Caroline Moore

There is nothing cosy about Penelope Lively

Though she’s often dismissed as the ‘housewife’s choice’, her selected stories show her as beady, unsentimental and thoroughly modern

Penelope Lively at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2015. [Getty Images] 
issue 04 December 2021

At one time, Penelope Lively was routinely shortchanged by critics. Her protagonists are often middle-class professionals — historians, archeologists, scriptwriters and the like — and her Booker-prizewinning Moon Tiger was notoriously dismissed as the ‘housewife’s choice’. Now, gods, stand up for housewives!

Lively is not a cosy read. The word which keeps coming to mind to describe these stories is ‘beady’ — though I may be influenced by ‘The Purple Swamp Hen’, in which the narrator is a wise old bird in the garden of a household in Pompeii (AD 79).

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