrative is concerned with how and why this death came about. The later Grasshopper (2000) is barely concerned with crime at all: the central focus is on a young woman, recovering from depression and trying to find her identity, who associates with petty criminals and is closely involved with accidental deaths on two occasions. The Vine novels, then, may be motivated by tension and suspense, but they frequently do not contain murder. Classic crime fiction will follow a pattern where harmony is depicted, disrupted, and then restored; the ‘romans noirs’ Rendell novels lack this narrative conservatism, but for the most part end in a restoration of order, with danger passed and any possible killer either dead or caught. The narratives of the Vine novels, however, are much more complex. A frequent device is that of a presentday first-person narrator uncovering secrets from the past, as is the case in A Dark Adapted Eye, Asta’s Book, The Brimstone Wedding and The Blood Doctor. A tension is created between past and present, and the use of the first person

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elevates the fiction, by raising questions as to why this person needs to either tell, or write their story; in structuralist terminology, the tension between ‘story’ and ‘narrative discourse’ is foregrounded. Furthermore, Vine does not limit narration to one voice: in Asta’s Book the narrative discourse mixes the voices of the modern-day narrator, the diaries of her grandmother Asta and legal evidence from the past. Similarly, in The Brimstone Wedding the narration of Jenny is replaced, in the latter part of the novel, by a tape recording of the voice of Stella, after she has died. The structure is at its most literary and non-generic in No Night is Too Long, which is a confessional narrative by a former student of creative writing. As the novel progresses, the narrative is taken up by a female character, which allows the reader to contrast both her and the previous events with the manner in which Tim Cornish has portrayed them; shortly before the end, a minor character, who has seemed to be outside the action, takes up the narration in the first person, for reasons which have nothing to do with the crime that has taken place. This shows Rendell’s willingness to experiment with form, and even a nod towards post-modernism, which is not normally associated with generic writing. A simple but effective charge one could level at much popular fiction is that it is transparent, and designed to thrill, to appeal to the sensations. It will tend to be disposable, and not to bear re-reading. Brookner, for one, has defended a Vine novel from any possible charge of simplicity: ‘a further attack on our comprehension will take place in at most two years’ time, and we will suppose that our understanding will be further helped by a second or third reading. This will in fact be the case’ (1998b, p. 36). This may be a matter of a book merely being complicated in its surface narrative; but we should be able to apply Kermode’s theory of perpetual modernity here. While the novels are essentially controlled by suspense narratives, and cannot be radically reinterpreted, there is on occasions an ambiguity that is lacking in the Wexford novels, although sometimes present in the ‘romans noirs’. We can link this idea of ambiguity, eliciting discussion, with Bloom’s theory that canonical work should unsettle us. Iris Murdoch became the subject of study by Byatt because the latter wanted to understand the ideas; The Unicorn and The Black Prince have been much discussed because they are ‘difficult’. This is the case with Vine’s The House of Stairs (1988), which stands up to complex critical interrogation by Russett: it is heavily intertextual, consciously reworking the plot of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), narrated by an aspiring novelist who admires James the writer. It also makes play with the Bronzino painting which itself figures in the James novel. The novel, as Russett (2002) shows, is complex and multilayered, investigating artistry, maternity and desire; it is one of the Vine novels chosen for analysis by Rowland. Rendell (re)read all of James’s fiction prior to writing this novel (Rowland, 2001, p. 194), which would confirm her desire to be seen as a writer of high literature. The uncertainty of the novel’s resolution complements

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the narrative unravelling at the end of No Night is Too Long, and potentially establishes it as a piece of high literature. One of the chief factors which evidences the ambiguity of the Vine novels is the frequent use of Gothic tropes, as Russett and Rowland note throughout their studies. The Gothic as a form has shifted from being merely a popular narrative device, to a mode of writing with feminist possibilities; Murdoch has been read in this way, and Emma Tennant sees the creative opportunities in the form. Dreams, the irrational, madness, symbolic houses and darkly depicted fathers are all featured within the Vine world. Carter had consistently used Gothic, in books such as The Magic Toyshop (1967) and The Bloody Chamber; Rendell, it might be argued, was following this tradition, which continues in the novels of current literary prize winners such as Sarah Waters and Helen Dunmore. For Rowland, although P. D. James is more referential to Gothic, Rendell Gothicizes the bourgeois family (this is most notable in The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy), and the lack of closure in the Vine novels brings with it a sense of Gothic sublime (2001, pp. 116–119). The rationale and realism of the traditional crime novel give way to a sense of the feminine in opposition to masculine law and authority. The House of Stairs, again, holds up as a representative text: speaking of it, Rowland claims that ‘Rendell’s typical narrative is to show conventions of romance as inadequate to contain the extremities of desire, so the Gothic emerges in the modification of generic boundaries’ (2001, p. 133). The Gothic is a unifying feature of the Vine canon. Unlike James, who takes an ultimately tragic view of secular modernity, and is associated with the Right (she is a Conservative Life Peer), Rendell identifies herself as a socialist and a feminist (she was created a Life Peer by Blair in 1997). This belief in socialism and feminism creates an obvious link with literary academia, which, since the onset of post-modernism and the wider rise of theory, has been increasingly Left in its outlook. As we have seen, Rendell has used her ‘political’ Wexford novels as a means of raising issues she sees as important; although these are often not feminist novels, but sometimes more concerned with class, they accord with Duncker’s view that feminist fiction should be polemical, and ‘roar’ (1992, ch. 1). For Rowland, Rendell, writing as Vine, shows that power ‘is not monolithic, but socially inflected’ (2001, p. 166) which sees her sharing the Foucauldian stance of Carter in novels such as Nights at the Circus. Rowland is correct in seeing Asta’s Book as a feminist novel: like Brookner’s Look at Me, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Byatt’s Babel Tower (1996) and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, it is concerned with a woman’s need to transcribe her experience. For Asta, the writing of a diary gives her an identity, living as she does as a newly arrived immigrant in Edwardian London; it is also an investigation of mothering, as is The House of Stairs. Thus, narrative complexity is matched by ambiguities inherent in the Gothic, and the potential for feminist readings should mean that the

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Vine novels elicit discussion and interpretation, at a level not possible in standard detective fiction. The seriousness of the Vine novels, and their variety, are indicated by Rendell’s adoption of canonical fictional forms: the novel as moral vision, and the allegory, where characters function as types and symbolism abounds. The former is most apparent in what is the most successful work, and the best contender for being a literary novel, No Night is Too Long. The degree of closeness to the narrator, and the fact that this is also a self-reflexive novel, result in, when other focalizations are taken up, an implied moral judgement. There is no omniscient narrator here to do this, a device whose clumsiness weakened the Rendell novels; instead, the implied author creates irony by allowing Tim Cornish to express his selfishness, vanity and solipsism in his words and actions, as does Austen in Emma (1816) and Murdoch in The Sea, the Sea. We are then invited to make moral judgements as we observe how Cornish deals with other characters, aided by Rendell giving us their point of view. The feeling is in fact that of reading an Austen novel: although we are not told what to think, we very clearly know the type of behaviour of which the author either approves or disapproves. We can add to this other characters in Vine novels, all of whom are either artists, or quasi-obsessional about literature: Adam in A Fatal Inversion, Elizabeth in The House of Stairs and, in Rendell, Gwendolen in Thirteen Steps Down, the latter unable to detect that (rather melodramatically) she has a lodger turning to murder and an Iraqi refugee hiding in her attic. The moral outcome seems to be that art is dangerous, and that those who live by its rules, by a desire to impose meaning on existence, are flawed in their ability to negotiate normal human relationships. This moral sense is decidedly not contemporary, and brings Rendell close to Austen and Eliot. If we measured Murdoch as great owing to her similarity to Dickens, then the Vine novels at least qualify for being high literature, in that they join Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ in intent. Leavis says of Austen that ‘without her intense moral preoccupation she wouldn’t have been a great novelist’ (1993, p. 16). If this moral seriousness is a key to greatness then, in No Night is too Long, Rendell is surely great. A moral purpose is executed in a different way in A Fatal Inversion, a modern fable in the line of Golding’s Darkness Visible (1979) and Rites of Passage (1980). Its surface is that of suspense fiction: we know that a murder will take place, but we do not know of whom; we also know that the bodies of a woman and child lie undetected over many years. Beneath this, however, lies a grim dissection of contemporary England, symbolized as a decaying, isolated country mansion, lacking a permanent inhabitant, temporarily resided in by two unpleasant upper-class young men and the friends who come to join them. It is, perhaps, Mansfield Park after all the Bertrams have gone, or Howards End given over to Tibby. Rendell takes great pains to lay out the story of Adam and his father, how in this case the father, expecting to inherit from a weak and feckless uncle, is driven to rage when he is passed over in favour of his son. Adam inherits this new ‘garden’, which is at the same time a pagan world of pre-Christian deities

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represented by crumbling statues on the terrace. The proprietors of this estate – the patriarchs – are seen to be Bacchanalian, selfish, unfit rulers, and Zosie could be read as an Eve who is both calculating herself, and yet a victim of the violent patriarchal culture within which she grew up. In a manner reminiscent of Golding’s symbolic depictions of England, Rendell shows how class and race operate in the modern world: as in the former’s work, the prognosis is a grim one. Shiva and Vivien, a Hindu and Jew, come to join the commune at Ecalpemos (the nickname for the house): It was the quietest place Shiva had ever been in, silent in a velvety, tactile way so that you felt you might have been stricken with deafness. . . . A dustiness in the air and a dustiness underfoot and a scent of something sweet and something rotten. Not like England, he had thought, not what he had expected a bit. (1987, p. 125) When the two friends arrive, the others are on the terrace, ‘stupid with hashish and wine’, surrounded by empty bottles; Shiva and Vivien stand ‘On the lawn below the loves of Zeus’ (1987, p. 159). The situation develops to allow Rendell to make her point about Englishness: the outsider is not so much feared, as ignored. In fact it is Shiva’s feeling of invisibility which leads him to suggest demanding a ransom, after Zosie kidnaps a baby in desperation, which leads to the eventual murder; and Shiva is not recognized by Adam in the book’s present, nor his name remembered, and dies in a racially motivated arson attack, unbeknown to the other survivors. Similarly, Vivien serves as both racial other and mother/wife, an uncomplaining nourisher and provider who is sidelined as events proceed, until, learning what has happened, she leaves to inform the police and bring justice. Vivien is shot by a panicked Adam: it is her body, we learn, that lay in the woods of Ecalpemos. The message is Golding’s, in effect: the good and the selfless are helpless in a benighted world where man has returned to his base desires for power and survival above all else, and here is a Piggy who is also woman and Jew. We might imagine A Fatal Inversion as Lord of the Flies (1954) rewritten as the story of how and why Piggy was murdered, the narrative drive motivated by mystery and suspense; Tennant will use the same canonical novel as inspiration, as we shall see. For Rendell, A Fatal Inversion is about ‘the inability of young people to be responsible, which is quite natural. It’s about a lack of restraint and selfdiscipline’ (Leith, 1999, p. 4) a theme she will develop in No Night is Too Long. It is an examination of horror, of evil, ubiquitous in humanity: for Rendell, they are not Manichean and not metaphysical, but arise from society’s construction and its management of the ‘other’, and from its patriarchal power; it is suggested that Zosie’s disturbed mind, which set the tragedy in force, is the result of her upbringing, of domestic violence, rape and impregnation by a stepfather. Moreover, there is no consolation at the end: Adam and Rufus are last seen companionably sharing a drink, free, unburdened, with the wrong person

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blamed for murder; and most chillingly, we see Zosie, now with a new identity and a brood of children, about to buy Ecalpemos and move back in to make it her permanent home. Her view of the past is the following: ‘We do know about all those grisly things up in the wood.’ She smiled, holding out her arms, her swollen body swinging under the full loose skirt, child-like no longer but powerful suddenly, a ruling force. ‘And we don’t mind a bit.’ (1987, p. 317) There is no redemption and no consolation as the individual makes their way in the world, crushing all who stands in their way. The circularity of the plot suggests that evil is ingrained in human nature, in fact. There are many additional reasons why Vine’s work deserves serious recognition; I want to turn here to some facts about a further one of her novels which, even in this case only, are indicative of a novelist surpassing the generic. King Solomon’s Carpet, as I have noted, was shortlisted for a non-generic literary prize. There are several possible reasons for this. As well as building suspense, it offers a dark, poetic representation of London unified through the image of the underground train. The trains become, as they do in Murdoch’s A Word Child, representative of states of mind; the atmosphere is close to Dostoevsky in its nihilism. The narrative spins out to hint at outside characters that are never developed: it suggests a large world, in common with those of Murdoch and Dickens. It has, most importantly, at its centre a character and plot-line which have no connection with criminality: Cecilia’s end is to come to a realization, deliberately recalling that of Mrs Moore in A Passage to India (1924), that there is a hollow nothing at the centre of her world. The literary allusion and existential despair confirm, here, that Rendell as Vine seems to have escaped generic trappings. It seems from the above, then, that there is more than adequate reason for seeing the Barbara Vine novels as evidence of Rendell’s ability to be a serious novelist. Nonetheless, in spite of this artistry, her work continues to be seen as purely popular. I am not convinced that, even in powerful and original works such as A Fatal Inversion and No Night is Too Long, Rendell quite deserves to be measured alongside Murdoch and Brookner as a contender for canonicity. The first problem is not really Rendell’s fault. Having established herself as a genre writer, it is difficult to convince scholars that she is capable of more; the praise has come not from scholarship, but from critical journalism. The Vine novels may not be crime fiction, but they are still suspense fiction which, no matter what its literary qualities may be, is seen as generic. In addition, the novels are still reviewed as crime, and are placed under that heading in bookshops: this is clearly a wise marketing decision on the part of the publishers, but it does not help Rendell’s literary reputation. Comparison with James is worthwhile here: the jacket of her novel Devices and Desires (1989) identifies the work as ‘both an engrossing mystery and a powerful and remarkable work of

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contemporary fiction’. The words keep the two levels of literature alive and claim that James can participate in both fields: the same claim is never made of Rendell by her publishers. This problem is compounded by one of which Murdoch, Brookner and Tennant are all guilty: an excess of production. By not only writing genre fiction, but by writing a great deal of it, and then adding a third type of novel that is still partly generic, Rendell identifies herself more and more as a heteronomous writer. Although James writes fiction that in form is much more generic, the long gaps between her novels (she has written only 17 in total) save her from this charge. If Rendell were totally serious about her move to Vine, she would have done well, perhaps, to submit the work anonymously, or not advertise the fact that this was the work of Ruth Rendell. It is in her style above all, though, that Rendell shows she is a good rather than a great writer. Paradoxically Brookner, much more limited in ambition and narrative, is a more accomplished artist, owing to her writing. Here, we should refute post-modern notions of the death of the author to argue that not only should we evaluate a novel in terms of its style, but that behind any notion of an implied author lies a real presence, whose gifts, talent and world-view can produce either greatness or mediocrity. With a great writer, such as Austen, George Eliot or Woolf, with Murdoch and with Brookner, readers may feel that they are in the company of a distinct and unusual mind, through the artist’s assembly of their material. Rendell has great imaginative gifts, but lacks true profundity. A Fatal Inversion and No Night is Too Long are resonant, moral works, as I have shown: but these are just two examples, and at times Rendell’s ambition overreaches itself. In spite of the excited attention given by Rowland and Russett to The House of Stairs, Rendell has set herself up for criticism by evoking James so heavily. Attempting to escape generic shackles, she has written a novel that is neither a tense work of suspense fiction nor a successful piece of literary fiction, for her style is not developed enough to make the slowness interesting. Here, Rendell’s simplicity works against her. This ambition is most problematic in The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy, the story of the hidden life of a recently deceased novelist who was once nominated for the Booker Prize. In the manner of Byatt in Possession, Rendell inserts extracts from Gerald Candless’s novels which are, we are told, serious literary works. Each chapter begins with an epigraph, of which the following is a typical example: Few people mind saying they have a bad memory but no one admits to having bad taste. Purple of Cassius (1998, p. 87) It is true of course, but does not appear amusing or distinctive enough to deserve quotation; nor would it fit to suggest that Rendell is being ironic and

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that Candless was not as good as the world thought. The problem is worsened by the inclusion of a long extract, towards the end, of an unpublished manuscript that reveals the truth about Candless’s life. It closes as follows: He had died back there in the mist. But hours were to pass, a night and half a day of agony and disbelief, before he recognized that life as he had known it was over and he must undergo a rebirth. (1998, p. 342) This does not convince as the work of a great, serious novelist. Candless is seeing himself as having in effect died, and in need of being reborn, which is not original; the language and thought is not profound. This quotation, and the 30 pages of manuscript which precede it, effectively communicate psychological tension, loneliness and the build-up to a dramatic climax – but this is suspense fiction. It reads, in effect, as an extract from another novel by Barbara Vine. At this point, we should interrogate Carey’s defence of Rendell’s writing, which he would surely wish to apply to the Vine novels, too: Literary intellectuals habitually underrate Ruth Rendell. The fact that she has never been shortlisted for the Booker prize does not stir them to protest – although they squeal with indignation when their own far less considerable favourites are omitted. Their prejudice stems from the conviction that no popular writer can be truly great, and from the idea that the crime novel is a minor form. (Dickens, of course, disproves both assumptions.) They also tend to confuse style with verbosity, and so fail to notice how powerful Rendell’s spareness is. If pressed to justify their coolness, they maintain that she lacks profundity. Yet this seems even more imperceptive than their mistake about her style. For Rendell combines intelligence with emotional depth to a degree rare among modern novelists. (1996) We should bear in mind that this is a review, and thus may not have been considered at length by the writer; nonetheless, the passionate anti-elitism mirrors Carey’s thesis in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Carey is, I think, mistaken on a couple of counts: Dickens was popular but, as Gelder indicates, the novels were not the equivalent of popular fiction in their time (2004, p. 56). Neither is it appropriate to call him a crime novelist. And to say that the combination of intelligence and emotional depth is rare: where does that leave liberal humanists such as Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, John Updike and Saul Bellow? It is quite true that verbosity does not always equate with excellence, in terms of style: some have felt that this was the case with Murdoch. Brookner, however, uses mostly non-figurative, simple, formal language in a manner that is often both witty and original. Keeping Brookner’s description of a bleak Christmas Day in London in mind, let us examine Rendell (as Vine) describing an equally bleak afternoon:

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People talk about the country as if it’s always beautiful. The ones who don’t live in it, that is. There’s something awful about an East Anglian village on a Sunday afternoon in winter, something grim. The surrounding land is grey and shrouded in mist. The village street is long and straight, the houses are low and the trees are low whilst the sky is a huge lid, dull and dimpled like pewter. At four-ish the lights will come on but that’s not for half an hour and meanwhile the low houses are dark and all sealed up, the windows dull and blind except for the eye of a TV screen glowing behind them in a corner. There’s never anyone about but all the cars are there. (Vine, The Brimstone Wedding, 1995, p. 255) This is quite an accurate representation of time and place, and, as in a similar moment in Gallowglass (1990), Rendell is successful in using visual details to give atmosphere: the lack of people and excess of cars; the mist; the ubiquitous televisions, made a touch monstrous through their personified ‘eyes’.10 It is also successful in that the focalization is through Jenny, a young woman who works as a carer in a nursing home and is not educated: the simplicity appears appropriate, and this reads as how Jenny might transcribe her thoughts. Rendell has achieved veracity. Is it just convenient, though, to use a first-person narrator who is uneducated, rather than being a would-be novelist? The writing in the extract is not just simple: it is rather clumsy. The second sentence is not a sentence, for there is no verb present; the word ‘low’ is used three times, which is excessive for the extract, but perhaps allowable in terms of the narrator, as is the expression ‘all sealed up’; there should be a comma after ‘half an hour’ in line 6. There is some metaphor: the sky is seen as both a lid and as pewter, and both windows and televisions are personified. But when we compare this to the Brookner extract, it falls short: Brookner avoids the repetition and error, and distinguishes herself with the image of London as Pompeii. Stowe, in his analysis of the Wexford novel An Unkindness of Ravens (1985), defends Rendell in a similar way to Carey, finding that ‘Her prose is crisp and unselfconscious, artful without ever seeming artistic.’ He analyses an extract where a track is seen as ‘a morass, the colour and texture of melted chocolate in which a giant fork had furrowed’; for Stowe, the metaphor is ‘homely’ and ‘more a window into Wexford’s mind than an example of literary artifice on the part of his creator’ (1986, p. 655). Again, the critic can be argued with, for Wexford is supposed to be quasi-intellectual; in addition, the chocolate metaphor, although apt, sounds childish. While this type of image is allowable in genre fiction, it is more problematic in the Vine novels, where the writing mars the imaginative ambition. The use of simple metaphors carries on in the Vine novels, with the first-person narrator of Grasshopper seeing streetlamps as fruit gums (2000, p. 25), and a character in A Fatal Inversion comparing a line of parked cars to coloured beads (1987, p. 24); this is adequate imagery, but no more than that. In addition, Rendell is still guilty of punctuation errors, for in

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King Solomon’s Carpet we find the following: ‘Diana was a music student like himself, she was beautiful, warm, loving, a serious person’ (1992, p. 35). The first comma should be replaced by a semi-colon. This confusion is in fact a recurrent element in Rendell’s writing, something not present in Brookner, nor in P. D. James, whom I return to now, with the opening of her novel Original Sin: For a temporary shorthand typist to be present at the discovery of a corpse on the first day of a new assignment, if not unique, is sufficiently rare to prevent its being regarded as an occupational hazard. Certainly Mandy Price, aged nineteen years two months, and the acknowledged star of Mrs. Crealey’s Nonesuch Secretarial Agency, set out on the morning of Tuesday, 14th September for her interview at the Peverell Press with no more apprehension than she usually felt at the start of a new job, an apprehension which was never acute and was rooted less in any anxiety whether she would satisfy the expectations of the prospective employer than in whether the employer would satisfy hers. (1994, p. 3) This is highly typical James writing. There is a careful formality here, and the level is raised by the inversion in the first sentence; in this sentence, a detached tone is achieved by the generalization: it is a, rather than any specific, typist. This detachment culminates in the comic idea of the corpse being an occupational hazard, and the comic note is juxtaposed with the carefully qualified sentence to enhance the effect. The style is reminiscent of nineteenth-century realism, and continues in this manner: elaboration and qualification; omniscience (‘certainly’); bathos (Mandy is the ‘star’ of the ‘Nonesuch’ Agency), parallelism (the repetition of ‘apprehension’); and chiasmus through the repetition of ‘satisfy’ and ‘employer’ in the last sentence. It brings James, like Brookner in the passage we examined, close to Austen, in a way in which Rendell has not yet been able to write. It is for this reason, then, that James has a claim to seriousness which Rendell has not. The case of Rendell, then, consolidates what we have proved with regard to Murdoch and Brookner. There is a great deal to be said in defence of Rendell: she is an accomplished practitioner of crime fiction, working within its boundaries and deservedly winning genre prizes, and adding a political dimension; she is original in her investigation of the marginal, criminal mind. As Barbara Vine, she has written remarkable entertainments with strong elements of Gothic, morality and ambiguity. Yet Rendell’s style, and the fact that she is marketed as a genre writer, mean that she is trapped for the moment in the popular field, although straining at its edges. In addition, the most recent Barbara Vine novels show that something has been lost since Grasshopper; they place Rendell back firmly in the heteronomous. This field is, for the moment, where she belongs, with Daphne du Maurier, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and many notable others; it is not to deny them a great deal of merit. In fact, there is a great

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deal more literary pleasure to be found in du Maurier and Collins than in many firmly literary writers: pleasure, with something more besides. Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is a useful final comparison. A century after publication, the novel is as popular as ever, and has never been out of print; it also has 446 entries in MLA and is very frequent part of university syllabuses. There is a strong argument for seeing Dracula as canonical, high literature, as a modern myth: certainly, for what it is worth, Bloom includes it (and also novels by Stevenson and Wilkie Collins) in his The Western Canon. Does Rendell really belong there, and could she make the journey? If Stoker and his contemporaries are an example to go by, only time will tell.

Chapter 5

Emma Tennant

We have moved from an examination of how Iris Murdoch came to be the leading female writer of British fiction, and how she was displaced by the rise of feminist studies and literary theory, through to the problems faced by Brookner and Rendell: alleged repetition, use of formulae, writing of ‘female’ fiction and the way they seemed to occupy a place too close to the centre of the establishment. Genre, more than gender, in short, hinders the way these novelists are perceived, just as Stella Gibbons, Daphne du Maurier, Elizabeth Taylor and others struggled against accusations of being middlebrow. After 1980, accompanying the increasingly successful publishing industry and book marketing, and the growth in power of the Booker Prize, the ‘old guard’ – novelists such as Murdoch, Golding, Spark, Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson – sank in favour as new writers, aided by Granta, Bradbury’s courses at the University of East Anglia, and the fashions of post-modernism, feminism, magic realism and historical narrative, rose to acclaim. Rushdie, McEwan, Ishiguro, Swift, Barnes and Martin Amis led the masculine side; there was less female representation, it seems, but Angela Carter achieved a high degree of critical prominence, as did Jeanette Winterson. Even A. S. Byatt, who had been publishing fiction since 1964, benefited from the zeitgeist: her use of postmodernism and structuralism in Possession led that novel to win the Booker Prize in 1990, which was a rare moment of popular and critical acclaim interlinked. Her sister Margaret Drabble’s work was, at the end of the 1980s, however, being criticized harshly for its outdated liberal realism. It would seem, then, for a would-be female novelist at the end of the 1970s, that following these critical fashions would be the secret of success. It was not the case. Quite obviously, given the increasing proliferation of fiction flooding bookshops, a writer may be post-modern, and feminist, but not achieve acclaim. Emma Tennant is one of a group of novelists which arose in the 1970s and 1980s, and trailed nobly behind Carter but failed to achieve sufficient visibility within academia to be called canonical. As late as 1989, critics such as Flora Alexander were noting that while Murdoch, Spark and Lessing were well served by critics, other, newer writers like Tennant were much less so (p. 95). These somewhat ‘invisible’ novelists, some who might be termed feminist, some who do not sit comfortably with that label, include Michèle Roberts, Sara

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Maitland, Eva Figes, Micheline Wandor, Zoe Fairbairns and Elaine Feinstein. Many of them were part of the quintet that produced Tales I Tell My Mother (1978), a writers’ group with an explicitly feminist agenda. Tennant was not part of this, but she was founder and editor of the journal Bananas, which published new writing, including the work of Carter. All these women, like their American and Canadian counterparts Atwood, Morrison, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker and Joanna Russ, have produced innovative, experimental and challenging work which has played with genre and worked against realism. We start to find the very issue of canonicity in British fiction influenced by the fact it is British fiction, and not post-colonial, world writing. Tennant’s serpentine career, her canonical standing at the start of the twentyfirst century, and the reasons why she is not acclaimed as she might be are perhaps the most puzzling of the writers in this book. There are also questions to be asked about style and originality. Emma Tennant kindly agreed to be interviewed, and her comments on her writing, her reputation and on the canon in general are interwoven with my argument. They shed a most useful light on why Tennant, of the four figures in this study, is the most distant from the canonical centre. If we began with a writer sometimes seen as one of the most important of her time, then we should surely end, after a journey outwards in the canonical solar system, with one who occupies a sadly Pluto-like position. We can begin with consideration of how Tennant stands in the academic and popular canons, in terms of scholarly work, teaching, reviews and prizes. Tennant has 21 entries in the MLA Bibliography. This is not an unhealthy number, but, given how much work she has produced over 31 years, it is scant. She is less studied, it appears, than Brookner and Rendell; she is far less studied than Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, and even less so than Atwood and Morrison. There are no books published yet solely on Tennant; Murdoch and Carter have many. She has not been the sole subject of conferences, as have the former (and Winterson). She is not listed on the British Council’s Contemporary Writers website, nor did she form part of Bloom’s canonical list in The Western Canon (1994). Of recent books on contemporary fiction, there is no mention of Tennant in Childs (2005), Head (2002), Mengham (1999), Morrison (2003), Rennison (2005) and Tew (2004). A brief mention is given in Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel (1993), and in Randall Stevenson (1986). There is, however, a full chapter in Werlock (2000), and in Beate Neumeier’s earlier Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary Writers in Britain (2001) (which is the proceedings of a conference). From a Scottish angle, there are small sections on Tennant in two monographs (Anderson, 1993, 2000). Connor, in The English Novel in History 1950–95 (1996), discusses Two Women of London (1989) (pp. 178–182); Showalter picks the same novel in her famous Sexual Anarchy (1992, pp. 124–125). This fact proves that, although there is little interest in producing scholarly work on Tennant, she does form a standard (if minor) part

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of critical work on post-war British fiction, although the interest is almost always in her work of the 1970s and 1980s. There is not a great deal of university teaching that includes Tennant, but her work appears occasionally on specialist courses, with regard to areas such as the dream, and updates of the Brontës. From the mid-1970s, Tennant’s novels were reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, often very favourably.1 On occasions, her work has been discussed in the London Review of Books. Leading fiction-reviewing newspapers, such as The Sunday Times and The Guardian, will normally make space for her work, although this depends on how each novel is being pushed by the publisher. There was reasonable commentary on Felony; although Heathcliff’s Tale (2005) and The Harp Lesson (2005) received very positive reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (2007) was not reviewed anywhere. Although reviews are not scholarly work, this critical journalism is surely vital to ensure that a writer is receiving ‘Kermodean’ attention. Tennant was, she reveals, shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize for the novel Hotel de Dream (1976); apart from this, she has neither been nominated for nor won any literary prizes, although it is only in recent years that the Booker panel have started publishing longlists, so we are not to know what happened before (Turner, unpublished interview, 2007). Interestingly, the Orange Prize has not come remotely near her, and she has not sat on the judging panel for any of the main prizes, unlike Rendell, who is ahead of Tennant in the prizerace, as we found. The author, unsurprisingly, has not appeared in the many league tables produced by our ranking-obsessed culture: The BBC Big Read; The Orange Poll for Best Fiction by Women (Matthews, 2003); The Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels; and the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. She is not mentioned in selections by Burgess (1984), and by Callil and Toibin (1999). A recent book was her Autobiography of the Queen (2007); even given the fact that Alan Bennett’s similar ‘royal fiction’ is a huge bestseller, Tennant’s work tended to manage an Amazon sales ranking of only 30,000. Few of Tennant’s novels, are, in fact, still in print: while The Bad Sister (1978) and Two Women of London were republished by Canongate in omnibus form in 2000, Hotel de Dream (1976), Wild Nights (1979), Alice Fell (1980), Queen of Stones (1982), Woman Beware Woman (1983) and others are no longer available. This is a stark contrast to Murdoch and Rendell, who are all in print, and Brookner who, while some of her titles are out of print, has had her 1980s fiction republished in the late 1990s. The conclusion we can easily draw from the above is that if, as we have maintained, being part of the contemporary academic canon means being part of the material of conferences and journals, Tennant is not a leading player, and lags behind even Brookner, whose position for some is equivocal. Nor is Tennant part of the commercial canon, which flies its flag through literary prizes, book promotions, Richard and Judy’s Book Club on television, media adaptations and high sales. Although Tennant’s Austen ‘classic progressions’ – continuations of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), and Sense and Sensibility (1811) – can be found (unfortunately, perhaps), repackaged as women’s

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romance in Britain’s remainder bookshops, and Pemberley (1993) is her bestselling work, Tennant is not a commercially popular writer. Tennant’s novels are literary fiction, and she is a marginal figure, now, in the literary world of the early twenty-first century. If we measure Tennant against Harris’s list of canons, she does not ‘score’ highly. Her work is not part of a ‘nonce’ (highly visible, contemporary) canon, nor his idea of selective, critical or diachronic canons. Tennant’s entire oeuvre is not all in the ‘accessible’ canon, although it is in a ‘potential’ canon; it may be in ‘personal’ canons of some. The previous three novelists under examination fare much better with Harris’s criteria. Once any writer of what is dubiously called ‘literary fiction’ has been reviewed in leading journals, listed in books on fiction, and had some scholarly discussion, they might be said to hover on the outer edges of the canon. Tennant, it is apparent, has scored some points, and so we should examine the reasons for this academic attention, and additionally suggest why she deserves more academic consideration than she has yet received. Tennant’s work, in its early stages, forms part of the revolution in cultural studies, where the canon was questioned, and formerly marginalized writers and texts became subjects of study and scholarship. Increasingly, as we saw with regard to Rendell, it has become de rigueur to consider genre fiction in a scholarly light, and the old opposites of high and low culture have become consciously blurred. Tennant cites Moorcock and Ballard as influences (Haffenden, 1985, p. 288), and, if not pure science fiction, her early work deals with the fantastic, which, as Atwood and others have noted, lets writers examine their own society at an artistic distance.2 Tennant describes her early work as comic science fiction (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 150). The Gothic, as a literary form, occupies a more central place in culture than science fiction. The Bad Sister is the earliest of Tennant’s novels to have been treated seriously by critics; it is a feminist version of Hogg’s Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner (1824). Similarly, the later Two Women of London is a modern, female-centred reworking of Stevenson’s Gothic classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). These novels are Tennant’s most popular, in terms of academic attention, and have been discussed in articles, and within books.3 There is much less interest, in terms of the academy, in the poetic novels, and the ‘classic progressions’. Two Women of London is the last Tennant novel to be the subject of any repeated attention. Is it the case that The Bad Sister and Two Women of London are Tennant’s ‘best’ works? It appears to be increasingly difficult to pose and answer this question if, as is so often suggested, there is no such thing as intrinsic artistic value, and all value is contingent, objects of art only being such when a power-wielding institution embraces them. The Gothic tropes of these novels do however explain the attention scholars have given them: we can add to this their feminist argument and post-modern structure (more of this later). Both novels deal in the uncanny, unsolved mysteries, the night, dreams and the subconscious; Two Women of London has the narrative drive of a thriller. Carter, Atwood and

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Morrison would all use the fashionable Gothic to argue their points; Gothic became, and remains, a highly visible trope in both popular and now literary works. Tennant, in fact, has not entirely rejected the Gothic, and the recent novel Felony (2002) sees the author recognizing that it is still a useful trope for depicting the anguish of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a writer who, Tennant feels, suffered at the hands of Henry James. A climactic scene shows Woolson having a breakdown on the shores of Lake Geneva: Constance has no idea where she is going. The storm mounts, and seldom falls away; to plunge in the bottomless lake is tempting. . . . Thunder, following the lightning which comes in jagged knife throws down across the lake, sounds an ominous chorus to Constance’s increasingly desperate thoughts and muttered sentences. . . . Mary Shelley did dream; and Constance, making her way up the hill now, through falling shale and grabbing hold of bushes as she goes, screams at the indistinct figure she sees, high by the villa’s garden wall above. Frankenstein! – she sees the bolted-together monster who walked that night from Mary Shelley’s mind. (2002, p. 149) There has, as yet, been no academic work on Felony. The extract deserves note for its intertextual Gothic: the imagination of an earlier woman writer influences that of a later one, allowing Tennant to implicitly suggest that there may be a female Gothic tradition, of which she, as author, thus becomes a part. Tennant’s Gothic, then, moves from its associations with the vampire and the dream in The Bad Sister, through its rewriting of classic male Gothic in Two Women of London, to the scene above and, most recently, the reworking of Jane Eyre (1847) in The French Dancer’s Bastard (2006), where the symbolic stately home remains central, but the ‘victim’ is now a pubescent girl. This trajectory shows an inventive, experimental approach to the Gothic, far above that of popular romance, and it should qualify Tennant for more academic attention than she has yet received. Pemberley, Tennant, acknowledges, is her only bestselling novel (Turner, 2007). It sold more than 100,000 in paperback, and, in hardback, it made a top ten bestselling fiction list at the end of 1993.4 The success of the novel (its sales were way above those of Tess, published the same year) prompted Tennant’s publishers to push for more work in the same vein. An Unequal Marriage, continuing the story of Elizabeth and Darcy, appeared the following year; Elinor and Marianne and Emma in Love followed in 1996. Although Pemberley preceded the Austen ‘mania’ of the mid-1990s – there was a glut of film and TV adaptations – it arrived in a timely way, and this surrounding interest cannot but have helped the later Austen ‘classic progressions’. Although Pemberley is not enough of a bestseller to make Tennant a commercial writer of serious power, or one who bridges the gap between commercial and literary fiction like Sebastian Faulks or Louis de Bernières, it is worth considering why this novel did so well,

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when Tess, which also played with a leading work of nineteenth-century fiction, remains a fairly minor work of ‘literary fiction’. For a start, rather than using her fiction to criticize both a canonical author’s work, and his own behaviour, as she does with Hardy in Tess, Tennant writes, quite convincingly, in Austen’s style. Thus, as the opening to the novel, we have ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a married man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a son and heir’ (p. 3). Tennant works in the realist tradition: Tess has a structure that is complex and post-modern, like many of the earlier novels, while in Pemberley Tennant in fact leads Elizabeth and Darcy through similar misunderstandings of pride and prejudice to those in Austen’s novel. The end, meanwhile, sees the couple reunited and Elizabeth pregnant. It fulfils the demands of genre fiction and is a satisfactory Regency Romance, in effect, leading us through tension to understanding and a consolatory world of happy-ever-after. Tennant is acutely playing on the audiencepleasing side of Austen, with commercial success: this is illustrated by the following scene, close to the end of the novel: ‘You are never to leave me again, do you hear me, Eliza’, said Darcy – but in a rough voice that was scarcely audible to her. ‘You are too precious to me – loveliest Elizabeth, forgive my stupid pride, in abandoning you! Please do so!’ Elizabeth found no breath to reply; but she looked up at Mr. Darcy with eyes so fine, smiling and full of love, that Mr. Darcy knew he had the answer. (1994, p. 183) In addition to the fact that, for once, Tennant does not appear to be writing against the canon, we should note the fact that Austen’s work itself is, for many readers, popular fiction: she can be argued to be the originator of Regency Romance, and the novels have been televised and filmed again and again. Further, Austen’s name comes behind only Shakespeare and the Brontës now in terms of being a ‘brand’: there is a burgeoning Austen industry, including books on cookery, Christmas and games; Austen dolls, and, in Bath, a Regency town in which to base this industry. In Pemberley, we might argue, Tennant has joined this industry, positioning herself as a heteronomous writer in Bourdieu’s field of cultural production. The matter of the Gothic links to Tennant’s Scottish heritage, and the increasing interest, since the early 1990s, in Scottish literature. The trumpet-blast of Alasdair Gray in Lanark (1981) heralded a gradual belief in the possibilities inherent in literature from north of the Border; this, naturally, was reinforced by devolution and Scottish Nationalism. The major players have generally been cited as male: Booker winner James Kelman, and also Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh, although we should add Janice Galloway and the notable success of A. L. Kennedy. This renaissance, and its accompanying critical interest, has resulted in inclusion for Tennant in two further books: The Scottish Novel since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams (1993); and Contemporary Scottish Writers (2000).5

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In interview, Tennant makes frequent reference to the fact that she was born in Scotland, where she lived an idyllic, isolated existence until she was 9 and her family moved to London. For Tennant, there is a distinct Scottish identity, which is related to the idea of the double: I went to school in Scotland and spoke a broad Scottish dialect, and if you then come south there does exist a split as to whether you think you are Scottish or English. The concept of the split personality is particularly appealing to Scottish writers because the doubleness of national identity has been there for so long. (Haffenden, 1985, p. 292) Tennant also talks approvingly of Karl Miller’s Cockburn’s Millenium (1975) and its ideas of Scotland as a particularly fertile ground for the double, and how it suggests that Scotland is obviously colonised by England, and therefore breeds a totally different kind of literature, more romantic, more akin to European literature and European imagination than England ever has. I, of course, find all this very interesting and provocative as it’s where I happen to come from and where my imagination – it seems to me – is so completely unlike a lot of English novelists. (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 124) Scottishness appears to be germane to canonicity, both in wide terms, given the high standing of many Scottish writers at the moment, and because for Tennant it creates an identity that leaves one separated from Englishness and thus more fruitful in imaginative terms. Tennant obviously sees herself as a Scottish writer, at times, and certainly as a writer outside the English tradition: her comments on colonization would allow for a quasi-post-colonial reading of her work, for The Bad Sister and Two Women of London foreground the double, and the idea of exile and movement recurs in later novels such as The French Dancer’s Bastard and The Harp Lesson.6 In the latter, the origins of the protagonist are deliberately mysterious: Pamela may be the child of the Duc d’Orléans or an Irish revolutionary, and events see Pamela passively transported from Dorset, to Paris, and then to Ireland. Scottish identity overlaps with the transformed Gothic doubles of Hogg and Stevenson, then, to produce fiction which has concerns outside those of gender politics, and takes up topical themes of identity and nation. In The Harp Lesson, Pamela reflects that ‘all my life I have received strange looks and questions: am I by birth English or French, was my mother, the famous and learned royal tutor who denied so often that I was her child, in fact lying or telling the truth?’ (2005, p. 6) Iris Murdoch’s work has, despite her intentions, been read as post-modern, and curiously in vogue with fashions in literary theory. Brookner is hard to read as post-modern; Rendell’s work as Barbara Vine can at times play with postmodern concepts. Many other writers of that era, such as Lively and Drabble,

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also tread a line between realism and post-modernism. Tennant, however, produced work that could easily be read as post-modern, from the late 1970s through the 1980s. Queen of Stones, for example, is once again a retelling of a classic, canonical narrative, from a female perspective. The master text is Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Tennant imagines the events transposed to Dorset, and a school trip that goes awry when some of the girls become lost in a mysterious fog. The novel opens with an extract from a newspaper, followed by an Author’s Note. This author is later established to be fictitious, and not definable as masculine or feminine. The third-person narrative that follows is an essentially realist thriller, yet interspersed with the reported thoughts and dreams of the girls, case histories of them from teachers, sociologists and psychiatrists, a report by a bishop, and the journal of one the girls. The tense also shifts, in the surrounding narrative, from present to past. The novel concludes with a postscript, an addendum by the author, and a short bibliography. This constant shifting of focalization successfully allows the reader to question the assumptions made by both ‘author’ and figures of social authority; we realize that none of these explanations is satisfactory in telling the complex, secret life of the minds of girls. In its disruption of linear narrative and deferral of meaning, then, Queen of Stones is an archetypal post-modern fiction, and has been examined in critical work by Schmid (2001)and Alexander (1989, pp. 78–79). Although Tennant has confessed that she is not certain she understands what post-modernism is (Turner, 2007), she has absorbed the literary climate with the result that subsequent novels are also de-centred, foreground their own construction, mix fact and fiction, and problematize narrators, myth, and the recounting of history. The earlier The Bad Sister is composed of an Editor’s Narrative, The Journal of Jane Wild and an Editor’s Note; Two Women of London mixes omniscient narrative, journal, description of a film, an answerphone message and an editor’s postscript. In Tess, fiction is interspersed with polemic, biography of Hardy and rendering of ancient history. It is curious, surely, that these complex novellas, interweaving classic literature, genre, biography and historical fact, should be as neglected as they are, when the post-modern worlds of Barnes, Ackroyd and Swift are a staple part of the monographs on post-war British fiction? Much of Tennant’s fiction parallels the concerns of these novelists: we might cite Barnes’s mixture of biography, fiction and criticism in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and Swift’s problematizing of history in Waterland (1983). It is not a simple gender argument of course, for Byatt’s post-modern fiction has elicited much discussion (although this may not have happened without the winning of the Booker), as has Carter’s. There are root questions of prominence in the publishing world at stake here, to which I will return. The next matter for consideration is feminism, particularly given Tennant’s obvious post-modernism: the relationship between these movements is a complex one, as Waugh highlights in Feminine Fictions (1989). Noting how postmodernism concerns itself with demolishing the boundaries between high and

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low culture, and the recuperation of marginal voices, Waugh decides that ‘women writers have not yet experienced that subjectivity which will give them a sense of personal autonomy, continuous identity, a history and agency in the world’ (1989, p. 6): post-modernism, for Waugh, can be viewed as a masculine domain. Tennant might be said to follow Lessing in The Golden Notebook, producing texts which appear post-modern in structure, yet retain, as Waugh argues, a commitment to the liberal-humanist subject within this. Both Lessing and Tennant acknowledge the complexity of subjectivity, and the formation of the subject through discourses, yet each will give voice to a character within a recognizable locale. Waugh does not discuss Tennant, but her fiction would fit in to many of Waugh’s arguments: Tennant is navigating a position shared by other post-war women novelists who find both post-modernism and liberal realism unsatisfactory forms. Queen of Stones is a realist text within its post-modern framework; novels such as The Bad Sister, Two Women of London, Tess and The French Dancer’s Bastard depict how the subject becomes trapped within discourses, and the focus of the novelist is on both narrative framework and discourse, and the need within this for an individual to form their subjectivity. Murdoch, Brookner and Rendell have all been aligned with feminist concerns, if to very varying extents. Nonetheless, of the writers in this study, it is only Tennant who is explicitly political and feminist in her fiction, although this is not without its accompanying problems. Here is Tennant in The Bad Sister: The Muse is female, and a woman who thinks must live with a demented sister. Often the two women war, and kill each other. I thought of the male Muse – or the male counterpart who is needed to make a woman complete in herself: he is yet to come. And as I lay hating the girl in the photo. . . . She, my shadow who waits still in the street, is the definition of that vague thing, womanhood: a pact made with the eyes, signalled to men, that suggests women should pretend to enjoy a subservient position while ruling the men with ‘an iron hand in a velvet glove’. Men like her because she is so finite. She never dreams, there is no static around her head – this is reserved only for me, only for the other sister, and in the terrible competitiveness, it’s a battle she will always win. (1979, p. 63) Through the narration of Jane Wild, we are told that, as Tennant puts it in interview, ‘The important split which makes this wild person is only there because of the necessity to conform; if that necessity wasn’t there, the wildness would have been transformed into a proper sense of self-expression, without so many barriers’ (Haffenden, 1985, p. 293). For Tennant, female subjectivity cannot be adequately represented by the realist novel, and one of the purposes of The Bad Sister is to demonstrate how the norms of society restrict the female consciousness. In an extract on the opening page of ‘The Journal of Jane Wild’, the character feels that her rump is ‘ripe, ready for a mouthful to be taken out’ (1979, p. 33): as Anderson observes, this is reminiscent of Atwood in The Edible

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Woman (1969), seeing women as ‘food’ (1993, p. 178). Likewise, Jane sees herself as the object of male photographers: this idea of the male gaze is a leading one in modern feminist thought, notably in Laura Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), and Carter plays with it at the start of The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus. Like Carter, too, Tennant is keen to investigate the effect on (young) women of master narratives, myth and fairy tale. This is illustrated in Queen of Stones by the ironic juxtaposition of the male psychologist’s reports with the dreams of the girls, in the same way that, in works such as The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber, Carter, along with writers such as Emma Donoghue and Anne Sexton, rewrites fairy stories and deconstructs myth, liberating her female characters from their trappings. Tennant’s 1990 novel Sisters and Strangers announces itself as modern fairy tale, retelling the story of Eve. According to Duncker, ‘Feminist writing will . . . always be oppositional. We must always write polemic, until we have written our new world into being’ (1992, p. 15). Duncker would surely applaud Tennant’s voice. As Wesley concludes, ‘the fact that The Queen of Stones recasts a boys’ book into a girls’ adventure reiterates the feminist project evident throughout Emma Tennant’s oeuvre: girls, too, have secret lives worthy of fiction’ (2000, p. 188). Tennant’s engagement with feminism might be argued to go beyond simple polemic for, as Anderson notes, The Bad Sister refutes simple doubles, deconstructing binary oppositions in the manner of Cixous to reveal plurality (1993, p. 179); and, similarly, Jane’s surname – ‘Wild’ – obviously (too obviously, perhaps), suggests the ‘wild zone’ of female experience. In fact, Tennant’s postmodern structures reinforce her feminist goals. According to Jacobus (1979), women’s writing can and should be a transgression of literary boundaries, exposing those boundaries as phallocentric impositions. As Greene (1990) notes, discussing women’s fiction of the 1970s, this metafiction can resemble the ‘écriture feminine’ of Cixous, and Kristeva’s discussion of the polyphonic novel. Tennant, in her refusal to follow realism without deconstructing it, goes in the direction desired by Duncker for her sisters who should ‘roar’: Form requires (desires) conclusion, requires tidiness, requires the good ending, and the novel particularly thrives on that requirement; but a radical, philosophical claim of feminism is about being-in-engagement and we have not explored enough ways of writing that animating sense into our fictional texts. (Maitland, 1989, p. 199) Tennant has demurred at her novels being seen as feminist (Turner, 2007): we might argue that, rather than espousing a simple fictional writing of female power, the novels we have cited are post-modern and Gothic, thus sharing many of the concerns of feminism, such as investigation of subject formation and discourses of power. Tennant’s feminism is not without its problems; but

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there is a further means by which she challenges hierarchies, in the very form of her works. Tennant’s reworking of classic literary texts is part of her feminist project: we have seen how she claims male Gothic for a new, contemporary female purpose, populating Two Women of London with female figures, where Stevenson’s original was peopled almost entirely by males. This project, however, goes beyond the Gothic, and intertextuality is the defining feature of Tennant’s work, from The Bad Sister on, as Maack (1997) shows. For Tennant, retelling these narratives, or adding a sequel, allows previously silenced female characters to speak, or allows us to consider how a text might function if it were played out with women. Clearly, for Tennant, Golding had missed something by writing Lord of the Flies with purely male characters: hence the all-girl Queen of Stones. Similarly, later, the story of Henry James cannot be told without a leading part being given to the poet who loved him, Woolson, in Felony. This revisioning is shared by many other contemporary women novelists such as Marina Warner, who uses The Tempest in Indigo (1992); Jane Smiley, rewriting King Lear as A Thousand Acres (1991), and Atwood’s version of Homer’s Odyssey, The Penelopiad (2005).7 It extends and consolidates Tennant’s interest in myth and fairy tale; again, as before, it is noteworthy that more has not been said about this political intertextuality, in which Tennant’s post-modernism and feminism unite. The ubiquity of this desire to liberate both real-life women from the margins of history (‘La Belle Pamela’ in The Harp Lesson, Woolson in Felony, the real Tess in Tess), and to rewrite the canon so that patriarchal discourses are challenged, is illustrated by the closing lines of Pemberley, where even within an apparently formulaic realist romance, closure is questioned. Although Tennant does follow Austen closely, as she reunites Darcy and Elizabeth, she does nonetheless complicate her ending, as follows: ‘An artist should also be commissioned – so Mr Darcy insisted, even though Elizabeth felt alarmed at the prospect – to paint the portrait of Jane Bingley in a white dress with green ornaments, and Elizabeth Darcy in yellow’ (1994, p. 184). Now an inattentive reading of the end of the novel would identify only the apparent ‘happy ending’, which serves the purpose of the unions that end Austen’s novels: the portrait could be seen as a celebratory object. Nonetheless, Elizabeth is ‘alarmed’ by the prospect, on which Darcy insists. It seems as if Tennant’s intention is in fact to show Elizabeth trapped within marriage, and symbolically trapped within a portrait, a victim of the male gaze. Tennant has agreed that critics have missed her intentions in Pemberley, which were to question Austen’s endings, and demonstrate how marriage destroys Elizabeth Bennet’s sparkle (Turner, 2007). It is a literary and political project which needs discussion by critics, something that has not yet happened. Charges of repetition cannot be levelled at Tennant, who is, like Byatt, a writer ‘to whom easy labels will not apply’ (Haffenden, 1985, p. 281). Although she has used canonical narratives, and reworked myths, the output is constantly changing, and Tennant does not simply write feminist versions of Hardy

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and Hogg. It is worth, at this point, placing Tennant’s key work of the 1970s, The Bad Sister, alongside other fiction published by women at the same time. Here is a novel trying to do, according to its author, something new: a book about a female double, working with Woolf’s remark that a woman writer will struggle to coexist with another woman (Haffenden, 1985, p. 292). It is also a novel with a strong sense of loneliness, isolation and social exclusion, rooted in Tennant’s childhood, and Scottish and Gothic literature. This unease is a characteristic of the great part of fiction by women writers, from Behn through Radcliffe, from the Brontës through Bowen to Brookner. The isolated heroine is nothing new, but Tennant makes her own significant contribution, in her portraits of women ostracized in upper-class society (The House of Hospitalities (1987), The Adventures of Robina (1986), Pemberley). Tennant’s work, right through, is unified by a strong and disquieting sense of the female on the fringes of society, subject to hallucination or madness, unable to fit into the social world, and even Elizabeth Bennet changes from Austen’s original to a new Mrs Darcy, influenced, as Tennant admits, by her own experiences: ‘Did she have no freedom, no independence of movement, as the mistress of Pemberley?’ are the new Elizabeth’s thoughts (1994, p. 110), as are the following: But that there was nothing in the world that did not find itself measured against the Darcys, and was then found wanting: this was the cause of Elizabeth’s sense of oppression, and her sudden yearning for escape, for a place where she would not be known and not be judged. For was she not expected to be chatelaine of this great place, and overseer of the good of the village; and mother, too, to poor Georgiana – when she was not yet three and twenty? (p. 134) Similarly, Tennant depicts the inner lives of girls and young women, as well as adults. For Wesley, this is the noteworthy characteristic of her work. Alice Fell, Wild Nights, Queen of Stones, Felony and The French Dancer’s Bastard all privilege this point of view, and, unusual as it is among contemporary, ‘literary’ writers, it deserves more academic attention. We might suggest that the publication of The Bad Sister represented a high point in Tennant’s career, it being the book following her near win of a literary prize, and one that has become her most critically examined. What was happening in the surrounding literary climate? In 1977 Margaret Drabble published her realist, state-of-the-nation The Ice Age, and the Booker shortlist that year honoured Penelope Lively and Barbara Pym, the latter returned to favour after the excavations of Lord David Cecil. The following year, the year of The Bad Sister, saw Murdoch win the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea. She was joined on the Booker shortlist by Penelope Fitzgerald, with her debut, The Bookshop. Fitzgerald, a sharp miniaturist in the Austen vein, would win the Prize the following year with Offshore. Although Fay Weldon made it to the shortlist in 1979

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(the only occasion) with Praxis, these were years that favoured the old masters, the established talents or newcomers who were ‘respectable’, it seemed. Neither Tennant nor Carter ever received Booker Prize nominations for their fiction; the shortlists and winners of this can illustrate what the contemporary canon, at that time, was. It did not include writers of genre or popular fiction, nor did it include writers of ribald language or feminist experiment. This was most clearly illustrated in 1984 when Brookner won the Booker for Hotel du Lac, while Carter’s Nights at the Circus did not even make the shortlist. If, as Bradbury suggests, the Booker shortlists illustrate the trends of English literature, then it is an institution which can work to exclude, favouring writers such as Murdoch and Brookner, who work within the canon, over writers of genre and experiment. In 1985, Frederick Karl would offer the following lament on women’s writing: I think that the lack of experiment, the paucity of narrative daring, the stress on traditional storytelling . . . is connected to the failure of women’s experience to be projected onto the larger world. That desire to resolve old wounds through love and bonding, that forsaking of achievement in the larger world, is reflected in the unadventurous use of narrative, plot, details, character. The ‘female experience’, like all other experiences, must be handled in modern or postmodern terms, and yet repeatedly novels limning this experience are old-fashioned in structure, based on Edwardian models. (p. 424) Karl, although discussing American novelists, reflects an attitude prevalent to women’s writing on both sides of the Atlantic. Waugh (1989) cites Karl as representative of this (p. 27). Karl has clearly not read Tennant or Carter, and appears to be trapped in a view of the then-contemporary women’s novel as purely domestic and realist. His views are symptomatic of the failure of Tennant to make an impact on the literary world. For Tennant herself, originality is in fact an invalid artistic concept, putting her in the centre of post-modern thought: ‘One of the most modish expressions to have somehow crept in when people talk about writing or art at all, is, “Is she original?” and it’s absolutely meaningless. It’s like saying somebody isn’t relevant’ (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 141). She quite consciously, like Carter, is attempting to refute the idea of the original genius and, in line with post-structuralism, acknowledge the borrowed nature of all language and narrative: ‘I feel the point of writing for a woman is to take, magpie-like, anything they please from anywhere, and produce a subversive text out of the scraps; out of patriarchal or any kind of material they can get in their beaks’ (Anderson, 1993, p. 180). Nonetheless, fiction writing in this vein will demand some freshness of manipulation and perspective, surely, and Tennant can be argued to possess that, in

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her interest in doubleness and the child’s perspective, and in the use of the female figure on the margins of upper-class life. Further, works like The Bad Sister and, most notably, Two Women of London are accurate portrayals of the climate in which they were written. The latter is partly a protest against the dominant values of Britain in the 1980s, a city where affluence and poverty sit side by side, personified in the figures of Mrs Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. The stateof-the-nation novel was critically unfashionable by the latter half of the twentieth century, but Tennant’s use of it deserves respect and examination, and she should be placed alongside Jonathan Coe, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Margaret Drabble as a critic of 1980s materialism, just as, in The Bad Sister, she evokes the gloom of the 1970s, as did Rendell in A Demon in My View, as we saw in Chapter 4. Is it possible to answer the question of why Tennant is a member of neither the academic, nor the popular canon? While there will always be an element of chance, as Kermode concedes, there are reasons which we can easily trace. First, if Murdoch, Brookner, Rendell and others such as Drabble, have found that their work has been accused of being middle class, in an era of growing fascination with the viewpoint of the lower classes, then it would naturally be even harder for someone like Tennant, whose background is aristocratic. Murdoch, Rendell, Byatt, Bainbridge and James have received Honours during their lifetime; Tennant was born with hers and was, until her marriage, Lady Emma Tennant. Tennant, in fact, feels that her upbringing ‘had as many disadvantages as coming from a really difficult background’ (Shakespeare, 1986, p. 45). In interview, she suggests that only Caroline Blackwood is an example of a writer from her background who has been taken seriously (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 147). It is a problem that cuts across gender, but not genre: a romantic novelist may find that the ‘trappings’ of their class lure a reader into some desired ‘escapism’, while a ‘high’ writer may find themselves charged with claims of inauthenticity. This has been the case with even the First World War poets Owen and Sassoon, and recent Booker nominee Edward St Aubyn. Tennant would, in her fiction, write against her background – the satire in The House of Hospitalities is a good example of this – but she remains seen as a writer from the upper echelons of society, with even her rebellious attitude mocked: she has been dubbed ‘the girl who put the Che into Cheyne Row’( Shakespeare, 1986, p. 45). As we saw, Tennant has failed to receive any nominations for the Booker, Orange or Whitbread Prizes, an event which would immediately give her publicity and increased sales, and can result in increased academic attention. Neither has her work been televised, filmed or staged, although she was approached to write a screenplay for Queen of Stones, a project that failed, and she wrote the original screenplay for the TV movie Frankenstein’s Baby (1990). Brookner’s Hotel du Lac was filmed after its Booker win, two of Murdoch’s novels were dramatized on television, and much coverage given to her illness; Rendell’s

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Inspector Wexford is a staple of television. Tennant reveals that she is not, in fact, bitter at this lack of what many would call success, and is actually quite pleased never to have been involved in that arena (Turner, 2007). The failure of Tennant’s fiction to take a serious hold on scholars is part, in fact, of a wider decline in the fortunes of the British novel in the second half of the twentieth century when, as has been reported time and time again, the freshest and most exciting writing seemed to come from the former Empire, in sparkling post-colonial visions, or from North America, or from the magic realists of South America. Tennant has strived to free herself from the shackles of realist writing and embrace science fiction, allegory, magic realism, and the portrayal of heightened states of consciousness. The question is: why has she failed, where Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have succeeded? One possibility, identified by Wood, is that the British novel is caught uncomfortably between tradition and experiment: the boldness is not bold enough, the attempts at Victorian solidity weak (1996, p. 113). Thus, Haffenden’s view that Tennant is less successful in portraying character, than in suggesting states of mind, while Tennant asserts that narrative has always been important to her, might be symptomatic of a wider malaise. The strange thing is that Tennant is very strongly not parochial, and identifies herself with traditions outside the British establishment, as we have seen; yet she is still categorized as a ‘British novelist’ when the label ‘Black British Novelist’ or ‘Afro-American Writer’ is now seen as much more authentic and valuable. As a British novelist, Tennant falls victim to the desire within both scholarship and the publishing world to turn to non-British novelists who write against the colonial past. The last female British winner of the Booker Prize was Pat Barker for The Ghost Road in 1995, which can be argued to be (commendable) evidence of a woman writing what was traditionally male fiction – a historical war narrative. The recent wins of the Orange Prize by Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and of the Booker by Indian Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (2006) indicate how what might be called the contemporary canon is operating. If we return to the complicated matter of Tennant, fiction writing, the feminist movement and feminist theory; we find several suggestions as to why Tennant is not canonical. The first question needs to be: what is a feminist novel, in fact? There did arise, in the early 1970s, with the rise of the women’s movement, a type of novel of which the leading practitioners were Erica Jong, Marilyn French and Lisa Alther. Books such as Fear of Flying (1973) and The Women’s Room (1977) were, essentially, realist popular fiction with a new emphasis on a female ‘adventurer’. Here, the kinds of possibilities for women in fiction, formerly restricted to the Gothic and romance – a kind of vicarious ‘travelling heroinism’ in Moers’s eyes (1978) – were replaced by possibilities of achievement within the contemporary world. This essentially realist, moderately utopian vision took an uncomplicated view of language and assumed that all experience could be easily represented by the text. For this reason, the

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amount of academic interest in the writing was not high, although, in terms of the value of popular narratives, their importance can be maintained. Tennant, clearly, has little in common with this view of the uncomplicated subject and narrative. In addition, Tennant shows herself to be surprisingly close to writers such as Drabble in her feminist concerns. In spite of her complex rendering of the human subject, we can add to Tennant’s class trappings the apparent failure to move beyond liberal feminism. Doris Lessing would come under heavy criticism for her negative comments about feminism: her later career demonstrates a suspicion of ideology in books such as The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Sweetest Dream (2001). Tennant was never seen by the women’s movement as a central figure in the first place, but her writings and comments display a similar scepticism. The Bad Sister, for example, is partially concerned with the destructive effects of militant feminism on both society and the individual subject. The author has said, for example, that ‘I think feminism works and has worked in a fantastic way, but I also think that a young and innocent person surrounded by propaganda can be corrupted, wherever the forcing comes from’ (Haffenden, 1985, p. 292). Similarly, she finds that one of the great dangers at the moment is a ghettoisation . . . a kind of self-consciousness, which I think is important now, also has its bad side, and can make women closed off from other things that are happening, and from other perceptions, in the world, and closed off by men, in a bad way by identifying themselves – it seems to me – too much as being a ‘woman writer’. (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 119) Tennant then goes on to say that ‘I felt that if I wanted to portray the American feminist journalist [in Woman Beware Woman] in an unsympathetic way then I was jolly well going to, and therefore I made her rather a stereotype’ (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 121). This aligns Tennant with the position of Rendell, attacked as we have seen for her portrayal of militant feminism in An Unkindness of Ravens, while Tennant’s suspicion of ideology links her not only with Lessing, but also to Murdoch, in The Message to the Planet. Her suspicion of separatism is shared by Byatt, who satirized a feminist scholar in Possession; in fact, Carter and Weldon have expressed similar attitudes, meaning that Tennant is far from being a lone literary representative. Clearly, then, Tennant’s position is not really a radical one, and as feminism advanced towards its third wave, defining itself rather as feminisms, realizing the need to take account of the subjectivities of black and lesbian women, Tennant’s position would become an invidious one. If we look at Duncker’s ideas in Sisters and Strangers (1992), for example, we see a focus on black and lesbian writing, in which Tennant of course can play no part. Another problem is Tennant the polemicist. Now, while for Duncker, women writers must ‘roar’, critics are divided about this, and it will cause opposition.

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Carter, for example, is reluctant to ‘roar’: her authorial position is often an ironic one, mocking her heroines, and resisting utopian solutions. Duncker has found problems with this, while we might suggest that this refusal to be didactic in fact solidified Carter’s position, giving her work more layers.8 Tennant, however, can be highly polemical. Here is a characteristic extract from her Tess: You must look at your mother, and her mother before her, and all the long line of women born without names of their own, given or sold to names that would never be truly theirs: as nameless, as interchangeable as the eyeless fertility statues found in the old settlements all over Europe and Britain. . . . The history of these women is the history of you and your mother. And, because, for all these women, the suffering and the song was the same: toil, childbirth, death; and for those who fell outside, another song repeated itself: rape, childbirth, desertion or betrayal, let me tell you your history. (1994, p. 14) This is a noble and rather lyrical attempt to invoke sisterhood, and Duncker would support it; nonetheless it is ripe for attack, as follows: It reads didactically, Liza Lu sounding like an incantatory Sybil preaching from the pulpit, her sermon littered with modernday, feminist tropes. . . . But the process of feminist cultural archaeology that begun in the Seventies has made these into clichés, divested of force. Revelations like these do not refresh or surprise, but cater neatly to a certain formulaic politics. (Birch, 1993, p. 31) There is also a profoundly negative perception behind Tennant’s more feminist novels, a seeming refusal of possibility and despair that puts her closer to Drabble and Brookner’s neo-realism than Atwood and Carter’s fantasy. Tennant, although she advocates science fiction and fantasy, does not show hope in what she portrays: for many feminist novelists, fiction should explore possibilities and suggest changes. The Bad Sister sees the lead character Jane Wild go mad and die, victim of schizophrenia, a symbol of the problems faced by the female subject in the modern world; in Queen of Stones a group of girls together succumbs to rivalry and violence. Woman Beware Woman has a title that speaks for itself, and even Two Women of London, although it allows its heroine to escape, portrays women’s lives as prone to division and resultant acts of violence. Even Rendell has been suggested to be utopian in her vision; the American Marge Piercy, whose bestseller Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is close to the The Bad Sister in its narrative of a woman’s exploration of fantasy, which is perceived as madness by society, allows a utopia of hopeful feminist possibility within the realist structure. The Bad Sister, like Woman on the Edge of Time, in fact, reads as a peculiarly dated fiction, too welded to the concerns of the 1970s.9 Tennant admits that the novel reflects its zeitgeist in terms of

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feminism and politics, but feels that it is a mistake to define her work as feminist: the term is too simple (Turner, 2007). In terms of Tennant’s use of genre, although she feels that Queen of Stones is a thriller, and Two Women of London follows a thriller framework, her narrative complexity and post-modern stance work against generic success. The author’s view that she has always been interested in plot above all can be questioned: The Bad Sister and Hotel de Dream focus on states of mind and fantasy, not narrative progression. It is only when we reach Pemberley, in fact, that Tennant’s abandonment of complicated structure allows a realist novel to surface in a way that meets genre expectations – although, neatly, more complex things are also being said. This success is, I suspect, double-edged, for it brought Tennant a commercial success out of line with ‘artistic integrity’: in terms of Bourdieu’s arguments, her art becomes heteronomous. While the winning of a literary prize, a great deal of money, and commercial success, helped Byatt in terms of literary perception, this was because Possession is a complex, post-modern work. It is too easy to view Pemberley as money-making exercise, rooted in safety and the knowledge of market interest. The same accusations could be levelled at Tennant in her writing of her affair with Ted Hughes a year after his death in the third volume of her autobiography, Burnt Diaries (1999), and in her fictionalizing of Plath and the poet in The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001). Here, it is worth considering the mostly negative reviews that have greeted the Austen sequels. Tobias Jones, for example, reviewing Emma in Love in The Observer, for example, wrote ‘Make no mistake then, this is about money and career moves, not art’ (1996, p. 15). Beyond this, we have the matter of Tennant as figure in the publishing world. Tennant’s flitting between styles and genres is a curse as well as a blessing: in interview she acknowledges the problems of writing different types of novel, of not being a purely science-fiction writer, for example (Roe and Tennant, 1986, p. 150). In a wider way, according to Tennant, there is a new, cruel climate where writers are seized on then dropped, never to be published again, if large contracts do not ‘deliver’ a hit. Tennant lays much of the blame with Scott Pack, who, until a few years ago, was chief buyer for Waterstone’s. Whereas previously, new writers would be encouraged by editors, and books would form part of a literary climate, discussed and thought about, in the ‘post-Pack’ world only the potential bestsellers are put on prominent display. The circle becomes self-perpetuating, so the ‘minor’ writers do not have any chance. Smaller writers are rejected by publishers, and, for Tennant, serious reading has been brought to a halt. Tennant praises Dan Franklin (of Random House/Jonathan Cape) as a fiction editor who is loyal to his writers, but stresses that he again is controlled by the power of the publishers, who will not pay ‘smaller’ writers to keep going. The Neilson Book Scan ‘helps’ publishers, and thus inhibits writers. ‘Hype springs eternal’ is Tennant’s summing up of the climate (Turner, 2007).

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She also suggests that the point where she stopped writing fiction, and turned to memoirs, made things difficult for publishers and readers; she also agrees that there is an ageism in the literary world (which is one of the themes of Confessions of a Sugar Mummy (2007)), a problem that Brookner has faced. One final point is more mundane, and, yet, surprisingly pertinent: the matter of the friendship between Tennant, Carter and Lorna Sage. We should remember Byatt’s feeling that Murdoch was partly canonized by the work of Sage. Sage was also the first person to write a critical article on Carter, and became one of the main champions of her work. Tennant, while anxious to point out that the three were friends, and that there was no rivalry between herself and Carter, does feel that Sage was the real best friend and champion of Carter.10 Indirectly, then, canonicity may be the result of friendship and connections, or praise by those who are already part of the canon. Nowhere can this be proved more true than in the case of Zadie Smith, to whom we will turn in the conclusion. We can attempt to solidify our findings about Tennant’s oeuvre by going back to the critical definitions of canonicity cited in Chapter 1, and investigating how Tennant can be matched with them. Let us begin with Kermode. For Kermode, in Forms of Attention (1985), the central argument is that canonical works are those which are always able to be modern: their meaning is not fixed, and the reader creates new meaning each time, each generation. The canonical text will always generate discussion because, as a text, it is always ‘incomplete’. The problem with Tennant, examining her work in this light, is that meaning is often too clear, to the point of didactism, as I noted above: the fiction can be too political, perhaps. Tennant has acknowledged that The Bad Sister is a very complicated book to discuss, but complexity is not necessarily equated with profundity (Haffenden, 1985, p. 292). Tennant is very historically specific, her ideas rooted in feminist politics and post-modernism, in a way that, according to T. S. Eliot, makes a writer provincial. Does Tennant write universal narratives, works that, for Clausen, contain themes and codes? Is The Bad Sister a book which works as Nervous Conditions was shown to in Chapter 1, containing, beneath its post-colonial veneer, a narrative appealing to readers of all cultures? This is not a possible question to answer, for those for and against Tennant’s work will give opposing views. Yes: it is a story of mental panic, social claustrophobia, enclosed femininity, and these are ‘universal’. No: it is too involved with its world of London in the 1970s, and too overtly signposted. I would assert, on balance, that, as a novel, it is too interested in its own appearance, its significations, to let any universal themes and codes shine through. Similarly, it is devoid of the elements of ‘low’, folk or popular culture which, for Nemoianu, are part of all canonical works of ‘high’ literature. Would Bloom view Tennant’s fiction as original, disturbing, innovative, ruffling our expectations? Tennant has refuted, as I have shown, originality. Yet we can go some way to trying to measure her work against Bloom’s criteria by

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looking at the way she actually writes. We return to The Bad Sister, to make some observations about Tennant’s style; here is the opening of ‘The Journal of Jane Wild’, the major component of the novel. I’ll have to tell you now of the night I first went on my travels . . . the night, most of all, that Meg gave me further signs of her power. I left the Berrings’ party and walked home through the streets where it looked as if it had never rained, I walked fast in front of the dust gardens and the brick walls to keep people in, I sent cats up trees to perch heavy as fruit in the foggy grey leaves. As I walked on I could feel myself falling apart. I was in a frenzy of impatience to become another person. My rump was soft and divided under my clinging silk dress as men photographers would have it divide: ripe, ready for a mouthful to be taken out. . . . My breasts unshielded, nosed the air for potential attackers like glow-worms swimming always a few inches in front of me. . . . The streets had been very silent; tonight the menace hadn’t come out in humped back in grey gabardine, or a gaggle of youths flying low like crows; it had lurked there, the urban forest, waiting for something impossible to come about. (1979, p. 33) It is not on account of Tennant’s writing that The Bad Sister achieves what success it does: it works as a result of its use of Gothic, post-modernism, and its portrayal of a consciousness under stress, a subjectivity trying to assert itself and failing. We should think about the above passage. The use of the first person gives a directness suitable for the rendering of subjectivity; the focalization adds a level of interest as we ponder the distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’. The fact that much of the novel is narrated by Jane Wild allows Tennant to attribute any weaknesses to Jane. There are some interesting things in the extract: ‘dust garden’ is a simple but unconventional use of noun as adjective; the ‘gaggle of youths flying low like crows’, a simile where the bird imagery is used twice to reinforce the depersonalized ‘youths’; the ‘urban forest’, where a disquieting image is created by marriage of noun with apparently inappropriate adjective. Nonetheless, as a piece of writing it is not perfect: strictly speaking, the first sentence of the second paragraph should be broken with semi-colons (Brookner would not permit this, although it is something which Rendell does frequently). The image of the cats ‘heavy as fruit’ does not quite work: cats should surely be heavier than fruit, not vice versa. The simile of breasts as glow-worms is very strange: is this some strange manifestation of Wild’s mind? The other problem is that the feminist message is too strong, too unsubtle. We are told that Jane wishes to become someone else, and that she is a victim of the male gaze, and that the surrounding world is hostile, ready to devour her. Now as a message, this is important, and Duncker is quite right to insist that contemporary women writers should ‘roar’; but should they not do this with

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style and wit? Wood’s complaint against Carter is unjustified, I think, but could be applied to Tennant: Carter’s fictions, however, drench us in signification, and their theoretical coerciveness – embodied in the books as a tendency towards over-explicit statement, allegory, and symbol – seems to be, not just the inevitable price paid by a Post-Modern self-consciousness, but an artistic failure. (1996, p. 128) The problem with this writing in The Bad Sister is that it is neither the simple language of popular fiction used by Marilyn French and Erica Jong to make political points, nor is it effective ‘literary’ language. Humour would add a great deal to Tennant’s vision here: she is missing the comic metaphors of Murdoch, which I highlighted at the end of Chapter 2. If The Bad Sister and Two Women of London are Tennant’s central works, then Bradford is surely right in stating that ‘didactic, and polemical import are slightly outdoing invention in claims upon the reader’s attention’ (2007, p. 129), and that Tennant’s oeuvre is largely a creative manifestation of feminist theories of culture and literary history. Tennant is defined through this idea, it seems, when these two novellas recur as the prominent examples of her writing. However, this is only half of the story. Tennant has written a greater variety of fiction than most of her peers, and much has been said in praise of Tennant’s style: a reviewer of The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted found that ‘much of the writing has the endearing quirkiness of having sprung from a truly unconventional mind . . . the odd and detailed imagery keeps the story rolling along’ (Thorpe, 2001, p. 15). Similarly Joanna Motion, in the Times Literary Supplement, noted ‘the far-ranging precision of her language’ when reviewing Woman Beware Woman (1983, p. 1345). Although Tennant’s desire to preach has sometimes damaged her style, she is capable of being a writer of poetic and visionary power. Her use of language, and her metaphors, deserve attention which they have not had: it is this that gives her a claim to canonicity, in that her perspective is, as Bloom would suggest, original and disturbing. Here is another extract from The Bad Sister: The High Street is wider than I remembered. There is no traffic. The islands look as if they would sink if boarded; glacial mannequins wave from distant shops; in all this, which is like a muted cruise, a secret departure at night for Purgatory, I am walking several feet above the ground. (1979, p. 38) Throughout this book we have considered the ability of some of the novelists in question to evoke atmosphere and place: Brookner’s depiction of a desolate London was seen as distinctive by its being likened to Pompeii, from the point of view of a disturbed protagonist, and similar work is being done by Tennant. Here, Jane Wild is schizophrenic: the mental disturbance results in the implicit

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likening of an empty street to an ocean. The traffic islands are seen as islands in the sea, and the atmosphere is that of a ‘muted cruise’. What is a muted cruise, exactly? Here, Tennant is using a mild oxymoron, for a cruise would normally be associated with pleasure; the effect unsettles. The only communication comes from inanimate objects: mannequins ‘wave’. The sinister desolation reaches its climax in the idea of the muted cruise being extended to that of a ‘secret departure at night for Purgatory’. Rather than use the more obvious image of a voyage to Hades, Tennant chooses the halfway idea of Purgatory and makes the event ‘secret’, which follows on from the ‘muted’ cruise: the silent atmosphere is built upon, and any implications of hell are therefore deliberately moderate, although Jane is ‘walking several feet above the ground’, telling us that this is a Gothic scene, in fact. The imagery lifts the writing above the generic work which Rendell so often produces: here, Tennant is poetic and well worth attention. Tennant’s imaginative gifts are given greater rein in Wild Nights, a poetic novel unified by images and seasons. In the following extract, the child-narrator (which Tennant so often favours) describes her journey from Scotland to England: My father and mother lay in their tiered bunks like stone crusaders. They showed no trace of anxiety at being drawn from the strength of the hills and made to float without defence in an unknown land. Fingers of cold came in on them in their swaying tomb, a quiver of ice arrows to bind them to the north, but they slept on, dreaming of spring. (1981, pp. 102–103) The likening of the parents to ‘stone crusaders’ is successful, first of all, since there is some truth in the image: a sleeping person may easily look like an effigy. Tennant, however, uses the precise image of a crusader, setting up an effect by which the parents become alien and remote, owing to the medieval era evoked. The image is extended as we see the journey from north to south likened to the Crusades, perhaps, but Crusades where the parents are ‘defenceless’. The personification of the weather – ‘fingers of cold’ – adds to the inhuman atmosphere, while the ‘quiver of ice arrows’ is a complex metaphor, as it qualifies the ‘fingers of cold’ with a more sophisticated image that disconcerts in its suggestion of the harm that the cold/arrows may do. The train becomes a ‘swaying tomb’, which continues the theme of death, set in contrast to the ‘dreaming of spring’ that the narrator imagines. As in the extract from The Bad Sister, Tennant shows herself to have original poetic ability, creating a scene that evokes her narrator’s sense of alienation and loss. Coldness, again, is inherent in Tennant’s presentation of Cambridge, seen through the eyes of a fictional Sylvia Plath: It’s cold in Cambridge. Cambridge – cold, with the sky bright and fierce. . . . It’s a masculine city, hard and beautiful and laid out in squares and rectangles

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that will allow no undergrowth, no prowl or sudden loss of sensation. Cambridge admonishes, stands needle-straight in fens that let in a blast of cold air from Denmark. (2003, p. 41) This piece of writing, more recent than the previous extracts, uses simpler but no less striking images to convey mood. A bright sky is an untroubling image; a bright, fierce sky disturbs, since any calm is disrupted: the brightness must be somehow too bright. Cambridge is personified as masculine, with adjectives both negative and positive conjoined (hard and beautiful); like a patriarchal figure, to Plath, it ‘admonishes’. The city is seen as proportional and determined; any disruptive elements, any mystery, perhaps any femininity, are forbidden. Tennant reminds us of the flatness surrounding Cambridge (the fens), which permits ‘a blast of cold air from Denmark’. No all-pervading chill, then, but the violence inherent in ‘blast’. Why Denmark? Perhaps the blast comes from something rotten in Elsinore; perhaps Tennant is being deliberately ambiguous. The three extracts are united by images of bleakness, cold and desolation, seen through the eyes of a narrator or central character alienated by their environment. Tennant proves herself to be, like Brookner, a poet of the modern city and, like Rendell, a portrayer of aberrant minds. It is time to suggest how Tennant’s fortunes could and should change: it is time Pluto moved nearer the sun. At the present time, Tennant is a respected writer of ‘literary fiction’, but much of her work is out of print, and she is viewed by some as belonging to a dated world of 1970s and early 1980s feminist fiction. This state of affairs could change, given the right circumstances. Bloom, supported by Byatt, as we have seen, defines the canon as the property of writers. Writers define the canon by what they work with or against; Tennant, then, needs to be acknowledged by new (female) novelists as an influence. She also needs some celebration in the way that Barbara Pym was lauded in the Times Literary Supplement, which gave her career a major boost.11 It would need a lead article in the London Review of Books, say, to start things in motion. This should be written by, ideally, someone of the status of Eagleton or Rushdie, the latter who was to some degree responsible for the success of Zadie Smith and Kiran Desai through his favourable comments prior to their publication. In short, what is required is what fortunately befell Botticelli, as Kermode illustrates: resurrection by another artist. A televised, staged or filmed version of a Tennant novel would help matters, as would a major reprint of her novels, as has happened to Murdoch. Similarly, inclusion on a literary prize shortlist, preferably the Booker, would boost visibility, and thus sales. It also needs scholars to undertake some excavation and write about Tennant from a new angle. Many of the above ideas are interconnected, and one would not happen without the other. We are too close to Tennant’s work to judge it fairly; nonetheless, if Gaskell’s political novels could be taken up by scholars a century after they were written,

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could not the same happen with Tennant’s? This novelist has a linguistic ability which transcends her political concerns, and which adds to her potential literary survival; it can be argued that Tennant is a more accomplished writer than Rendell, no matter how great the latter’s storytelling gifts. Yet Rendell is a household name, and Tennant is not. Is this a strange state of affairs? It is not a surprising one. By now, answers are becoming clear, but the story is not complete without some consideration of the most recently feted women novelists, at the start of the twenty-first century.

Conclusion: The Contemporary Scene

Through the course of this book we have seen some of the reasons why the four novelists in question have either been canonized or marginalized, in terms of both the academic and popular canons. There have been problematic factors in each case, but there remain some unifying factors which it is worth restating, before moving forward. There is a great tension between the academic and commercial fields; literary writers who seem to operate as heteronomous artists will find their serious status in question. This happened with Murdoch, Brookner and Tennant. The popular canon has its own laws, rules and prizes, and its authors have greater power in terms of visibility than their literary peers. The sales of new hardback literary fiction are tiny in comparison with those of bestselling writers. Carey’s arguments in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) prove true still: a genre writer is often seen as writing for a dangerous, unthinking mass, and incapable of originality. High cultural and commercial visibility may result later in a fall in reputation; if a novelist’s work is greatly associated with a particular era, it can quickly become dated. Thus American bestsellers such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, although still in print and not forgotten, are so embroiled in the politics of their time that they can alienate a reader. This is a potential problem with some of Tennant’s fiction. In terms of the academic canon, a novelist must increasingly engage with current trends and political concerns, to become ‘teachable’. Likewise, as formalism ebbed in the wake of post-modernism and interest in writers from marginal backgrounds, interest in style has lessened. If writers do not appear to be saying something, academic interest in them may not be great. This is the case with some of the more recent historical fiction of Beryl Bainbridge, perhaps. Consequently, if canonical writers are found to be conservative – sexist, racist, imperialist – they can lose their classic status. This has happened with Kipling, Lawrence Durrell, Kingsley Amis, Waugh and (possibly) D. H. Lawrence. Conservative modern and contemporary writers will face the same problem: if they are apparently anti-feminist (Brookner) or conservative in their politics (Murdoch), they will not find favour with academia and its association with the Left. But it has often been the case that artists who appeal have politics that appal: C. S. Lewis is a popular manifestation of this.

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While a literary novelist who seems to repeat the same formula may be criticized for this, for seeming to be generic, writers who are hard to classify confuse the establishment as they cannot be easily taught. This has been the case with Emma Tennant (and also with A. S. Byatt). Perhaps having a layer of romance, or quest, or melodramatic tragedy, which readers come to expect, helps a writer survive: many of the established members of the canon, such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, can be argued to be canonical because they have the qualities of both literary and popular fiction. Thus, Iris Murdoch is, of the novelists examined, the most likely to become permanently canonical since, as I established, she wrote novels that are both philosophical studies and entertainments. Most importantly, now, the market is the driving force behind the canon. Quite simply, a novelist has to be in print to be studied and thus part of an academic canon, which derives much of its power from the business of underand post-graduate courses. Although Lessing, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, bemoaned the internet, we should applaud the fact that work likely to be lost or difficult to obtain can now be made available online. However there remain, finally, frustratingly unpredictable instances of chance; chance even comes into the matter of who wins which literary prize. If Carter had won the Booker Prize in 1984, it is unlikely Brookner would have earned the moderately successful position she has in terms of scholarly attention. It is also a matter of chance whom a novelist knows or is praised by, perhaps; Lorna Sage helped Angela Carter’s journey to the canon; Shena MacKay (another Booker nominee) had been dropped by her publishers, and was only published again on the recommendation of Iris Murdoch; Zadie Smith and Kiran Desai (whose The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker Prize in 2006) were praised by Rushdie. The above points are not an attempt to provide a final answer as to how and why canonization happens: the question is a very large one, and the individual chapters provide four different pieces of evidence which cannot be summed up in a few lines. In the face of the multiplying evidence, judgement and evaluation are needed. Is it possible to decide who is the greatest post-war British woman novelist; or, to refine the question, whose work shows most originality, stylistic verve, narrative invention and potential transcultural and transhistorical appeal? The answer, for me, has to be Murdoch, for the reasons set out in Chapter 2, and above. Her fiction is not only the most likely to become canonical; it should survive, for the novels are pieces of art that survive interpretation and reinterpretation. What is more, they contain comedy, and affirm the value of the neglected area of literary pleasure. We need to look more widely than our four novelists, meanwhile, and return to some of the questions set out in the introduction. I suggested that Lessing, Murdoch, Carter, Drabble and Spark were seen as the canonical novelists of the post-war years; who is seen as canonical now? Who might comprise a new set of ‘living muses’? Toni Morrison is the most studied woman writer still, with 633 entries in the MLA bibliography on Beloved alone. In addition to reasons

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suggested earlier, we should add the fact that Morrison is American, living and working in the United States, her novels immediately available for circulation in the country with the third largest population, and one of the highest numbers of schools and academic institutions, in the world. Morrison’s American status, combined with her challenging of her country’s past, thus gives her an international power. Global canonicity is achieved through the use of English, and connection with the United States. Similarly Margaret Atwood ranks highly in terms of scholarly interest; in addition, The Handmaid’s Tale has been a popular A-level set text in the United Kingdom, and was chosen as one of reading groups’ selections of future classics, for a new imprint by Vintage. The obvious politics of the novel, its readability and science-fiction framework, would explain its popularity; it is also easy to write about and understand, with regard to the gender questions raised. In terms of British novelists, Lessing’s winning of the Nobel Prize in 2007 has perhaps generated new interest in a writer who had been viewed for some time, by many, as old-fashioned and politically unsound. Lessing tops the chart of British women writers, in terms of MLA entries. Although, rather interestingly, there does not seem to be interest enough in the academic community to continue the conferences on Lessing’s work at the University of Leeds, one gets the impression that people are thinking and talking about her a little more than they were. In 2007, in response to a barrage of hostility when the newspaper described Martin Amis as Britain’s greatest living author, The Guardian’s Stephen Moss spoke to writers, critics and booksellers to try and determine who really deserved the title: the leading woman novelist turned out to be Lessing. However, one of those interviewed, herself a leading novelist – A. S. Byatt – suggested, as she has done before, the late Penelope Fitzgerald as someone who should be viewed as great. Fitzgerald makes rather a fascinating case. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore, she was nominated on a further three occasions; her last novel, The Blue Flower (1995), was chosen as Book of the Year more than any other, by reviewers. Some of those who nominated it include Carmen Callil, Jane Gardam, Doris Lessing, Candia McWilliam, Byatt, Hermione Lee, Philip Hensher, A. N. Wilson and Adam Mars-Jones: a reputable list. The novel then went on to become the first non-American work to win the US National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Prize, beating Don De Lillo and Philip Roth. This led to frequent praise by American critics, and a glowing obituary in the New York Times when the author died in 2000. Leading writers, such as Byatt (as we have seen) and Julian Barnes, have suggested that she was the best English novelist of her time; in a poll of critics and writers, in The Observer, to find the best novel of the past 25 years, The Blue Flower came joint third (McCrum, 2006). Most interestingly of all, perhaps, the Department of English in the University of Montana ran, in 2005, a third-year course titled ‘Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald’. Being paired with Woolf suggests greatness in itself.

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Without doubt, Fitzgerald was an artist of note, with an extraordinary ability to suggest a great deal in very short novels. This is certainly the case in The Blue Flower, a book of fragmentary episodes which conveys a great deal about late eighteenth-century Germany, and the birth of Romanticism. Fitzgerald is not often taught, a clear reason being that, as well as not obviously tackling issues, the novels are a mixture of simplicity and complexity. It is not easy to explain what the author is doing, and how. This is certainly work to be admired, yet The Blue Flower is both admirable, beautiful, chilly and remote. It is hard to imagine the novel having a wide universal appeal; nor is it, strictly speaking, original and individual. At the opposite end of the spectrum, another figure emerges as a constant favourite in polls, and recipient of an astonishingly high amount of academic attention. This is J. K. Rowling. Now, the high sales of her work are widely known, so it is no surprise that she will have the term ‘greatest’ linked to her, in terms of democratic polls. What becomes interesting is how The Book Magazine found her Britain’s greatest living author, well ahead of others, in 2006; what seems strange is that she is written about in the academy more than A. S. Byatt. No one would deny the readability of Rowling and, certainly, the books stand up to some analysis in terms of their confrontation of class, gender and the ‘other’. Likewise, the author’s massive appeal and success demand interrogation, in terms of popular culture and its study. But it does seem wrong that she is studied to such a large extent. An explanation for this may be her sheer, worldwide availability: many of the articles on the Potter series are published outside Western Europe. Wide availability, and wide translation, generate their own canonicity. This is a matter for further investigation, which lies outside the remit and space of this book. If writers such as Byatt and Rowling can be intensely studied and researched in their own lifetime, we approach the idea of a contemporary canon. Although the concept sounds slightly oxymoronic, there is increasingly a situation where contemporary and often new writers are lauded as implicitly great. This often links with the commercial interests of literary prizes, and an increasingly market-driven literary world. Often, though, it is evidenced by the writers who are the most popular subjects of new literary studies, or those chosen by Granta to feature in their Best of Young British Novelists lists. Thus Zadie Smith. Smith is the most studied contemporary woman novelist, owing probably to her discussions of multiculturalism and hybridity; she was only able to make this journey into the academic canon because she was marketed and visible. The fact that she was offered a deal of £250,000 for two novels, while still at university, made a good story; she was also, as a black woman, able perhaps to allay any fears the publishing industry might have about the political correctness of its world. Smith’s work was also praised by Rushdie; if Rushdie is one of the leading, if not the leading, contemporary novelist, then this praise cannot but help. Praise from the canon draws a new member towards it, as was the case with Walter Scott and his belief in the excellence of Jane Austen. Smith’s White Teeth

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(2000) has become an A-level set text; the author herself also has a powerful position in literary journalism, writing lead articles for the New York Review of Books, and being asked for comment on the recent death of John Updike. Smith’s voice is clearly seen as authoritative. Standing not far behind Smith in terms of academic interest is Sarah Waters, whose novels are both pastiches of Victorian sensation fiction, and powerful questionings of gender and sexual identity. In their playing with the Gothic, and social structures such as the prison, there are hints towards Foucault which have been taken up by academics. What is more, the plots that support this are readable, making the novels successful with the public at large. Waters is entertaining, moving, and asks important political questions; she has not yet proved herself to be original, nor has there been time for her work to be deemed classic. This is the same with Smith: all that can be done is to evaluate, judge and analyse the work, alongside the fiction of other contemporary and past figures. Out of the work of these two writers, the most powerful novel is Smith’s On Beauty (2005), which goes beyond pastiche of E. M. Forster to become a plea for the liberal-humanist novel in the face of the loss of the subject in postmodernism. The novel is not so much original, as implicitly arguing for a return to character and the consciousness as foci, and for a Murdochian use of the novel to explore morality. Jeanette Winterson, Pat Barker and Angela Carter continue to be read, studied and analysed, and they are joined by Smith and Waters to become the new potential ‘brilliant women’. There are further novelists, winners of prizes, esteemed reviews and sometimes a place on Granta’s list, but not always of large sales; sometimes their names are not well known. This list might comprise Monica Ali, Kate Atkinson, Nicola Barker, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Diski, Helen Dunmore, A. L. Kennedy, Andrea Levy, Marina Lewycka, Hilary Mantel, Michèle Roberts, Helen Simpson, Ali Smith, Rose Tremain and Marina Warner. All could inhabit the shadowy area of the contemporary canon, if the circumstances were right. Winning or being nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction unites many of them, as does the perhaps curious term used by the prize to describe what it looks for: accessibility. Accessibility combined with an obvious discussion of topical issues is certainly found in Lewycka’s shortlisted A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (2005), Tremain’s winner The Road Home (2007) and Levy’s winner Small Island (2004), which went on to become the Whitbread Book of the Year, and was chosen by Orange as the best of its prize winners, ten years after the inception of the prize. Tough questions should be asked here. There is a place and a need for all forms of literature, from pulp magazines, to fantasy fiction, to high art; but in a prize that, alongside ‘accessibility’, uses the words ‘originality’ and ‘excellence’, the choices seem flawed. The three words cannot always be united; Levy, Tremain and Lewycka have a veneer of easy charm often present in their work, which negates high art. This is not to deny them their

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worth, simply to consider why they have been pronounced best (or potentially best) in their field, while linguistically inventive innovators such as Elizabeth Cook in Achilles (2001) have been ignored. Achilles is a short novel told in poetic language; as its title implies, it makes use of myth, with a narrative linking Greek mythology to Keats and the Romantic imagination. It also resists easy classification and a tidy conclusion; the reader has to work. Its short length suggests that it may be a difficult book to market. Cook’s work should be available, and indeed written about and studied, for it asks subtle questions about gender, as well as being an example of good writing – something lacking in many more noted figures from the Orange lists. It leads us to the question: is high art no longer women’s business? At this point, we turn to a novel that is, deservedly, a classic: Virago have named it as such, and enough time has passed since its publication (1980) to apply the term. It is the one of best examples of a woman writer producing high art. The novelist is Shirley Hazzard, and the novel The Transit of Venus. Here is the opening: By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, or lacerated a roadside with a streak of fencing. This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England. As late as the following morning, small paragraphs would even appear in newspapers having space to fill due to a hiatus in elections, fiendish crimes, and the Korean War – unroofed houses and stripped orchards being given in numbers and acreage; with only lastly, briefly, the mention of a body where a bridge was swept away. That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve – for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in those moments – waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination. Farmers moved methodically, leading animals or propelling machines to shelter. Beyond the horizon, provincial streets went frantic at the first drops. Wipers wagged on windshields, and people also charged and dodged to and fro, to and fro. Packages were bunged inside coat-fronts, newspapers upturned on new perms. A dog raced through a cathedral. Children ran in thrilling from playgrounds, windows thudded, doors slammed. Housewives were rushing, and crying out, ‘My washing.’ And a sudden stripe of light split earth from sky. (1995, pp. 3–4)

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In its portrayal of a threatening natural world, the extract is reminiscent of Hardy. The eruption of natural chaos mirrors international violence (the Korean War), and hints at, and becomes, emblematic of the emotional violence that will unfold. This novel is high romance, with a Jamesian focuses on the consciousness, and the emotional temperature of social and domestic life. The opening suggests tragedy, and the novel indeed, as it progresses inexorably towards disaster, has the air of the Greek classics. It is related by a narrator of quite startling coldness, who, unfashionably, knows everything there is to know about each character, and can describe them in terms of the mythic, seeming to skewer them on a pin. The melodrama above is thus quite apt, opening what is in effect a modern romantic tragedy. One surreal image above, the dog racing through a cathedral, should be looked at again, closely. It is something that should not happen; the order of things has been upset. Again, it is both a consequence of the storm and an indication of more to come; in addition, the picture is original – and startling. Hazzard, as can be surmised given the patterns shown in this book, is not widely studied or written about, and by choosing an Australian writer I am not claiming that British women writers are not as good as Australian ones. But the extract should show a vision, a command of language and a seriousness, which is absent in much celebrated contemporary writing. Hazzard was, in fact, shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004 (and longlisted for the Booker) for The Great Fire. Prize committees, then, do recognize profundity and seriousness, as well as accessibility. Bryan Appleyard recently suggested that Hazzard, and Marilynne Robinson, are the greatest novelists alive (2007): this runs contrary to the evidence of polls, sales, university courses and the MLA; it is a suggestion surely worth consideration. Hazzard and Robinson both occupy a notably different field than Atwood and Morrison, much less public; both are difficult writers, and this is no bad thing. Of ‘new’ British novelists, one of the most exemplary is Rachel Cusk. Reviewers have often criticized her for being precious and pretentious; this is sometimes the case, but her 1997 novel The Country Life benefits from its use of first-person narrative and consequent irony, as we both become close to, and question, the perceptions of the narrator. Here is the opening to that novel: I was to take the four o’clock train from Charing Cross to Buckley, a small town some three miles, I had been told, from the village of Hilltop. The short notice at which I was required had left me with little time for more than a glance at the area on the map, where I had learned only that the two names belonged to the lower part of the county of Sussex, and where I had gained the impression of a series of subdivisions eventually resulting in a narrow scribble of road and terminating in the dot of my destination. The prospect of travelling away from London was an unnatural one. Some gravitational principle appeared to be defied in doing so. Tracing the route with my finger, the distance seemed more unsustainable as it grew, and once beyond the

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city’s edge took on in my mind the resistance of an inhospitable element, as if I were now forging out to sea or tunnelling underground. To me the town of Buckley was as remote an outpost as an Antarctic station, and, still further, the village of Hilltop – represented there by a dot, as I have said – seemed to promise neither oxygen nor human life. (p. 1) A voice is being created here. The use of the pluperfect tense creates a suitably distancing effect from the events; the tone is detached, analytical and dryly humorous, with knowing remarks – ‘some gravitational principle’ seeming to be defied in leaving London. The passage suggests an attempt at solidity in the face of powerlessness (‘I was to take’, ‘I had been told’), as the narrator curiously insists upon the fact that Hilltop is represented by a dot – ‘as I have said’. Thus, formality and humour are combined, along with a sense of mystery: what is the function of the journey, and what state of mind is evidenced by the curious tone? The novel goes on to become, within the familiar trope of a ‘governess’ arriving at country house, admirable through the manner in which scenes are analysed and commented upon by the narrator. Stylistic excellence is not the only thing absent in much prominent women’s writing, however. In the face of the desire by contemporary novelists to embrace science fiction, war, history and post-modernism, a feeling has grown that the traditional focus of women’s fiction – love, marriage and the home – is outdated. This was certainly evident, as we saw, in reactions to Brookner’s work. While the use of fiction to broaden possibilities should continue, both challenging ideologies and offering inspiration, it is important that realism which reflects what is normal for many women should survive, for this too can question the status quo, in a way that can be embraced by a very wide readership. Here is an instance, in fact, where accessibility is required, and literary prizes are not needed. An obvious example is the work of Joanna Trollope, dubbed normally as ‘Aga Saga’ when it presents, notably in The Rector’s Wife (1991), a sharply critical view of the institutions of Middle England: the Church, marriage and the village. For critics, though, Trollope is dismissed as middlebrow. The term ‘middlebrow’ demands further analysis, which there is not space for in this book. Murdoch, Rendell and Brookner have all been seen as middlebrow, as have Drabble, Lively and many others. Morrison, Atwood and Lessing are absolutely not middlebrow; neither is Helen Fielding, whose work is lowbrow, and thus, paradoxically, more likely to receive attention, as she plays a very large part in popular culture. There are regular complaints from women novelists that new fiction by women is too domestic; heartening as it is to see the wide range of topics covered by recent women novelists, does that mean that the domestic should not have its place?1 This brief survey of the contemporary scene has questioned what might be called the contemporary canon, and the work of some leading writers; nonetheless, the increasing number of women novelists being published and read, often thanks to the Orange Prize, should be applauded, for it offers ‘brilliant

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women’ the chance to ‘roar’, to be heard in a way they would not have been in the time of the Bluestockings. The novel, meanwhile, has always been associated with entertainment; indeed its ease was what often aroused ire, early on. If there is a place for the resurrection of ‘domestic realism’, for the novel as a place to investigate morality and create character, then there must also be a place for the comic novel. Comedy is part of what gives Murdoch her value; it is also present in much of Cusk. And so we come, last of all, to Barbara Pym. Pym’s work might be argued to be provincial, using T. S. Eliot’s ‘test’ for the classic, in that its settings and observations demand familiarity with what is evoked; Pym is, too, consolatory, and although there is implied pathos in her presentations of older women, it is hard to ally her with politics. Nonetheless, Pym’s humour has been recognized widely; she is surely one of the greatest comic writers of the twentieth century. The evidence for this lies, among other things, in her use of simile and metaphor which, as Crowther (2007) suggests, is the sign of artistic invention. Characters compare visits to a blood donor with a stream of consciousness novel; lone men in female company eye each other like sad specimens in a zoo; a solitary Father Christmas decoration on a cake looks like King Lear, deserted in the snow. ‘Whatever Happened to Pleasure?’ asked Susan Manning as the title of a 2001 article, citing Hume and Johnson to argue that pleasure is not mere diversion, but the driving force behind much thought and philosophy. Pym’s work is fiction that deserves attention. She is not a forgotten writer; but perhaps it is time for her to be reread in ways that have been neglected. Her comic sense is vital; the now well-known story of her success, sudden abandonment by her publishers, late return to publishing, and the way academic interest in her work has grown since her death, represents all that is possible for women novelists. If there ever was such a thing as a closed literary canon with patriarchal gatekeepers, it is a thing of the past. Universities teach and research everyone from Chaucer to Angela Carter to Agatha Christie. The cultural visibility of the literary prize, the continuing boom of bookshops, and media successes such as Richard and Judy’s Book Club mean that new literary fiction is placed in front of a potentially very large audience. The number of undergraduates reading English grows, with students often able to write dissertations on any author of their choice, and the power of the internet makes primary material available to many in a way it never was before. Nonetheless, we are still too close to post-war novelists to know who will really last. Kermode’s idea is perhaps the best: keep the novelist alive by talking about them. Looking back to novelists who began a little earlier, it is encouraging to see that Virginia Woolf is still being discussed; so too is Agatha Christie. If the two can survive side by side, whether in a canon or canons, we can only applaud.

Appendix

Post-War British Women Novelists The following is a list of some of the most notable British women novelists who have produced work from 1945 to the present day. Obviously, the list is a personal selection; in a sense, it is my own (very large) canon, and deliberately includes literary and popular writers. The information is as follows: a short selection of what I consider to be their best or most important books; the number of articles pertaining to them in the online bibliography of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which highlights thus their standing in the academic canon; any major fiction prizes they have won; and, finally, the sales rank of their current biggest seller on the book website amazon.co.uk, as of February 2009. This last is, of course, likely to change rapidly and is only superficial evidence; it does, however, give us some idea of who is buying books by whom. Given the overwhelmingly large field, I have restricted the selection to writers whose careers began after 1945, or who produced their most notable work in this period. This sadly means that a range of writers including Elizabeth Bowen, Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier and Rosamund Lehmann do not feature. There are a great many literary prizes in operation. The information relates to those that are seen as the most influential. These are: z the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, begun in 1968, which awards £50,000 z the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, founded in 1995, which awards

£30,000 z the Costa Book Award, formerly the Whitbread. Each category winner

receives £5,000; the Book of the Year winner takes an additional £25,000 z the Guardian First Book Award (previously the Guardian Fiction Prize),

established 1965, which awards £10,000 z the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, founded in 1919, which awards

£20,000 z the David Cohen Prize, which awards £52,500. Not widely known by the

public, the prize is highly valued by writers – not just in terms of the large sum of the winnings.

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Appendix

I have only included shortlistings for the Booker and Orange prizes, as these are the shortlists which are published and have, for good or ill, the most cultural power. A blank in the prize ‘box’ does not mean that a writer has not won any literary prizes, of course. Where the writers have published in other genres, I have only included novels, and not memoirs, plays, etc., in any listings. Short story collections and novels for children are featured.

Author

Major works

Ali, Monica

Brick Lane (2003)

Atkinson, Kate

MLA, Jan. 2009

Prizes/shortlistings

Amazon.co.uk sales rank of biggest seller, Jan. 2009

16

Booker Prize shortlist – Brick Lane

7,475 (Brick Lane)

Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995); Human Croquet (1997); Case Histories (2004)

4

Whitbread Novel and Book of the Year – Behind the Scenes at the Museum

8 (When Will There be Good News)

Bainbridge, Beryl

Injury Time (1977); The Birthday Boys (1991); Master Georgie (1998)

18

Whitbread Novel Prize – Injury Time; Every Man for Himself. Booker Prize shortlist – The Dressmaker; The Bottle Factory Outing; An Awfully Big Adventure; Every Man for Himself; Master Georgie. Guardian Fiction Prize – The Bottle Factory Outing David Cohen British Literature Prize (jointly with Thom Gunn)

10,634 (Every Man for Himself)

Barker, A. L.

Innocents: Variations on a Theme (1947); A Source of Embarrassment (1974); A Heavy Feather (1978); Life Stories (1981); The Gooseboy (1987)

3

Booker Prize shortlist – John Brown’s Body

185,500 (An A. L. Barker Omnibus)

Barker, Nicola

Wide Open (1998); Darkmans (2007)

1

Booker Prize shortlist – Darkmans

50,117 (Darkmans)

Barker, Pat

Union Street (1982); Blow Your House Down (1984); Regeneration (1991); The Eye in the Door (1993)

80

Booker Prize – The Ghost Road. Guardian Fiction Prize – The Eye in the Door

1,251 (Regeneration)

(Continued )

Author

Major works

Bawden, Nina

A Woman of My Age (1967); Carrie’s War (1973); George Beneath a Paper Moon (1974)

Bedford, Sybille

MLA, Jan. 2009

Prizes/shortlistings

Amazon.co.uk sales rank of biggest seller, Jan. 2009

5

Booker Prize shortlist – Circles of Deceit

6,053 (Carrie’s War)

A Legacy (1956); Jigsaw (1989)

12

Booker Prize shortlist – Jigsaw

14,472 (A Legacy)

Brooke-Rose, Christine

Such (1966); Between (1968); Thru (1975); Xorander (1988)

67

James Tait Black Prize – Such

148,818 (The Brooke-Rose Omnibus)

Brookner, Anita

Providence (1982); Look at Me (1983); Hotel du Lac (1984); Family and Friends (1985); Visitors (1997); The Next Big Thing (2002)

67

Booker Prize – Hotel du Lac

1,905 (Strangers)

Brophy, Brigid

Flesh (1962); The Snowball (1964); Palace without Chairs (1978)

19

Byatt, A. S.

The Virgin in the Garden (1978); Still Life (1985); Possession (1990); Babel Tower (1996)

221

Booker Prize – Possession

5,351 (Possession)

Carter, Angela

The Magic Toyshop (1967); Nights at the Circus (1984); Wise Children (1991)

356

James Tait Black Prize – Nights at the Circus

675 (The Bloody Chamber)

Colegate, Isabel

The Great Occasion (1962); The Shooting Party (1980); Winter Journey (1995)

5

Not in print

72,175 (The Shooting Party)

Comyns, Barbara

Sisters by a River (1947); Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (1950); The Vet’s Daughter (1959); The Juniper Tree (1985)

2

81,976 (Sisters by a River)

Cook, Elizabeth

Achilles (2001)

1

95,008 (Achilles)

Cookson, Catherine

The Fifteen Streets (1952); Katie Mulholland (1967)

1

13,440 (Feathers in the Fire)

Cooper, Jilly

Riders (1985)

1

Cusk, Rachel

The Country Life (1997); Arlington Park (2006)

0

Dick, Kay

They: A Sequence of Unease (1977); The Shelf (1984)

1

Not in print

Diski, Jenny

Nothing Natural (1986); Rainforest (1987); Monkey’s Uncle (1994); Only Human (2000)

13

75,571 (Apology for the Woman Writing)

Drabble, Margaret

The Millstone (1965); The Realms of Gold (1975); The Ice Age (1977); The Radiant Way (1987); The Seven Sisters (2002)

292

Duffy, Maureen

The Microcosm (1966); The Paradox Players (1967)

18

275,142 (Capital)

Duncker, Patricia

Hallucinating Foucault (1996); James Miranda Barry (1999)

2

135,650 (Hallucinating Foucault)

4,747 (Riders) Orange Prize shortlist – Arlington Park

James Tait Black Prize – Jerusalem the Golden

42,277 (Arlington Park)

12,328 (The Sea Lady)

(Continued )

Author

Major works

Dunmore, Helen

A Spell of Winter (1995); Talking to the Dead (1996); The Siege (2001)

2

Dunn, Nell

Up the Junction (1963); Poor Cow (1967)

3

Ellis, Alice Thomas

The Sin Eater (1977); The Other Side of the Fire (1983); The Summerhouse Trilogy (1987–1990); The Inn at the Edge of the World (1990)

6

Emecheta, Buchi

The Slave Girl (1977)

Fairbairns, Zoe

Benefits (1979); Stand We At Last (1983); Here Today (1984); Other Names (1998)

7

Not in print

Feinstein, Elaine

The Border (1984); Mother’s Girl (1988); All You Need (1989)

12

590,600 (Dark Inheritance)

Not in print

MLA, Jan. 2009

Prizes/shortlistings

Amazon.co.uk sales rank of biggest seller, Jan. 2009

Orange Prize – A Spell of Winter; Orange Prize shortlist – The Siege

21,137 (The Siege)

244,359 (Up the Junction) Booker Prize shortlist – The Twenty-Seventh Kingdom

182

386,718 (The Summerhouse Trilogy)

131,732 (Second Class Citizen)

Fell, Alison

Mer de Glace (1991)

1

Fielding, Helen

Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)

19

Figes, Eva

Days (1974); Nelly’s Version (1977); Light (1983); The Seven Ages (1986)

10

Guardian Fiction Prize – Winter Journey

441,703 (Light)

Fitzgerald, Penelope

The Beginning of Spring (1988); The Gate of Angels (1990); The Blue Flower (1995)

17

Booker Prize – Offshore Booker Prize shortlist – The Bookshop; The Beginning of Spring; The Gate of Angels

1,491 (The Blue Flower)

21,924 (Bridget Jones’s Diary)

Forster, Margaret

Georgy Girl (1965); Mother Can You Hear Me (1979); Private Papers (1986); Have the Men Had Enough (1989); Lady’s Maid (1990)

4

5,972 (Keeping the World Away)

Freud, Esther

Hideous Kinky (1992); Gaglow (1997); The Wild (2000)

2

5,022 (Hideous Kinky)

Galloway, Janice

The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989); Foreign Parts (1994); Clara (2002)

16

37,793 (This is Not About Me)

Gardam, Jane

Crusoe’s Daughter (1985); Queen of the Tambourine (1991); Old Filth (2005)

8

Whitbread Novel of the Year – Queen of the Tambourine Booker Prize shortlist – God on the Rocks Orange Prize shortlist – Old Filth

22,034 (Old Filth)

Gee, Maggie

The Burning Book (1983); The White Family (2002)

10

Orange Prize shortlist – The White Family

172,435 (My Cleaner)

Glaister, Lesley

Trick or Treat (1991); Easy Peasy (1997); Sheer Blue Bliss (1999)

0

Grant, Linda

When I Lived in Modern Times (2000); The Clothes on Their Backs (2008)

2

Harris, Joanne

Chocolat (1999)

3

Heller, Zoe

Notes on a Scandal (2003); The Believers (2008)

134,931 (As Far As You Can Go)

Orange Prize – When I Lived in Modern Times Booker Prize shortlist – The Clothes on Their Backs

1,915 (The Clothes on Their Backs) 2,314 (The Evil Seed)

Booker Prize shortlist – Notes on a Scandal

1,364 (The Believers)

(Continued )

Author

Major works

Hill, Susan

I’m the King of the Castle (1970); The Woman in Black (1983); Air and Angels (1991)

25

Howard, Elizabeth Jane

Something in Disguise (1969)

2

19,313 (Love All)

James, P. D.

A Taste for Death (1986); Devices and Desires (1989); The Children of Men (1992); Original Sin (1994)

54

129 (The Private Patient)

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer

Heat and Dust (1975)

87

Booker Prize – Heat and Dust

166,958 (Heat and Dust)

Kennedy, A. L.

Paradise (2004); Day (2007)

22

Costa Novel and Book of the Year Award – Day

24,763 (Day)

Lessing, Doris

The Grass is Singing (1950); Martha Quest (1952); The Golden Notebook (1962); The Good Terrorist (1985); The Sweetest Dream (2001); Alfred and Emily (2008)

874

Booker Prize shortlist – Briefing for a Descent into Hell; The Sirian Experiments; The Good Terrorist David Cohen British Literature Prize

1,845 (The Golden Notebook)

Levy, Andrea

Fruit of the Lemon (1999); Small Island (2004)

10

Orange Prize – Small Island Whitbread Novel and Book of the Year Award – Small Island

1,553 (Small Island)

Lewycka, Marina

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (2005); Two Caravans (2007)

0

Orange Prize shortlist – A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian

1,141 (A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian)

MLA, Jan. 2009

Prizes/shortlistings

Amazon.co.uk sales rank of biggest seller, Jan. 2009

Whitbread Novel Award – Bird of Night Booker Prize shortlist – Bird of Night

3,130 (The Woman in Black)

Lively, Penelope

Moon Tiger (1987); Passing On (1989); Cleopatra’s Sister (1993)

32

McDermid, Val

The Mermaids Singing (1995); Wire in the Blood (1997)

6

MacKay, Shena

A Bowl of Cherries (1984); Redhill Rococo (1986); The Artist’s Widow (1998)

4

Booker Prize shortlist – The Orchard on Fire Orange Prize shortlist – Heligoland

58,622 (The Atmospheric Railway)

McWilliam, Candia

A Case of Knives (1988); A Little Stranger (1989); Debatable Land (1994)

2

Guardian Fiction Prize – Debatable Land

379,894 (Wait Till I Tell You)

Maitland, Sara

Virgin Territory (1984); Daughters of Jerusalem (1978)

13

Mantel, Hilary

Fludd (1989); A Place of Greater Safety (1992); A Change of Climate (1994); Beyond Black (2005)

5

Booker Prize shortlist – Beyond Black Orange Prize shortlist – Beyond Black

54,080 (A Place of Greater Safety)

Mason, Anita

The Illusionist (1983); Angel (1994)

0

Booker Prize shortlist – The Illusionist

538,377 (The Right Hand of the Sun)

Michael, Livi

Under a Thin Moon (1992); Their Angel Reach (1994)

3

Not in print (only later children’s books)

Mortimer, Penelope

The Pumpkin Eater (1962)

3

70,900 (The Pumpkin Eater)

Booker Prize – Moon Tiger Booker Prize shortlist – The Road to Lichfield; According to Mark

12,364 (Consequences)

717 (A Darker Domain)

108,869 (Far North and Other Dark Tales)

(Continued )

Author

Major works

Murdoch, Iris

Under the Net (1954); The Time of the Angels (1966); A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); An Accidental Man (1971); The Black Prince (1973); A Word Child (1975); The Sea, the Sea (1978); The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983); The Good Apprentice (1985)

Pilcher, Rosamunde

The Shell Seekers (1984); September (1988)

5

9,722 (The Shell Seekers)

Plaidy, Jean (pseudonym of Eleanor Hibbert)

Murder Most Royal (1949)

0

2,861 (The Vow on the Heron )

Pym, Barbara

Excellent Women (1952); A Glass of Blessings (1958); No Fond Return of Love (1961); The Sweet Dove Died (1978)

Quin, Ann

Berg (1964); Tripticks (1972)

8

191,353 (Berg)

Renault, Mary

The Charioteer (1953); The Last of the Wine (1956); The King Must Die (1958); The Bull from the Sea (1962); The Persian Boy (1972)

13

78,002 (The King Must Die)

MLA, Jan. 2009

492

144

Prizes/shortlistings

Amazon.co.uk sales rank of biggest seller, Jan. 2009

Booker Prize – The Sea, the Sea Booker Prize shortlist – The Nice and the Good; Bruno’s Dream; The Black Prince; The Good Apprentice; The Book and the Brotherhood Whitbread Novel Award – The Sacred and Profane Love Machine James Tait Black Prize – The Black Prince

5,688 (The Sea, the Sea)

Booker Prize shortlist – Quartet in Autumn

5,560 (Excellent Women)

Rendell, Ruth

A Demon in My View (1976); The Crocodile Bird (1993); Simisola (1994); A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998); Harm Done (1999); Thirteen Steps Down (2004)

31

5,553 (Portobello)

Riley, Joan

The Unbelonging (1985); Waiting for Twilight (1987); Romance (1988)

21

60,850 (Waiting for Twilight)

Roberts, Michèle

The Book of Mrs. Noah (1987); Daughters of the House (1992); The Mistressclass (2003)

40

Rogers, Jane

Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1991); Promised Lands (1995)

Rowling, J. K.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)

262

Rubens, Bernice

The Elected Member (1969); The Waiting Game (1997)

12

St Aubin de Teran, Lisa

Keepers of the House (1982); The Slow Train to Milan (1983)

1

Smith, Ali

Hotel World (2000); The Accidental (2005)

4

Booker Prize shortlist – Daughters of the House

106,042 (Daughters of the House)

48,583 (Island) 50 (The Tales of Beedle the Bard) 435 (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) Booker Prize – The Elected Member Booker Prize shortlist – A Five-Year Sentence

135,689 (The Elected Member) 394,642 (Otto)

Booker Prize shortlist – Hotel World; The Accidental Orange Prize shortlist – Hotel World; The Accidental Whitbread Novel Award – The Accidental

10,259 (The Accidental)

(Continued )

Author

Major works

Smith, Zadie

White Teeth (2000); On Beauty (2005)

Spark, Muriel

MLA, Jan. 2009

Prizes/shortlistings

Amazon.co.uk sales rank of biggest seller, Jan. 2009

44

James Tait Black Prize – White Teeth Orange Prize shortlist – White Teeth; The Autograph Man Booker Prize shortlist – On Beauty Orange Prize – On Beauty

2,908 (White Teeth)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); Memento Mori (1963); The Public Image (1968); The Driver’s Seat (1970); Not to Disturb (1971)

210

Booker Prize shortlist – The Public Image; Loitering with Intent David Cohen British Literature Prize

14,321 (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

Taylor, Elizabeth

A View of the Harbour (1947); Angel (1957)

13

Booker Prize shortlist – Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

55,623 (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont)

Tennant, Emma

The Bad Sister (1978); Wild Nights (1979); Two Women of London (1989); Pemberley (1993)

21

166,360 (Pemberley Revisited)

Trapido, Barbara

Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982); Frankie and Stankie (2003)

1

49,133 (Brother of the More Famous Jack)

Tremain, Rose

Restoration (1989); Music and Silence (1999); The Road Home (2007)

7

Trollope, Joanna

The Rector’s Wife (1991); Next of Kin (1995); Other People’s Children (1998)

4

Booker Prize shortlist – Restoration James Tait Black Prize – Sacred Country Whitbread Novel Award – Music and Silence Orange Prize shortlist – The Colour Orange Prize – The Road Home

44 (The Road Home)

420 (Friday Nights)

Vine, Barbara (pseudonym of Ruth Rendell)

A Dark Adapted Eye (1986); A Fatal Inversion (1987); King Solomon’s Carpet (1991); Asta’s Book (1993); No Night is Too Long (1994); The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy (1998)

Walters, Minette

The Ice House (1992); The Sculptress (1993); Acid Row (2001); Fox Evil (2002)

Warner, Marina

The Skating Party (1982); The Lost Father (1988); Indigo (1992)

45

Booker Prize shortlist – The Lost Father

105,417 (Indigo)

Waters, Sarah

Fingersmith (2002); The Night Watch (2006)

22

Booker Prize shortlist – Fingersmith; The Night Watch Orange Prize shortlist – Fingersmith; The Night Watch

2,148 (Fingersmith)

Weldon, Fay

Praxis (1978); The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1984)

78

Booker Prize shortlist – Praxis

29,430 (The Life and Loves of a She Devil)

Wesley, Mary

The Camomile Lawn (1984); Harnessing Peacocks (1985); The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986)

1

Winterson, Jeanette

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985); The Passion (1987); Sexing the Cherry (1989); Lighthousekeeping (2004)

196

5

14,288 (The Birthday Present)

14,128 (The Chameleon’s Shadow)

68,740 (The Camomile Lawn)

1,628 (Oranges are Not the Only Fruit)

Notes

Introduction: The Field of Modern Women Writers 1

See Chris Hopkins (1995), ‘The Neglect of Brigid Brophy’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 15 (3), 12–17.

1. Theories of the Canon 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

For a more detailed analysis of Classical canonizing, see Gorak (1991), chapter 1. Those who argue for an inception of the canon at an earlier date include Trevor Ross (1998), The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press; and Richard Terry (1997), ‘Literature, Aesthetics and Canonicity in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 21 (1), 80–101. See also Jürgen Habermas (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge: Polity Press. For a detailed investigation of the canon, language and culture in the eighteenth century, see the following: Adam R. Beach (2001), ‘The Creation of a Classical Language in the Eighteenth Century: Standardizing English, Cultural Imperialism, and the Future of the Literary Canon’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43 (2), 117–141; Thomas Bonnell (1997), ‘Speaking of Institutions and Canonicity, Don’t Forget the Publishers’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 21 (3), 97–99; and Nicholas Hudson (1998), ‘Johnson’s Dictionary and the Politics of “Standard English”’, Yearbook of English Studies, 28, 77–93. There has been a great deal of writing about cultural capital, and it is a widely acknowledged term in academic debate. Two of the most useful discussions of cultural capital and the literary canon are John Guillory (1993), Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and his earlier (1987) ‘Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate’, English Literary History, 54, 483–527. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. and intro. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), especially ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), ‘Notes towards the Definition of Culture’ (1948), and ‘Religion and Literature’ (1935). For discussion of the common reader, see Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose (1990), The Canon and the Common Reader, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. See also E. E. Kellett (1929) The Whirligig of Taste, London: Hogarth.

Notes 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

159

For evidence of this, see Arthur H. Scouten (1956), ‘The Increase in Popularity of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Eighteenth Century: A Caveat for Interpretors of Stage History’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 7 (2), 189–202. Penguin stopped publishing Wilson’s paperbacks in his later years; they reissued them in 1992, a fact surely connected to his death the previous year. Stratus reissued several of his works in 2001, but nonetheless his novels are still not widely available or marketed. This, of course, is close to topic of ‘Literary Darwinism’ – the idea that certain literary works appeal over generations since they illustrate essential, ingrained patterns of human behaviour. See, for example, Joseph Carroll (2004), Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, New York: Routledge. Lucasta Miller (2001), in The Brontë Myth, London: Jonathan Cape, provides an excellent investigation of the Brontë ‘industry’. For further discussion of Austen, the Brontës, and the canon, see Philip Goldstein (1991), ‘Criticism and Institutions: The Conflicted Reception of Jane Austen’s Fiction’, Studies in the Humanities, 18 (1), 35–55, and Tom Winnifrith (1996), ‘Charlotte and Emily Brontë: A Study in the Rise and Fall of Literary Reputations’, Yearbook of English Studies, 26, 14–24. For a detailed analysis of this in relation to literary fiction, see Richard Todd (1996), Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today, London: Bloomsbury. For more discussion of this, see John Sutherland (1982), Offensive Literature, London: Junction Books, and Richard McKeon (1976), ‘Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodox Heresy in Religion and Culture’, Critical Inquiry, 2, 781–806. The fall of D. H. Lawrence’s reputation is evidence of this: he is seen as being sexist, as is Kingsley Amis. Similarly, Kipling is now viewed as an imperialist. Popular fiction, by its very nature, can often be conservative and individualist, and thus at odds with the diversity espoused by academia since the 1980s. Byatt stated: ‘I am against anything which ghettoizes women. That is my deepest feminist emotion.’ Marianne MacDonald (1996), ‘Sexism Storm as Women-Only Book Prize Launches’, The Independent, 26 January, 2. Brookner likewise asserted: ‘I’m against positive discrimination. If women want equality, which they do, and which they have largely achieved, they shouldn’t ask for separate treatment. Publishing is an open forum. If a book is good, it will get published. If it is good, it will get reviewed. The whole idea of an award just for women fills me with horror.’ The novelist refused to allow her most recent novel to be entered for the award. Susan Jeffreys (1996), ‘Women Caught in a War of Words’, Sunday Times, 21 April, Features. There is a great deal of journalistic evidence about the creation of the Orange Prize; there is however, so far, only one scholarly article: Britta Zangen (2003), ‘Women as Readers, Writers, and Judges: The Controversy about the Orange Prize for Fiction’, Women’s Studies, 32 (3), 281–299. See Marilyn Butler (1975), Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, for a reading of the novelist as a conservative, and Margaret Kirkham (1982), Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, Brighton: Harvester, for a view of her as an Enlightenment feminist. For post-colonial Austen, see You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (eds) (2000), The Postcolonial Jane Austen, London: Routledge.

160

Notes

2. Iris Murdoch 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

As of February 2009, the number of entries for each on MLA are Atwood – 1089; Lessing – 891; Morrison – 1870; Walker – 607. See, for example, Angela Hague (1984), Iris Murdoch’s Comic Vision, London: Associated University Presses; Bran Nicol (1999), Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, New York: St Martin’s; and Anne Rowe (2002), The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch, Lampeter: Mellen, all published versions of Ph.D.s. The proceedings of this conference were published as Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds) (1996), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See Rowe (2006), which contains 16 articles, based on papers at the conference Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (2004), Kingston University, 17–18 September. The split is equal between novels and philosophy. These are Kate Begnal (1987), Iris Murdoch: A Reference Guide, Boston: Hall; Cheryl Browning Bove (1986), A Character Index and Guide to the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, New York and London: Garland; John Fletcher and Cheryl Browning Bove (1994), Iris Murdoch: A Descriptive Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography, New York and London: Garland; and Barbara Stevens Heusel (2001), Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception, Rochester, NY: Camden House. See, for example, Richard Todd (1979), Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearean Interest, London: Vision Press; Robert Hoskins (1972), ‘Iris Murdoch’s Midsummer Nightmare’, Twentieth Century Literature, 18 (3), 191–198; Suguna Ramanathan (1994), ‘Murdoch’s Use of Hamlet in Nuns and Soldiers, Hamlet Studies, 16 (1–2), 88–94; Howard German (1971), ‘The Range of Allusions in the Novels of Iris Murdoch’, Journal of Modern Literature, (2), 57–85. William Van O’Connor (1958), ‘The New University Wits’, Kenyon Review, 20, 38–50 – and much general critical and journalistic comment. Later: Angela Hague (1986), ‘Picaresque Structure and the Angry Young Novel’, Twentieth Century Literature, 32 (2), 209–220. Secondary work on Murdoch and art/music: Ann M. Ashworth (1981), ‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time: Bronzino’s Allegory and Murdoch’s Fiction’, Critique, 23 (1), 18–24; Darlene D. Mettler (1991), Sound and Sense: Musical Allusion and Imagery in the Novels of Iris Murdoch, New York: Peter Lang; Rowe (2002). Psychoanalytical criticism: Robert Hardy (2000), Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction, Lewiston, NY and Lampeter: Mellen Press; Jack Turner (1993), Murdoch vs. Freud: A Freudian Look at an Anti-Freudian, New York: Peter Lang. See John Fletcher (1988), ‘Iris Murdoch: The Foreign Translations’, in Richard Todd (ed.) Encounters with Iris Murdoch, Amsterdam: Free University Press, pp. 11–16. Stade likens Murdoch to Du Maurier and the Brontes in his review; Olga Kenyon (1988), in Women Novelists Today (Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 20) likens her (more positively) to Radcliffe. D. J. Taylor (1995), in his review of Jackson’s Dilemma, likened the novel to Mills and Boon and to a sensational novel by Mrs Braddon. ‘Snake in the Sun’, The Guardian, 13 October 1995, Features, 6.

Notes 11

12

13

14

15

16

17

161

This is partly owing to interest generated by the du Maurier centenary in 2007 – including a conference, a leading article in the Times Literary Supplement, and publication of various papers. The novels have also been recently reissued by Vintage. The published work on Murdoch’s Gothicism includes the following: Zohreh T. Sullivan (1977), ‘The Contracting Universe of Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, Modern Fiction Studies, 23, 557–569; Katherine Weese (2001), ‘Feminist Uses of the Fantastic in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47 (3), 630–656; Dorothy A. Winsor (1980), ‘Iris Murdoch and the Uncanny: Supernatural Events in The Bell’, Literature and Psychology, 30 (3–4), 147–154; Dorothy A. Winsor (1981), ‘Solipsistic Sexuality in Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, Renascence, 34 (1), 52–63. Joan Smith (2003), ‘The Biographer Who Wouldn’t, and Then Did’, The Times, 6 September, Weekend Review, 12: ‘Bayley . . . would one day write about [Murdoch] in the most revolting terms. When Murdoch succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, Bayley produced two books about her, chronicling her decline in excruciating detail.’ Alan Taylor (2003), ‘For the Love of Iris’, Review of A. N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her’, Sunday Herald, 7 September, 12: ‘Having been gazumped by Peter Conradi, it is hard to see his contribution to an industry, which seems set to rival that of the Bloomsbury set or Sylvia Plath, as other than mercenary.’ ‘Alas, for me it is also a world whose arcane and philosophical undertones, which have fascinated us for so long through so many opacities of the Murdochian vision, have lost their power to compel. I feel impertinent saying it about a truly great artist . . . but I think it is time that Iris Murdoch declared this particular genre closed.’ Jan Morris (1989), ‘Lettuce, Marmite and God’, Review of The Message to the Planet, The Independent, 30 September, Weekend Books, 34. Byatt (2003) reports: ‘When Ignes and I included An Unofficial Rose in Imagining Characters I faced a surprising number of queries about “why Murdoch?” which I don’t think we’d have faced if she’d been Angela Carter or Doris Lessing. The book was to have been with Virago and they would have preferred Carter or Lessing’ (personal communication, 27 October). The ethical turn accompanies a growing sense of the problems of post-modernism and a return of interest in scholarship to matters of morality and ethics. Charles Altieri, Wayne C. Booth, Cora Diamond and Susan Gubar all write in support of it: a good representative essay is Martha Nussbaum (1998), ‘Exactly and Responsibly: A Defence of Ethical Criticism’, Philosophy and Literature, 22 (2), 343–365. Peter J. Conradi (2006), ‘Laughing at Pain’, unpublished paper, Iris Murdoch: Morality and the Novel, Third Conference of the Iris Murdoch Society, Kingston University, 15–16 September.

3. Anita Brookner 1

The subjects are Pat Barker, A. L. Kennedy, Maggie Gee, Rukhsana Ahmad, Joan Riley, Jennifer Johnston, Ellen Galford, Susan Hill, Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant and Helen Fielding.

162 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Notes

However, this omission did Carter no harm, even perhaps helping her achieve canonicity. The Orange Prize for Fiction is claimed to have come into being through the failure of her Wise Children to make the longlist in 1991. This is done most fully by Eileen Williams-Wanquet (2004), in the opening chapter of Art and Life in the Novels of Anita Brookner: Reading for Life, Subversive Re-Writing To Live, New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Brookner’s influences are discussed most fully by Kate Fullbrook (2000), ‘Anita Brookner: On Reaching for the Sun’, in Abby H. P. Werlock (ed. and intro.) and Regina Barreca (foreword), British Women Writing Fiction, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, pp. 90–106. Michèle Roberts (2003) drew attention to this: ‘“My Quiche Lorraine was Sincerely Praised” . . . Beckett Meets Mills & Boon in Anita Brookner’s Living Hell’, Review of The Rules of Engagement, The Independent, 12 July, 26. Of course, this line is an example of Brookner’s very subtle and underrated comedy, as is the reference to ‘computer sciences’ in the extract above. It is a deliberate imposition of trivial detail in a serious framework; a comic juxtaposition. See, for example, Ana Gabriela Macedo (1998), ‘Angela Carter’s Fairy-Tales: Carnivalesque Excess and the “Laugh of the Medusa”’, in David Callahan (ed. and preface); Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira and A. D. Barker (eds) Violência e Possessão: Estudos Ingleses Contemporâneos, Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, pp. 107–112. There are several useful pieces on the themes of exile, and the status of immigrants and Jews in Brookner’s fiction. See Marilyn Demarest Button (1999), ‘A Losing Tradition: The Exotic Female in Anita Brookner’s Early Fiction’, in Button and Toni Reed (eds) The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders, Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 171–181; Malcolm (1998), ‘British Bastards: Representations of Nationhood in the Novels of Anita Brookner’, in Edmund Gussmann and Bogdan Szymanek (eds) PASE Papers in Literature, Language and Culture, Lublin, Poland: University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, pp. 263–271; Malcolm (2002), ‘The Lucky Ones? Child Evacuees and the Legacy of the Holocaust: Anita Brookner’s Latecomers (1988)’, in Zygmunt Mazur, Fritz H. König, Arnold Krammer, Harry Brod and Wladyslaw Witalisz (eds), The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children and the Holocaust, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, pp. 419–429; Louise Sylvester (2001), ‘Troping the Other: Anita Brookner’s Jews’, English: The Journal of the English Association, 50 (196), pp. 47–58; Aránzazu Usandizaga (2006), ‘Motifs of Exile, Hopelessness, and Loss: Disentangling the Matrix of Anita Brookner’s Novels’, in Claire M. Tylee (ed. and intro.), ‘In the Open’: Jewish Women Writers and British Culture, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, pp. 110–125; and Katarzyna Wieckowska (2001), ‘I Love My Exile: A Study in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac’, in Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwal (eds), The Writing of Exile, Katowice, Poland: Slask, pp. 117–126. This suggests that Brookner may be taken more seriously in Europe: a further form of canonicity is thus raised. Laurence Chamlou (2000), Ecritures de l’exil: Etude comparée des oeuvres d’Anita Brookner, Salman Rushdie et Kazuo Ishiguro de 1981 à 1992, Reims, France: Centre de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire dans les Littératures de Langue Anglaise, PU de Reims. See Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, ‘Anita Brookner’, in Shaffer (2005), pp. 469–480, for further discussion of this idea.

Notes 10

11

12

163

See also Angela McRobbie (2004), ‘Post-Feminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies, 4 (3), 255–264. There are some excellent and useful articles: for example, Frances Restuccia (1996), ‘Tales of Beauty: Aestheticizing Female Melancholia, American Imago, 53 (4), 353–383, and Ann Fisher-Wirth (1995), ‘Hunger Art: The Novels of Anita Brookner’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 41 (1), 1–15, both of which use Kristeva to read Brookner. Anita Brookner (1982), ‘Women against Men’, Review of Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, London Review of Books, 2–15 September, 19–20.

4. Ruth Rendell 1

2

3

4

5

6

There is much to be said about the canonization of Collins, and the relative disappearance of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Ouida, etc. Is it simply a matter of Collins producing better work? Some work of the aforementioned is in print, but they are not lauded to the extent of their peers. See Carol Poster (1996), ‘Oxidization is a Feminist Issue: Acidity, Canonicity, and Popular Victorian Female Authors’, College English, 58 (3), 287–306. Leslie A. Fiedler and C. W. E. Bigsby (1975), ‘Towards a Definition of Popular Literature’, in C. W. E. Bigsby (ed.) Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, pp. 28–42; David Madden (1973), ‘The Necessity for an Aesthetics of Popular Culture’, Journal of Popular Culture, 7, 1–13; John G. Cawelti (1971), ‘Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Popular Culture’, Journal of Popular Culture, 5, 255–268; John G. Cawelti (1998), ‘The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature’, in Gary Hoppenstand (ed. and intro.) and Charles I. Schuster (foreword), Popular Fiction: An Anthology, New York: Longman, pp. 730–736; Cawelti (1976). Gillian Slovo, the crime novelist, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her 2004 novel Ice Road. This, however, was not one of her crime works. Interestingly, Carter’s Wise Children, so notably omitted from the Booker shortlist, appeared on the Whitbread shortlist alongside Rendell/Vine. Gold Daggers for A Demon in My View (1976), Live Flesh (1986), the Vine A Fatal Inversion (1987), and the Vine King Solomon’s Carpet (1991); Silver for The Tree of Hands (1984); Arts Council Award for The Lake of Darkness (1981). There are many examples. Among the most notable are Umberto Eco (2003), ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’, in Christopher Lindner (ed. and intro.), The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 34–55; S. E. Sweeney (1990), ‘Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity’, in Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (eds), The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, pp. 1–14; Peter Hühn (1987), ‘The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 33 (3), 451–466; and Tzvetan Todorov (1988), ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in David Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, New York: White Plains. Norma Siebenheller (1981), P. D. James, New York: Ungar; Richard B. Gidez (1986), P. D. James, Boston: Twayne. James is also the subject of interview in a non-genre

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journal, an accolade Rendell has not received. See Shusa Guppy (1995), ‘P. D. James: The Art of Fiction’, The Paris Review, 37 (135), 52. It is interesting, and not surprising that, of all the Wexford books, Simisola is the most academically favoured for comment: see Rowland (2001), pp. 83–85; Suzanne Penuel (2005), ‘Relocating the Heart of Darkness in Ruth Rendell’, in Julie H. Kim (ed.) Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story: Ten Essays, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 51–70. Also: ‘Crime novelists have consistently shown themselves to be thoughtful commentators, whose best work offers a moral compass to a society that, too often, seems to have lost its bearings.’ Liz Thomson (2001), ‘From Prejudice and Paedophilia to Peace’, Review of Acid Row by Minette Walters, The Independent, 9 November, 5. Apart from Russett’s article, all are by Lidia Kyzlinková: (2002), ‘Ruth Rendell/ Barbara Vine: Social Thriller on The Crocodile Bird and Asta’s Book’, Brno Studies in English, 28 (8), 137–146; (2003), ‘Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine: Racial Otherness and Conservative Englishness’, Brno Studies in English, 29 (9) 123–131; (2004), ‘Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine: Social Thriller, Ethnicity and Englishness’, in Pavel Drábek and Jan Chovanec (eds) Theory and Practice in English Studies: Proceedings from the Seventh Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies: Vol. 2., Brno: Masarykova University, pp. 109–114; (2005), ‘Rendell/Vine: the Historical Universality of Degradation between Nations and Genders’, Brno Studies in English, 31, 139–146. Barbara Vine (1990), Gallowglass, London: Viking, pp. 47–48, where the narrator describes an empty Suffolk town at night.

5. Emma Tennant 1

2

3

4

See, for example, Edwin Morgan’s review (1978) of The Bad Sister, which found it a ‘highly interesting novel’, and talked of how ‘the nightmarish ambiguities of these later scenes, with their vivid evocations of mingled real and unreal environments, and their acrid infusion of suspense, really grip the reader.’ ‘Devil’s Work’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 July, 817. See, for example, Margaret Atwood (2005), ‘Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels’, The Guardian, 17 June, Friday pages, 5; Rosemary Jackson (1981), Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Methuen. Susanne Schmid (1997), ‘Emma Tennant’s Sister Hyde: Two Strange Cases of the Female Double’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 45 (1), 2–32; Steven Connor (1994), ‘Rewriting Wrong: On the Ethics of Literary Reversion’, in Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (eds), Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post-) Colonial, and the (Post-) Feminist, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 79–97; Annagret Maack (1997), ‘Translating Nineteenth Century Classics: Emma Tennant’s Intertextual Novels’, Anglistik and Englischunterricht, 60, 71–82. ‘The Independent on Sunday Bestseller List (1994)’, The Independent on Sunday, 23 January, Sunday Review, 37. Tennant came seventh. It is noted, however, that this is partially due to a high print run of Tennant’s novel, and clever marketing

Notes

5

6

7

8

9

10

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at a ‘low’ price of £9.99. Giles Gordon (1994), ‘Behind the Cover Story’, The Times, 29 January, Features. Carol Anderson (2000), ‘Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic Revisited’, in Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (eds), Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 117–130; Carol Anderson (1993), ‘Listening to the Women Talk’, in Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds), The Scottish Novel since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 170–186. In an interview Tennant suggests that she is more successful when she works outside the realist tradition, although the ‘old-fashioned’ novel is something she would like to do (Turner, 2007). Julie Sanders (2001), Novel Shakespeares, Manchester: Manchester University Press, investigates contemporary fictional revisions of Shakespeare. Patricia Duncker (1984), ‘Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History, 10 (1) 3–14. Morgan (1978) notes that the novel is of its time in terms of its feminist concerns and cinematic quality. Tennant admits that the novel reflects its zeitgeist in terms of feminism and politics, but feels that it is a mistake to define her work as feminist: the term is too simple (Turner, 2007). Tennant has stated that the idea for The French Dancer’s Bastard was Carter’s (Turner), and that Carter suggested the title for Woman Beware Woman (Roe and Tennant, p. 233). Philip Larkin (1977), ‘The World of Barbara Pym’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 March, 260.

Conclusion: The Contemporary Scene 1

Yvonne Roberts (2005), ‘Belittled Women’, The Guardian, 24 March, Features, 3, deplored this narrow focus. Gillian Beer, judge on the panel of the 2002 Orange Prize, nonetheless applauded the fact that new women writers had ‘none of the . . . anguished abasement of Jean Rhys or Anita Brookner . . . women have freed themselves to write more forcefully about much larger networks: wars, families, communities, national change, terrorism and history’. Angelique Chrisafis (2002), ‘The Hay Festival: Women’s Writing Leaves Sex Behind’, The Guardian, 10 June, Home pages, 5.

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Index

Abrams, M. H. 13 Achebe, Chinua 24, 30 Acheson, James, and Ross, Sarah C. E. 88 Ackroyd, Peter 119 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 126 Alexander, Flora 119 Ali, Monica 63, 68, 140 Alther, Lisa 126 Althusser, Louis 45 Altieri, Charles 20–1 Amis, Kingsley 29, 112, 136 Amis, Martin 54, 63, 112, 125, 138 Anderson, Benedict 16, 17 Anderson, Carol 113, 120, 121, 124 Anderson, Robert 16 Antonaccio, Maria, and Schweiker, William 39 Appleyard, Brian 142 Armstrong, Isobel 67 Armstrong, Karen 37 Arnold, Matthew 14, 18, 21 Atkinson, Kate 63, 140 Atwood, Margaret 37, 38, 55, 64, 113, 115–16, 142 The Edible Woman 120–1 The Handmaid’s Tale 53, 103, 138 The Penelopiad 122 Aubin, Penelope 65 Auerbach, Nina 21 Austen, Jane academic readings 30, 32 canonicity 17, 19, 32, 81, 107, 139 commercialisation 25–6 as an influence on later writers 22 interpreted by Emma Tennant 114, 116–17, 122 as romance 24 style 69–70, 110

Backus, Guy 46 Bainbridge, Beryl 55, 125, 136 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 27–8 Barker, A. L. 4–5, 7 Barker, Jane 30, 65 Barker, Nicola 140 Barker, Pat 7–8, 63, 126, 140 Barnacle, Hugo 67 Barnes, Julian 63, 112, 119, 138 Bayley, John 43, 52, 80 Behn, Aphra 30 Belsey, Catherine 54 Bennett, Alan 20, 114 Bennett, Arnold 53 Bentley, Nick 88 Bergonzi, Bernard 48, 49, 70 Big Read (BBC) 34, 38, 64, 88–9, 114 Biles, Jack 40, 53 Binding, Paul 100 Birch, Dinah 77 Birch, Helen 128 Black, Helen C. 3 Blackburn, Simon 39 Blackwood, Caroline 125 Bloom, Harold The Anxiety of Influence 21 as critic of Iris Murdoch 36, 55 theory of the canon applied to writers 42, 56, 102, 130 The Western Canon 19–22, 27, 29, 111, 113 Bluestocking movement 2 Blyton, Enid 24 Booker, Christopher 25, 81 Booker prize 28–9, 34, 64, 66–7, 112, 123–4, 126, 137–8 exclusion of genre fiction 87 exclusion of women 30 Man Booker International Prize 55

188

Index

Botticelli 32, 134 Bourdieu, Pierre 17–18, 22, 25, 39, 48, 89, 117, 129 Bowen, Elizabeth 4 Bradbury, Malcolm 4, 29, 36, 42, 46, 88, 113, 124 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 3 Bradford, Richard 10, 64, 69, 88, 113, 124 Bragg, Melvyn 36 British Council Contemporary Writers Database 6–7, 113 Brontë sisters (discussed collectively) 24, 25–6, 49, 56, 81, 117, 137 Brookner, Anita Austen, Jane, compared to 69–70, 81, 85 Booker prize 64, 66–7, 75, 124 Carter, Angela, compared to 67–8, 70, 72–4, 83–4, 85 editions 75 exile (as a theme) 75–7 existentialism 80 feminism 70–2, 84 influences 65, 69–70, 80, 82, 83 Ishiguro, Kazuo, compared to 80, 82 Jewishness 75–7 Lessing, Doris, praise of 84 Murdoch, Iris, compared to 80 novels: Altered States 74 Bay of Angels 66, 72, 73–4, 75 Brief Lives 67 A Closed Eye 67 Falling Slowly 75 Family and Friends 70, 76 Fraud 81, 84, 85 A Friend from England 68, 69, 70–1 Hotel du Lac 55, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71–2, 76, 83, 84, 85 Latecomers 76 Leaving Home 64, 72 Lewis Percy 65, 67 Look at Me 53, 64, 67, 69, 76, 82–4, 103 A Misalliance 69, 84 The Next Big Thing 72, 75–7, 80

A Private View 72 Providence 64, 68–9, 76, 80, 82, 83, 84 A Start in Life 62, 64, 73–4 Strangers 64 Undue Influence 72, 75, 78 Orange Prize 77 originality 81–2 postfeminism 78–9 reviews of novels 67, 74–8 Rhys, Jean, compared to 73, 83 romance/genre fiction, compared to 64–6, 67 sales 66 status 63–4 style 70, 81–3 universal themes 81 Brophy, Brigid 7 Burgess, Anthony 36, 114 Burney, Frances 17, 27–8, 31 Byatt, A. S. and Booker Prize 8, 112, 119 canonicity (as a novelist) 6, 8, 119 criticism of Orange Prize 30 as critic of Iris Murdoch 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 51, 53 as novelist 74, 103, 112, 119, 122, 127, 129, 139 praises Penelope Fitzgerald 138 view of the canon 21, 63 view of crime fiction 92–3 canon, the Bloom, Harold, theorised by 19–21 and Booker prize 28–9 and cultural capital 17 definitions, 12–14 Harris, Wendell V., theorised by 32–3 in history 14–18 Kermode, Frank, theorised by 32 ‘the popular canon’ 23–6 and sublimity 19 and syllabuses 22–3 and taste 27 and time 27 traditional ideas challenged 29–31, 33–4

Index and universality 24–5 and value 18 Carey, John 19, 24, 51, 87, 88, 97, 108, 136 Carter, Angela Anita Brookner, compared to 67–8, 70 Emma Tennant, compared to 128, 130 and feminism 127–8 Gothic 115–16 literary prizes 30, 124, 137 place in scholarship and on syllabuses 7, 8, 31, 37, 47, 53, 63, 64 status 4, 6, 8 works: The Bloody Chamber 64, 69, 73, 103 The Magic Toyshop 103, 121 Nights at the Circus 66, 67, 69, 70, 85, 103, 121 Wise Children 69 Cawelti, John G. 87, 92 Childs, Peter 63, 113 Christie, Agatha 10, 90, 144 Cicero 16 Cixous, Hélène 31, 70, 121 classic, the 13–14, 32 Clausen, Christopher 24–5, 29, 32, 34, 130 Cody, Liza 93 Coe, Jonathan 54, 125 Coetzee, J. M. 66 Collins, Wilkie 1, 87, 110–11 common reader, the 23 Comyns, Barbara 8 Connor, Steven 18, 113 Conrad, Joseph 19, 34 Conradi, Peter 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49, 51, 52, 60 Cook, Elizabeth 141 Corelli, Marie 3, 23, 24 Cornwell, Patricia 89 Costa Prize see also Whitbread Prize 28 Coward, Rosalind 79 Crowther, Paul 10, 18, 144 Cuddon, J. A. 13

189

Cunningham, Valentine 10, 37, 44, 58–9, 60 Cusk, Rachel 22, 140, 142–3, 144 Dahl, Roald 24 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 130 Dante 20 David Cohen Prize 28 Dawson, S. W. 35 Deeping, Warwick 23 Defoe, Daniel 18 De Lillo, Don 138 Desai, Kiran 64, 66, 126, 134, 137 Detweiler, Robert 40 Dick, Kay 48, 49 Dickens, Charles 24, 26, 28, 29, 52, 56, 108 Iris Murdoch compared to 59–60 Didion, Joan 63, 73 Dinnage, Rosemary 48 Dipple, Elizabeth 41, 49, 54 Diski, Jenny 140 d’Israeli, Isaac 23 Donoghue, Emma 121 Dostoevsky, Theodor 52, 101 Drabble, Margaret as critic 53 middlebrow 55 as a novelist 22, 123 realism 54, 62, 118–19 Ruth Rendell, compared to 95 status 4, 8, 54, 55, 67, 68, 112 du Maurier, Daphne 49, 110–11, 112 Duncker, Patricia 103, 121, 127–8, 131 Dunmore, Helen 103, 140 Durrell, Lawrence 136 Eagleton, Terry 10, 14, 54–5, 134 Eaton, Mark 22 Eco, Umberto 14 Edgeworth, Maria 21, 27–8 Eliot, George 1, 19, 24, 28, 31, 59, 60–1, 96–7, 107 Eliot, T. S. 14, 20, 21, 27, 130, 144 Ellis, Alice Thomas 8, 42 Emecheta, Buchi 7 English, James 28, 29, 88 Enright, Anne 63, 64

190

ethical turn, the 10, 39, 57, 96 Ettler, Justine 78 Fairbairns, Zoë 8, 113 Fairer, David, & Gerrard, Christine 26 Faulks, Sebastian 36 Feinstein, Elaine 7, 113 Fiedler, Leslie 11, 87, 94 Fiedler, Leslie & Baker, Houston A. Jr. 11 Fielding, Helen 21, 79, 143 Fielding, Henry 31 Figes, Eva 5, 6–7, 62, 113 Finney, Brian 88 Fitzgerald, Penelope 6, 123, 138–9 Forster, E. M. 22 Foucault, Michel 70, 140 Fowler, Alastair 17, 27, 38, 41 Fowles, John 43 French, Marilyn 126, 132, 136 Frye, Northrop 20, 25 Fullbrook, Kate 79 Fyfield, Frances 99 Gallagher, Susan 25 Galloway, Janice 117 Gaskell, Elizabeth 96–7, 98, 134 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 21 Gelder, Ken 24, 26, 65, 88, 100, 108 Gibbons, Stella 112 Gidez, Richard B. 89 Gilbert, Sandra M. 73 Gilbert, Sandra, & Gubar, Susan 21, 30 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 22 Golding, William 28, 29, 43, 55, 66, 112, 119, 122 Gorak, Jan 14 Gordon, George 14 Grafton, Sue 93 Gramsci, Antonio 29, 87 Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ 55, 112, 139 Gray, Alistair 117 greatness 2, 9, 19, 44–5, 56 Greene, Gayle 121 Griffiths, Joanna 78 Guillory, John 18, 19, 22

Index Haffenden, John 71, 79, 84, 115, 122, 126 Hampshire, Stuart 39 Hardy, Thomas 1, 26, 56 Harris, Wendell V. 15, 18, 33, 47, 86, 115 Haywood, Eliza 16, 18, 65 Hawthorn, Jeremy 13, 33 Hazzard, Shirley 141–2 Head, Dominic 37, 64, 78, 79, 84, 88, 113 Heilbrun, Carolyn 29 Hensher, Philip 35, 37, 48 Heusel, Barbara Stevens 40–1, 42 Highsmith, Patricia 100–1 Hollinghurst, Alan 42 Hollows, Joanne 79 Homer 25 Horace 16 Howard, Elizabeth Jane 11 Hume, David 2, 23 Humm, Peter, Stigant, Paul & Widdowson, Peter 89 Irons, Glenwood 93 Ishiguro, Kazuo 63, 77, 112 Jack, Ian 92 Jacobus, Mary 121 James, Henry 19, 26, 30 James, P. D. 55, 86, 87, 103, 107, 110 Austen, Jane, compared to 110 novels: Devices and Desires 106–7 Original Sin 110 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman 93 prizes 88, 89, 90, 91 style 110 value of crime fiction, discusses 92 James Tait Black Memorial Prize 28, 40 Joannou, Maroula 64 Johnson, B. S. 43 Johnson, Deborah 53 Johnson, Samuel 2, 16–17, 18, 20–1, 27, 32, 34, 56 Jones, Jonathan 2 Jones, Tobias 129 Jong, Erica 126, 132 Joyce, James 24

Index Karl, Frederick 124 Keller, Evelyn Fox & Moglen, Hélène 72 Kelman, James 117 Kemp, Peter 65 Kennedy, A. L. 63, 117, 140 Kennedy, George A. 12, 15–16, 26, 27 Kenyon, Olga 7, 53, 64, 65, 78 Kermode, Frank on chance in canon-making 45, 125, 130 criticized for sexism 29 Forms of Attention 32, 44, 114 ‘The Future of the English Literary Canon’ 33 literary pleasure 57, 60 theories applied to subjects of book 34, 41, 56, 82, 102 Kipling, Rudyard 136 Knight, Stephen 89, 91 Koenig, Rhoda 98, 99 Kolodny, Annette 29 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody 16, 26 Kristeva, Julia 121 Lauter, Paul 29 Lawrence, D. H. 26, 29, 136 Leavis, F. R. 14, 18–19, 21, 30, 43, 104 Leavis, Q. D. 48, 65 Lee, Robert A. 55, 67 Lehmann, Rosamund 4, 64 Lennox, Charlotte 2, 30, 31 Lessing, Doris canonicity Man Booker International Prize shortlisting 55 novels: The Golden Notebook 55, 84, 103, 120 The Good Terrorist 127 The Memoirs of a Survivor 5 The Sweetest Dream 127 realism 62 speaks against the canon 33–4 Levin, Harry 23 Levy, Andrea 30–1, 63, 68, 140–1 Lewis, C. S. 136 Lewycka, Marina 140–1

191

liberal humanism 10, 57, 62, 120 Linton, Eliza Lynn 3, 30 literary pleasure 50, 111, 137, 144 Lively, Adam 78 Lively, Penelope 8, 62, 67, 118–19, 123 Longinus 27 Maack, Annagret 122 McCracken, Scott 88 McCrum, Robert 138 McDermid, Val 92 McEwan, Ian 22, 54, 57, 63, 112, 125 MacIntyre, Alistair 39 Mackay, Shena 137 McWilliam, Candia 7, 37, 42 Madden, Deirdre 9 Maitland, Sara 62, 71, 113 Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander 76, 77 Manning, Susan 144 Mantel, Hilary 95, 140 Marcion 15–16 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 55 Martz, Louis L. 36, 39 Mengham, Rod 63, 113 middlebrow 55, 66, 143 Miller, J. Hillis 54 Miller, Karl 118 Milton, John 16 Moers, Ellen 126 Monk, Ray 39 Mooney, Bel 53 Morris, Amanda 93 Morris, Jan 6, 53 Morrison, Blake 79 Morrison, Jago 63, 113 Morrison, Toni 7, 37, 55, 63, 64, 115–16, 137–8, 142 Motion, Joanna 132 Mulvey, Laura 121 Munns, Jessica 22, 34 Munt, Sally 93 Murdoch, Iris Alzheimer’s 52 Booker prize 28, 55 Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies 47 comedy 58–9, 144 complexity 40–1 conferences 37, 39

192

Index

Murdoch, Iris (Cont’d) death 47 Dickens, Charles, compared to 59–60 editions 47 Eliot, George, compared to 59, 60–1 feminism 53, 54 genre fiction, compared to 49–53, 56 Gothic 46, 49–50 greatness 56 influences 43, 49, 56 intertextuality 43–5 Iris Murdoch Society 37, 38, 39 male discourses 45–6 obituaries 36 originality 56, 58 philosophy in novels 38–40, 41 realism 54 style 57–8 syllabuses, featuring on 42 universal value 60–1 works An Accidental Man 36, 40–1, 44, 58, 59, 60–1 The Bell 35–6, 38, 42, 46, 47, 49 The Black Prince 40, 46, 47, 57 The Book and the Brotherhood 51, 53 Bruno’s Dream 51 A Fairly Honourable Defeat 35, 46, 48, 69 The Flight from the Enchanter 46, 58, 59–60 The Good Apprentice 48, 49 The Green Knight 42, 44, 48, 52 Henry and Cato 50 The Italian Girl 43–4, 47, 49, 58 The Message to the Planet 52, 53, 127 The Nice and the Good 43, 48, 50, 51 Nuns and Soldiers 46, 48, 51, 69 The Philosopher’s Pupil 48, 51, 58–9 The Red and the Green 46 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine 47 The Sandcastle 51 The Sea, the Sea 38, 46, 49, 57–8 A Severed Head 40, 45 The Time of the Angels 39, 40, 49 Under the Net 35, 38, 45, 46, 49

The Unicorn 40, 43, 46, 49, 82 An Unofficial Rose 47, 52 A Word Child 39, 46, 51, 106 Nemoianu, Virgil 25–6, 30, 56, 130 Neumeier, Beate 113 Nussbaum, Martha 39 Oates, Joyce Carol 36 O’Farrell, Maggie 63 Olsen, Stein Haugom 24 Orange Prize for Fiction 6, 29, 30, 87–8, 126, 140–4 originality (as mark of value) 19, 43, 56, 124, 130 Orwell, George 52 Oswald, Alice 6 Ouida 23 Palmer, Jerry 88 Paretsky, Sara 93 Parker, Emma 63, 88 Pawling, Christopher 88 Payne, Michael 15 Pearce, Philippa 6 Perrick, Penny 95–6 Piercy, Marge 113, 128, 136 Pierre, D. B. C. 28 Pilcher, Rosamunde 55 Pope, Alexander 16 Porlock, Harvey 67, 78 Prospect magazine: list of Britain’s top 100 intellectuals 6 Proulx, E. Annie 63 Proust, Marcel 26 Pym, Barbara 6, 45, 55, 123, 134, 144 Rabinowitz, Rubin 39 Radcliffe, Ann 18, 22, 27–8, 49 Radway, Janice 65 Rankin, Ian 86, 89, 90 Reichs, Kathy 86 Rendell, Ruth see also Vine, Barbara Golding, William, compared to 104–5 Gothic, use of 103 influences and intertextuality 98, 102, 104, 106, 107 Inspector Wexford novels 90–4

Index James, P. D., compared to 91, 106, 110 London, portrayal of 95 as a moralist 96, 104 novels: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me 94 A Demon in my View 94, 95 From Doon with Death 90, 93 Harm Done 90, 94 A Judgement in Stone 94 Live Flesh 94 Not in the Flesh 89 Road Rage 90–2, 93–4 Simisola 90 Thirteen Steps Down 95–8, 104 An Unkindness of Ravens 109, 127 politics 103 prizes 88, 94, 114 ‘romans noirs’ (psychological novels) 94–100 sales 89 scholarship, place in 88 social realism 90–2, 96 syllabuses, place on 89 Vine, Barbara, writing as 100–10 Rennison, Nick 63, 88, 113 Rhys, Jean 73 Rice, Thomas Jackson 39, 40 Richard and Judy Book Club 114, 144 Richardson, Dorothy 4 Richardson, Samuel 17, 26 Roberts, Michèle 30, 62, 112, 140 Robinson, Marilynne 142 Roe, Sue & Tennant, Emma 115, 118, 124, 125, 127, 129 Roth, Philip 55, 138 Rowe, Anne 40, 42 Rowland, Susan 87, 100, 102, 103, 107 Rowling, J. K. 6, 24, 139 Roy, Arundhati 64 Rubens, Bernice 7 Ruhnken, David 14, 15 Rushdie, Salman 26, 28, 54, 55, 63, 77, 112, 125, 134, 139 Russ, Joanna 113 Russett, Margaret 87, 102, 103, 107 Sadler, Lynn Veach 75 Sage, Lorna 36, 42, 47, 130

Sappho 26–7 Sayers, Dorothy L. 92 Schmid, Susanne 119 Scott, Manda 63, 87 Scott, Paul 28 Scott, Sarah 30 Scott, Walter 17, 21, 139 Sexton, Anne 121 Shaffer, Brian 64 Shakespeare, Nicholas 125 Shakespeare, William 16, 18, 20, 24, 29, 42, 44, 56, 117 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 2 Showalter, Elaine 113 Siebenheller, Norma 89 Simpson, Helen 140 Skinner, John 28, 75 Smiley, Jane 122 Smith, Ali 62, 63, 140 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 18, 23 Smith, Joan 96 Smith, Nancy 63 Smith, Zadie canonicity 11, 37, 63, 134, 139–40 influenced by Iris Murdoch 57 as a novelist 22, 68, 95 Spark, Muriel 4, 6, 37, 43, 47, 55, 112, 137 Spencer, Jane 30 Spender, Dale 30 Spenser, Edmund 16 Stade, George 48, 51 Stetz, Margaret Diane 74 Stevenson, Randall 88, 113 Stevenson, Robert Louis 111 Stoker, Bram 1, 110–11 Stowe, William W. 91, 109 Sutcliff, Rosemary 6 Sutherland, John 31, 88 Swift, Graham 63, 112, 119 Symons, Julian 90 Taylor, D. J. 52 Taylor, Elizabeth 64, 112 Tennant, Emma Carter, Angela, compared to 121 class & background 125 feminism 119–22, 126–9

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Tennant, Emma (Cont’d) Gothic 115–16, 133 intertextuality 117, 119, 122 originality 132 postmodernism 119–20 realism 117 reviews 114 romance/genre 117 sales 114, 116 Scottishness 117–18 style 131–4 works: The Adventures of Robina 123 Alice Fell 114, 123 Autobiography of the Queen 114 The Bad Sister 114–33 passim The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted 129, 132, 133–4 Burnt Diaries 129 Confessions of a Sugar Mummy 114, 130 Elinor and Mariane 116 Emma in Love 116, 129 Felony 114, 116, 122, 123 The French Dancer’s Bastard 116, 118, 120, 123 The Harp Lesson 114, 118, 122 Heathcliff’s Tale 114 Hotel de Dream 114, 129 The House of Hospitalities 123, 125 Pemberley 115, 116–17, 122–3, 129 Queen of Stones 114, 119–29 passim Sisters and Strangers 121 Tess 116–17, 119, 120, 122, 128 Two Women of London 113–20 passim An Unequal Marriage 116 Wild Nights 114, 123, 133 Woman beware Woman 114, 127, 128, 132 Tew, Philip 63, 88, 113 Thorpe, Vanessa 132 Todd, Richard 45, 66, 88 Todorov, Tzvetan 90 Tompkins, Jane 29 Totton, Nick 44

Index Tremain, Rose 140–1 Trollope, Joanna 55, 143 value 18, 56, 115 Vine, Barbara see also Rendell, Ruth Asta’s Book 101, 102, 103 The Blood Doctor 101 The Brimstone Wedding 101, 102, 109 The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy 100, 101, 103, 107 A Dark Adapted Eye 101 A Fatal Inversion 95, 101, 104–6, 109 Gallowglass 109 Grasshopper 101, 109 The House of Stairs 102, 103, 104, 107 King Solomon’s Carpet 88, 106, 110 No Night is too Long 80, 102, 103, 105, 106 Virago Press 4, 30 Virgil 20 von Hallberg, Robert 11 Walker, Alice 7, 37, 113 Walter, Natasha 74–5, 84 Walters, Minette 90 Wandor, Micheline 7, 113 Warner, Alan 117 Warner, Marina 42, 122, 140 Warton, Joseph 16, 19 Watt, Ian 23, 30 Waugh, Evelyn 136 Waugh, Patricia 29, 64, 69, 119–20, 124 Weil, Simone 43 Weldon, Fay 30, 123, 127 Welsh, Irvine 117 Werlock, Abby H. P. 88, 113 Wesley, Marilyn C. 121, 123 West, Rebecca 4 Whipple, Dorothy 4 Whitbread Prize see also Costa Prize 28, 31, 87–8 Wilde, Oscar 19 Williams, Raymond 87 Williams-Wanquet, Eileen 74, 77 Wilson, A. N. 35, 36, 42, 48, 52, 56, 80 Wilson, Angus 24, 112

Index Wilson, Barbara 93 Wilson, Jacqueline 24 Winterson, Jeanette 6, 31, 37, 54, 62, 63, 112, 140 Wolfe, Peter 38

Wood, James 43, 126, 132 Woolf, Virginia 4, 21–2, 26, 31, 107, 123, 138, 144 Woolson, Constance Fenimore 116 Wren, P. C. 23

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