Dinah Birch

Edith Wharton’s reputation is finally disentangling itself from the long, fastidious shadow of Henry James. Only film and television could make the case in the public mind that Wharton is more than an imitative appendage of James. Scorsese’s intense version of The Age of Innocence found admirers, and the capering flounces of last year’s televised Buccaneers, with bosoms hardly out-swollen by the subsequent inflation of Pride and Prejudice, found many more. In Wharton’s case, displays of exuberant costume and calculated gloss make some sense. She understands the exhilaration of ‘swaying pyramids of pasteboard’ emerging from a Parisian milliner, and knows that the ‘long unerring lines’ of sophisticated dresses are to be taken seriously. Great clothes could be akin to great art in Wharton’s mind. This is one of the reasons for later habits of condescension towards her work. To sensibilities formed by Modernism, her frank preoccupation with wealth seemed crude and dated. Wharton insisted that grace, particularly women’s grace, was the product of money, and this made her an object of distaste to those who wanted to see culture and beauty as distinct from the polluted energies of capitalism. The celebrated stories of ‘Old New York’ represented what persisted of her fame: they were seen as period pieces, curious relics of a lost world.

One of the most convincing inclusions in Granta’s list of the 20 best young British novelists, A.L. Kennedy has composed a distinctive voice out of youth and national identity. She was born in Dundee, and now lives in Glasgow; Scottishness informs her fiction. This is partly a matter of a characteristic introspection, the tradition of spiritual autobiography that generated the novel in the first place and has never, in the hard climate of Scotland, quite lost its original impetus:

Women of my age, born in the early Fifties and now in our forties, have reached the season of retrospection. We have become – or have not become – wives, wage-earners, mothers, home-makers, gardeners or taxpayers. Our place in post-war history, formed by a procession of notions (often experimental, often contradictory) of what success is for women, has settled into a pattern that can be discerned and appraised. We can begin to compare our lives with those of our mothers. Hilary Mantel, born in 1952, has tried out a number of female identities – more than most of us – and succeeded more than most. She has trained as a lawyer and given it up, she has been a social worker and a teacher, she has earned a living in the Middle East and in Africa. She has also been several kinds of good writer – a film critic, a travel writer and a prolific novelist. Her fiction has continually tested different formats. Black comedy, supernatural fantasy, political satire and social realism move in and out of her books. A Place of Greater Safety (1992), a brave and solidly researched novel on the French Revolution, was a surprise. Perhaps it ought not to have been, for the Revolution, the biggest experiment in European history, must have been a magnetic subject. These diverse novels all survey the provisional. Mantel is unremittingly concerned with the multiple models available for a good life, the choices that might be within reach, worth a try, or even, conditionally, best.

It must be many years since any girl spoke of going into service. The language of labour has changed. Farm workers are now described as full-time agricultural technicians; kitchen maids have turned into catering assistants. Thinking about what service was like, and how it was represented in language and literature, is a way of thinking about deep transformations in our culture. Servants are survivors from a pre-industrial world of mutual dependency and obligation. But they are also the focus of difficult transitions, as social mobility and new wage-based economies invade the older social frameworks of the large household. Conceding too much in an oddly self-abasing conclusion to his expansive account of literary servants, Bruce Robbins declares himself ‘ready to grant that I have not been talking about what is necessarily most complex, sophisticated, profound or even interesting in the English novel’. Do not believe him. The relations he perceives between servants and those they serve are dense with complexity and sophistication. The fictional traditions of the servant are rooted in drama, where the slave, clown or servant is often a crucial intermediary between play and audience. Theatrical servants, from Plautus onwards, know that what they are engaged with is only a play, and they can be trusted to deflate the dignified pretensions of their masters. Preoccupied, like the audience, with making a living in a difficult world, they are more interested in survival than in tragic fate – though they can touch or even cause tragedy if they attempt to interpret their lives in terms borrowed from their employers, as Malvolio or Iago exceptionally do. By and large, however, their business is with the comic persistence of life.’

Do women want equality? To the militant suffragettes campaigning before August 1914, the answer was self-evident. They wanted equality badly, and were ready to do battle for it. The aggressive action which backed their polemical crusade was designed to demonstrate possession of virtues previously considered to be essentially masculine: the capacity for public action and rational argument, physical courage, a ruthless drive for justice. But the outbreak of what Christabel Pankhurst called ‘the other war’ changed all that. The long nightmare of the trenches meant that neither men nor women could see themselves in the same way. Images of gender fragmented into new and contradictory patterns that shadowed British feminism for decades after the Armistice.