This blog believes that Valentine’s Day should be abolished, so prepare for disappointment if you’re looking for praise of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s sugared bleats.
If you haven’t read it yet, Tessa Hadley’s short story collection, Married Love, is beguiling. Each story presents a stereotype of love, delves into it and turns out a fresh perspective. The book begins with precious student Lottie ruining the family breakfast by announcing her engagement to her hoary tutor — the soon-to-be-septuagenarian, Edgar. We then follow Lottie over 15 years of loveless marriage, sexual diffidence and wasted youth, before reaching the ironic conclusion that it was the woman she supplanted who had made Edgar so attractive in the first place.
Lottie’s idiocy is reminiscent of Dorothea’s bizarre infatuation for Casaubon in Middlemarch, a comparison that might have been inspired by Hadley’s debt to the great Victorian stylists. The precision of her prose is striking, as is her delicate evocation of place. She draws a character with just a few lines of prose, and then allows her setting to colour in the sketch. The stories range from the wilds of Exmoor to the bustle of 1920s Newcastle; from crumbling Suffolk rectories to Brutalist towers in Birmingham; from palatial villas on Surrey Heath to cramped flats in Bloomsbury.
You could read this collection as a social history of modern Britain, told via tales of sex and family. Two stories, especially, fit that analysis. The first charts a doomed adolescent romance between the privileged Shelia and the brilliant but underprivileged Neil. The second sees a socially ambitious man from Newcastle caught between disgust and lust by his supressed passion for an unsuitable local girl. It ends with the narrator observing that the hero thinks he ought to pursue his respectable neighbour but knows he won’t.
Each story is a similarly empathetic study of a common human problem. There are subtle accounts of unfulfilled sexual attraction, of the love between parents and children, of the botched sexual encounter, of the loss of love, and of the fear of losing love. There are soldiers, cleaners, musicians, writers, nomads, students, freaks, actors, dons, businessmen, men of note, and a host of intriguing nobodies. There is more to contemplate here than is found in some three volume novels.
The short story is an underrated form. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of British literary prizes: short story collections are not eligible for any of the major awards. The Costa Prize recently announced that short stories will be recognised next year, but outside the standard competition. This is an oversight and an insult, given that children’s literature (rightly) competes. In the last five years, there have been enthralling collections from: Julian Barnes, Rose Tremain, Kazuo Ishiguro, Helen Simpson and now Tessa Hadley. Those stories challenge the giants of the form: John Updike, William Trevor and Nathan Englander, to name but three. They deserve greater critical appreciation.
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