Tag Archives: Anita Brookner

Spinster Lit:  Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner & Others

Why Do We Love Spinster Lit? 

 Spinsters, let’s face it, are chic and independent. They have cats, belong to writers’ groups, and play Scrabble. They might not have e-mail. On the other hand, they might be addicted to dating sites. And their Little Free Library stocks only Viragos and Booker Prize winners.

In reality, married women also have cats and play Scrabble, but are frequently annoyed by the chaotic state of their Little Free Library. Why do passers-by dump tatty ancient copies of The Exorcist– sorry, that’s not your kind of book, and you remove it -and once there was a used condom. Very gross. If that happens to spinsters, they don’t mention it. 

Little Free Libraries are often stuffed with romance novels, which are said to account for about one-third of book sales, but I maintain that spinster lit has many followers. For one thing, the spinster novels often include a marriage plot, an unexpected/expected twist that enhances the pleasure of reading.

Barbara Pym is the Queen of Spinster Lit. Her brilliant comic novel, No Fond Return of Love, begins at an indexers’ conference. (Query:  Why is that so hilarious?)   Dulcie Mainwaring, a quiet, whimsical woman who has broken off her engagement to a younger man, hopes to make new friends at the conference.  Viola Dace, a bohemian type, dislikes being among the tweedy, but she has a  crush on handsome Alwyn Forbes, one of the speakers. When Aylwyn faints at the podium, Dulcie, Viola, and other women rush to provide succor, but Dulcie has the smelling salts.

Dulcie and Viola become friends, sort of:  they run into each other in the park, walk past Alywin’s house, which is in the neighborhood, and research his family. They go so far as to spend their Easter holiday at the hotel owned by Alwyn’s mother. Love is in the air, and both are suddenly surrounded by men, but who, if anyone, will get Alwyn? 

In Jean Stafford’s neglected classic, The Catherine Wheel, Katharine Congreve is a tougher, more modern type: the American spinster.  She has never married and believes in “the pleasure principle”  but suddenly faces a sexual crisis.  She has had a long affair with John, who married her cousin, Maeve, and even invited her on their honeymoon.  Every summer her nephew and nieces stay with her while John and Maeve travel.  And now John insists that he wants to divorce Maeve and marry Katharine so she can “save him.”  This is not what Katharine had in mind at all when she embarked on an affair. 

The Booker Prize winner Anita Brookner is the Co-Queen of Spinster Lit. Her heroines remind me of Barbara Pym’s, though she lacks Pym’s humor.  In Brookner’s superb novel, Look at Me, the narrator, Fanny, works in the reference library “of a medical research institute dedicated to the study of problems of human behavior.” (A very Pymish job!) Fanny is also a writer who takes notes every night on the eccentric library staff, including her best friend, an irritable colleague, and the cranky regulars. Writing is her way of saying, “Look at me.” But her life takes a sinister turn when she makes a new friend, who proves to be a dangerous, nasty friend.

On the genre side of spinster lit, I love the spinster detectives in mysteries:  Agatha Christie’s amateur sleuth, Miss Marple; Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver ;  Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, a sexier, younger, modern, American P.I.; and Ann Cleeve’s Vera Stanhope, a lonely, beer-drinking, obsessive detective.  I’m not a great mystery reader, so do tell me some of your favorites.

It is the season to curl up with a cozy book, and all except Jean Stafford’s novel fit that category.  So what’s your favorite spinster lit?  Or your least favorite, for that matter?  And why on earth are we drawn to it?

Anita Brookner & The Accidental Emperor: “Elizabeth Finch,” by Julian Barnes

Aficionados of Julian Barnes may have read his new novel,  Elizabeth Finch,  based loosely on the life of the subtle writer, Anita Brookner. (Both are Booker Prize winners.)  I read it in an afternoon,  completely absorbed but astonished.  I had expected an imitation of a Brookner novel, with a spinster heroine, afternoons at The National Gallery,  and unexpected friendships with surprising characters. 


Of course, Julian Barnes does not do the expected thing. This short book, divided into three parts, is part traditional novel, part essay, part biography. The narrator, Neil, a former student of Elizabeth Finch, takes her class “Culture and Civilization” in his thirties.  She warns the class that, though she does not pretend to be Socrates, she may not be the right teacher for all students:  they will engage in dialogue.  She speaks precisely, without notes, in  perfectly formed sentences, recounting the controversial history of Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor (362-363) who tried to save paganism by quashing the Christians.  Julian’s death in battle, in her view,  hastened the end of paganism and the rise of fanatical, book-burning Christianity.  History would have been different had Julian lived.   She gives equal time to the legends of Christian martyrs, among them St. George and St. Ursula.
 
Neil, a twice-divorced actor-turned-vegetable farmer, feels his mind expanding in response to her rigorous interpretations of history.  He idolizes and, indeed, loves EF, as he calls her, and at the end of the semester asks her out to lunch.  The two become lunch companions, but their relationship is never sexual. Barnes writes,

Our lunches continued for nearly twenty years, a still and radiant point in my life….  As she grew older – well, as we both got older -she was beset by the usual ailments and mishaps, of which she always made light.  But to me she was unchanged:  in dress, conversation, appetite (small), smoking (determined).

In an essay by Julian Barnes on Anita Brookner in The Guardian, Brookner seems very much like EF. Well, she is EF.  Barnes writes that he  knew her for thirty years – “not well” – and at their lunches, “Anita, who was always in situ, however early I arrived, greeting me with her usual unsettling opener: ‘So, what have you got for me?’”

Elizabeth is a charming, unknowable friend.  And she clearly loves Neil.  After her death, the novel takes an unexpected turn when Neil inherits her library and papers.  Poring over her short notes, he decides to write an essay on  Julian the Apostate, thinking this would please her.    And I loved this essay, which includes a short biography of Julian and a compendium of literary and political reactions by poets and essayists through the ages.

Neil writes, “Julian was a Roman emperor who never set foot in Rome.  He was an accidental emperor – though accidents led to imperial power more often in those days.  He spent his life as a scholar, far from court, far from military duty.”  

 I like that phrase, “accidental emperor.”


In the last part of the novel, Neil is still obsessed with EF.  He continues his investigation of her life by visiting his former lover, Anna, who had also been EF’s student, to pick her brain. But Anna, who startles him by admitting she was  a close friend of EF, does not give away much information. 

Do we get closer to EF in the process of Neil’s musings and writing?  We certainly get closer to Neil, who is desperate not to lose the memory of EF.  If our mentors had combined the best qualities of the Romantics and the Stoics, we, too, might have considered writing about Julian the Apostate. But then they were not Elizabeth Finch/Anita Brookner.


How I miss Brookner’s novels!