THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Rhys, Pym had to wait until the end of her life for real literary success. Her first novels, Some Tame Gazelle (1950),
Excellent Women (1952), Jane and Prudence (1953), and Less than Angels (1955), culminated with A Glass of
Blessings (1958). All proclaim the virtues of restraint, good behaviour, and feminine resilience, but A Glass of
Blessings is particularly effective in its representation of the shortcomings of disingenuousness and of the lack of
scope of women of a certain generation. The novel’s comedy depends upon the misapprehensions and the
conventional pieties of its slightly bored, fondly imaginative, dully married narrator. Pym’s fiction is generally set in a
small world of middle-class families and middle-aged spinsters, a world shaped by its topography of shops, tea-rooms,
and Anglo-Catholic churches and ordered by rituals of sherry and gossip. Publishers of the 1960s, working under the
assumption that readers would prefer accounts of up-market philandering in Hampstead, down-market adultery in
Huddersfield, and downright fornication in Cumbria to Pym’s sharp delineations of suburban gentility, rejected her
subsequent submissions. The situation changed in 1977, largely thanks to Larkin’s determined advocacy. The revival
of her fortunes as a writer was marked by the appearance of two new novels, by the reprinting of her work of the
1950s, and, posthumously, by the publication of fiction she herself had set aside or abandoned. The finest of her later
novels, Quartet in Autumn (1978), departs slightly from her established social patterns but not from the delicate
representation of obscure lives in which she excelled. The ‘quartet’ of the title, two men and two women who work
together in a London office, is observed as it divides, briefly celebrates, and privately decays. The novel’s last
sentence, with its reference to a life that ‘still held infinite possibilities for change’, has an irony which does not
smother its pathos.
Angela Carter’s fiction presents its readers with a world of magic and theatre in which there is an infinite
possibility for change. Her’s is an extravagance just held in check by the splendid artifice of her prose. Carter (1940-
92) reinvented the fairy-tale for a knowing adult public, infusing her narratives with macabre fantasy and erotic
comedy. Although she could scarcely be described as a pornographer herself, she recognized in her deft and
suggestive essay, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), that pornographic fantasy too would
have its legitimate place in literature once it could be moulded to the service of women and once women had ceased to
be considered as mere commodities. Carter is rarely a polemical writer, but as her novel The Passion of New Eve
(1977) and her two volumes of Gothic stories, Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979), suggest, she can
startle by the very vividness of her
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renegotiations of the elements that have shaped traditional accounts of male-female relationships. When she describes
the central (male) character in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman as being divided between ‘a barren
yet harmonious calm and a fertile yet cacophonous tempest’ and between ‘the drab colourless world’ and ‘the fragile
marginalia of our dreams’, she suggests something of her own narrative attraction to the sonorities and colours of the
margins of the imagination. This is particularly evident in her two major theatrical novels, Nights at the Circus
(1984) and Wise Children (1991), both of them set in the golden age of escapist entertainment, the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Fevvers, the cockney bird-woman of Nights at the Circus, has been hatched, like the
offspring of Leda and Jove, from an egg; at the age of puberty she has also, miraculously, sprouted wings (‘as my
titties swelled before, so these feathered appendages of mine swelled behind’). After a foster-childhood spent in a
Whitechapel brothel, Fevvers becomes a star of the London music-hall and the imperial circus in St Petersburg; she
survives an attempt at seduction by a Russian Grand Duke (‘his voice glutinous with tumescence’), and she ends
married to an American journalist in the wastes of Siberia where she, literally, has the last laugh when her new
husband discovers that she is not ‘the only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world’. Carter’s last novel, Wise
Children, dwells on the glossy careers of theatrical twins, both dancers, and the illegitimate offspring of an eminent
Shakespearian actor, a pillar of the ‘legitimate’ theatre. The narrative is in part an autobiographical quest to justify
this Shakespearian descent, in part an exploration of sisterhood and interchangeable identity. It is also a tour de force
of ventriloquism. Carter’s narrating twin is chatty, digressive, and theatrically camp, but her voice also creates and
subverts. She forges links between ‘theatre’ and ‘literature’ and she threatens to undermine neat gender definitions.
‘It’s every woman’s tragedy’, says one middle-aged twin to the other as they make up for a party, ‘that after a certain
age, she looks like a female impersonator’. ‘What’s every man’s tragedy then?’ asks the other. ‘That he doesn’t,
Oscar’, comes the pat post-Wildean reply. Carter was no man’s fool. Nor was she any woman’s.
In comparison to the work of their women contemporaries, the novels of John Fowles (b. 1926) and Anthony
Burgess (b. 1917) can seem strained, contrived, and forced. Fowles’s The Collector (1963) is a post-Freudian fantasy,
a first-person narrative supposedly written by a repressed, butterfly-collecting clerk who, having won the football
pools, kidnaps (or collects) the sophisticated art-student whom he has admired from a distance. Fowles has continued
to be fascinated by repression and by what he tends to see as its happy antithesis, the release of sexual energy which
can be equated with personal liberation. In Mantissa (1982), this espousal of the cause of psychic and sexual
liberation wastes itself in an explosive, self indulgent erotic fantasy; in The Magus (1966, revised 1977), it is