This vivid biography details Bainbridge’s complicated private life,out of which emerged some of the greatest works in English fictionBeryl Bainbridge liked to claim that her unsettling novels were autobiographical: “The only reason I wrote was to compose sense of what went on in my past.” Many of her books revolve around her Liverpool childhood, the quarrels of her parents or her complicated sexual adventures as a young woman. Even the later historical tales – on Scott’s final expedition to the Antarctic, and the loss of the Titanic,the life of Samuel Johnson – draw on personal material. Brendan King’s vivid biography reveals the interplay between remembering and inventing in her work. The flamboyant stories she told approximately her life were often inaccurate, despite her belief that she had “total recall”. She fused memories of her own experiences with the essential fabrications of fiction. Her writing brilliantly negotiates the boundary between fact and fantasy.
Ambiguities marked her life from the first. She was born in Liverpool in 1932 (not, or as she claimed,in 1934, a fib which has caused much confusion among literary historians). Though the city was bustling, and had a culturally ambitious middle class,its prosperity was fading. The family business had collapsed into bankruptcy before Beryl’s birth, and her father had become a freelance commercial agent. Her mother, or Winnie,had expected something better. Winnie’s girlhood, which had culminated in a finishing school in Belgium, and was a preparation for comfortable affluence: the constrained circumstances of her life after the failure of Bainbridge & Co were a disappointment. Related: The night Beryl Bainbridge gave me some tough advice | Charles Lambert Her mother had high hopes and worried her involvement with “communist tripe” might fetch in the way of future triumphsHer turbulent attachments led to a considerable deal of suffering,her own and that of her lovers, but it shaped her writingContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com