Penelope Lively: Bio Facts & Quotes
Bio
Born: Cairo, Egypt, March 17, 1933
Education: Read
Modern History at St. Anne’s College, Oxford
Languages: English
Nationality: British
Genre: Novel;
Children’s Novel
First Published: 1970, Astercote
Societies: Royal
Society of Literature; PEN; Society of Authors
Awards: Carnegie Medal, The Ghost of Thomas
Kempe,1973; Whitbread Award, A Stitch
in Time, 1976; Booker Prize, Moon
Tiger, 1987
Recognition: OBE,
CBE, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Avocation: Historian
Beginnings
Book Title: How
It All Began
Storyline: “A change of plan”
Chapters 1-3:
How It All Began, Penguin Books, 2011
Charlotte Rainsford––Retired Head of English
at a prestigious North London girls’ school
“Expert hands: lifting, bundling. In the
ambulance, she is on her side, in some sort of rigid tube. She hurts. Where is
hurt? Don’t know. Anywhere. May as well try to sleep for a bit.” (p. 1)
Charlotte
“She thought about the mugger. Her mugger.
This faceless person with whom she has been in transitory, intimate
relationship. Him. Or possibly her. Women muggers now, no doubt; this is the
age of equal opportunities. Person who was here one moment, gone the next. With
my bag. And my packet of Kleenex and my Rennies and my comb and my bus pass and
my rail card and three twenties I think and some change and the Barclaycard.
And my keys.” (p. 5)
Rose––-Charlotte’s daughter, Secretary to
Lord Henry Peters
“Rose had had to call Henry from the hospital
to say that she would not be back that day. He did remember to inquire after
her mother, when she arrived the next morning…… She explained that it was
possible she would not be able to accompany him to Manchester.” (p. 6)
Marion Clark:–– Henry’s niece, Interior
Decorator
“Marion is doing money at the desk in her
office next to the showroom; she is also awaiting a call from her lover, and
remembering that she has a client due in half an hour…… Her mind is flicking
also to Henry, and this tiresome matter of the Manchester trip next week, when
she really cannot spare the time.” (p. 9)
Jeremy Dalton––Marion’s lover, Stella’s
husband, Antiquarian
“The Daltons’ marriage broke up because
Charlotte Rainsford was mugged. They did not know Charlotte, and never would;
she would sit on the perimeter of their lives, a fateful presence.
The mobile phone was the smoking gun –
Jeremy’s mobile phone.” (p. 14)
Lord Henry Peters, Retired Historian–––Rose’s
employer
“All the same, it was tiresome not to feel
that he had the ballast of his old outline of this lecture; Rose would have
seen to it, too bad she had had to let him down, good of Marion to come but so
far her performance fell short. Henry made a few more notes, irritated now, and
then sat back to stare at the passing scenery, and doze again.” (p. 18)
Marion
“Marion, meanwhile, was doing rather better.
She had engaged at once with the man to her right, who introduced himself as,
“George Harrington–a pleasure to meet you… “ He had a certain charm, but not
too much – Marion was well aware that charm can be both self-serving and
deceptive.” (p. 19)
George Harrington, Financier––guest at
Henry’s Manchester talk
“George Harrington beamed. “This is most
exciting. What very good luck that Manchester brought us together in this way.”
“It’s only by chance that I’m here,” said
Marion. “My uncle’s secretary’s mother… Oh, we needn’t go into that.” She too
was smiling. Cards were exchanged. The lunch drew to a
close.” (p. 20)
Lord Henry Peters, Retired History Professor
“Henry began to speak. And as he did so he
realized with horror that he could not remember the names of the late
eighteenth-century prime ministers. The Elder and the Younger. Elder and Younger
what? Name. The name? He spoke; he avoided, he danced away from the
crucial word, he sounded odder and odder, he skirted, he fluffed, he knew that
it was becoming obvious. And then at last the name surfaced: Pitt, Pitt, Pitt.
He flung it out, triumphant, but too late: the puzzled faces before him told
him that.” (pp. 21-22)
Jeremy Dalton––husband of Stella, lover of
Marion
“Jeremy was not accustomed to adultery. He
had done it a few times before, but these had been transitory matters. Now, he
was branded, condemned, sentenced, and all because of a change of plans and a
message. So … so fortuitous. So unfair, in a way. The situation as it was – had
been – really wasn’t hurting Stella.” (p. 24)
Jeremy and Stella Dalton
“Twenty years ago. Since when both Jeremy and
Stella have discovered her propensity to collapse. Disaster is not necessary;
Stella can go into meltdown for no very evident reason. … So Stella’s present
state is Jeremy’s fault entirely. He acknowledges this, with a few wry thoughts
about that betraying mobile. Offstage, Charlotte Rainsford, catalyst, is
settling into her room at Rose’s house and, elsewhere, a juvenile delinquent is
going about his (or her) business.” (p. 29)
Charlotte, Rose, Gerry (Rose’s husband),
Henry, Stella, Jeremy, Marion
“It was on the fourteenth of April that
Charlotte Rainsford was mugged. Seven lives have been derailed – nine if we
include the Dalton girls, who do not yet realize that their parents are on the
brink of separation. Charlotte, Rose and Gerry are thrust into unaccustomed
proximity; Charlotte is frustrated and restless. Henry Peters – his lordship –
has been chagrined and humiliated and is desperate to reestablish himself.
Stella Dalton is taking five different kinds of medication, phoning her sister
twice daily, and instructing a solicitor. Jeremy Dalton is writing placatory
letters to Stella, nervously inspecting his accounts, and trying to sell an
eighteenth-century overmantel for an exorbitant sum. Marion Clark is soothing
Jeremy while wondering if in fact this relationship is really going anywhere;
she is meeting George Harrington for lunch next week – a potential business
partner looks suddenly more interesting than a romantic fling. She too has been
preoccupied by her accounts.
Thus have various lives collided, the human
version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes
is miles away now, impervious, offstage, enjoying a fry-up at the next
services. Just as our mugger does not come into this story, not now, anyway – job
done, damage complete, he (or she) is now superfluous.” (p. 44)
Three Novels
First Lines
“I’m writing
a history of the world,” she says. And
the hands of the nurse are arrested for the moment; she looks down at this old
woman, this old, ill woman. “Well, my goodness,” the nurse says. “That’s quite
a thing to be doing, isn’t it?” And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and
tucks and smooths–“Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl–then we’ll get you a cup
of tea.”
Moon Tiger, 1987
“The fifth
Brandenburg. Somewhere, some place, every moment, an orchestra is playing the
fifth Brandenburg concerto. Violins are tucked under chins, bows rise and fall;
in recording studios and concert rooms, and here in the dining-hall of a
Cambridge college where a hundred and fifty people are gathered together for no
reason except circumstance which is perhaps the reason for everything. They are
together for one hour fifty minutes and for the most part will never see one
another again.
Some, of course, will.”
Perfect Happiness, 1983
“The coffin
stuck fast at the angle of the garden path and the gateway out into the road.
The undertaker’s men shunted to and fro, their hats knocked askew by low
branches, their topcoats showered with raindrops from the hedge. The mourners
halted around the front door and waited in silence. Birds sang effusively. At
last the men managed to pivot the coffin on the gatepost and proceeded to the
waiting hearse. The coffin was loaded. The mourners straggled out onto the road
and hesitated, unwilling to commit themselves to the attendant limousines.”
Passing
On, 1989
Penelope
Lively’s Cosmic Comedy of Errors:
How It All Began
Theme:
Happenstance
“It’s only by chance that I’m here,” said
Marion. “My uncle’s secretary’s mother… Oh, we needn’t go into that.” She too
was smiling.” (p. 20)
“At the same time, she was thinking of George
Harrington, with a certain complacency. This might turn out to have been a
rather fortunate encounter; at best, a solution to her declining revenue.” (p.
23)
“It was on the fourteenth of April that
Charlotte Rainsford was mugged. Seven lives have been derailed.” (p. 44)
“Marion held her cup out to Mark “Thank you,
I’d love some more tea. Oh yes––Rose. I thought she sounded a bit distracted
when I rang. How is her mother, by the way?”
“Her mother?” Henry looked perplexed. “Oh, the mother. Yes, there was
some accident, wasn’t there?” (p. 210)
How It All Began, 2012
Theme:
Place and History
“London is said to be an agglomeration of
villages; not at all. London is a vast entity within which people move around,
each upon their own exclusive level, ignoring all that is unknown and
irrelevant. In the buses, Henry is sometimes aware that there do not seem to be
many others like him––elderly white male wearing suit and tie, with raincoat
over arm, and that the bus speaks in tongues, most of them unfamiliar to
him…….From time to time, Henry stares at his fellow travelers on the bus and
feels disoriented. What had gone on here? The society of his youth was a
familiar territory; you knew where you were with it, and moreover it related to
history: he saw also from whence it sprang, he saw its origins in the
nineteenth century, and in his own personal patch the eighteenth. Behind and
beyond it lay the long, slow metamorphosis of this country. In the mind’s eye,
the centuries were laid out, heading toward today, with significant
developments flagged up: Civil War, Reform Act, universal suffrage. But none of
that could have been seen to lead to this.”
“The eighteenth century had
moved on, leaving him behind. History is a slippery business; the past is not a
constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.”
How It All Began, (pp. 28-29; p. 30)
Theme:
Reading
“Forever,
reading had been the central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life
had been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction,
sustenance, to pass time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence,
reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even.” (p. 34)
“Charlotte found that her reading had
undergone a seismic shift. She read now purely for distraction……She was not
bolstered by books in the way she always had been; they were no longer that
essential solace, retreat, support system.”
(pp. 114-115)
Charlotte
starts Anton out reading children’s literature.
Anton’s Reading List
Where the Wild Things Are
How Tom Beat Captain Najork
Charlotte’s’ Web
The Finn Family Moomintroll
Demon Lover
Pride and Prejudice
A New Kind of Comedy
Penelope Lively
has created a new kind of comic cosmos. Lively, in her novels of comic realism, has inaugurated a world of contemporary
sensibility, one in which the distancing
factor of irony is just as suggestive, the author’s wit as astute, as in classic
comedy; but the prejudgment of human folly has been mitigated, has been transformed by the
understanding of the author. Judgment, held in abeyance as explicit
dictum, is still part of the scenic detail, character development, and thematic
juxtapositions of this contemporary world.
Laughter abounds in this new comic world. There is all the
fun of seeing the fall of the mighty (or at least the chastening of vanity),
and the more intelligent fun of predicting another round of mistakes, or maybe
a gentle learning curve, on the part of a certain character. There is plenty of
that kind of fun, and best of all, there is the sheer delight of entering a
world fashioned by a genius of comic realism.
A contemporary author
of comic novels in English, Penelope Lively writes in the tradition of masters
of comedy Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens. Shakespeare’s comedies make
brilliant use of the conventions of the comic plot, with its reversals and
reconciliations, and, for the most part, Shakespeare’s comic protagonists learn
and change. Jane Austen peoples her novels with comic types, to be sure, but it
is Austen’s affection and irony towards her characters, comical or not––and her
readiness to judge them, that makes her world so delightful and absorbing.
Charles Dickens created comedy out of hyperbole, and constructed an
often-fantastic world providing comic relief amidst the grim landscape of 19th
century social change.
Penelope Lively’s comic novels are, like the comedies of Shakespeare, intricately plotted. Just
as Shakespeare culled comic plots from Plautus and improved upon them, so
Penelope Lively has devised the action of her comic novels based upon classic
patterns of comedy.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, one finds that there is, in
certain ways, more of an affinity between Penelope Lively and Shakespeare than
between Lively and her realist forebears. As Shakespeare, in The Comedy of Errors, keeps track of
each character’s point of view amidst the many complications[i],
so Lively holds the several threads of How
It All Began, her comedy of happenstance, while realizing the individual
responses to randomness of each character in her cast. This affinity goes
beyond skill, however.
As Shakespeare scholar C.L. Barber notes, “Shakespeare’s
sense of comedy as a moment in a larger cycle” leads him, in The Comedy of Errors, to use the themes
of old age and the threat of death to place in relief the conventional happy
ending of the couples’ reunion.[ii]
That larger cycle is missing in most novels of comic realism. When Jane Austen
draws one of her brilliantly plotted novels to a close, it is as though that 18th
century world, so complete in itself, has been temporarily put to rest. No
other, larger world beyond it beckons. Likewise, the self-sufficiency of the
illusion of Dickens’ quirky world convinces us of its reality. The worlds of
Austen and Dickens and most others writing in the tradition of comic realism
are mimetic worlds understood and explained psychologically and socially. Their
authors do not understand these representations of reality in terms of
philosophy or cosmology.
Penelope Lively situates the plot of her exquisitely crafted
novel How It All Began within a
larger cycle: the lifecycle. Like a playwright, she pairs off (or re-pairs)
most of the key characters who are in their prime by story’s end, leaving
Charlotte and Henry, the two key characters of the older generation, to deal on
their own with aging and the end of life. Henry winds down like a failing
mechanism. At work on his memoirs, “Henry wrote, and wrote, and time went by
until he wrote rather less, and took to reading and rereading, in a desultory
way, and eventually ceased to do even that.” The more self-reflective Charlotte
marvels at the “new-minted” baby next door, seeing herself, by contrast, as
“time visible.” Lively adds that Charlotte’s story will end, “But not for
awhile, she thinks, not for awhile.”
Beyond the larger cycle of life and death, Lively situates
the events of her comedy within a universe whose laws include the perpetuation
of randomness through chaos. Happenstance sets this story in motion with Charlotte’s
mugging, and soon “Seven lives have been derailed.” Happenstance, like the
perpetuation of errors in Shakespeare’s play, will complicate the action of the
novel; but while the human error of Renaissance comedy can be resolved, its
mischief ended, the ripple effect of
chaos continues to the end of Lively's contemporary story and beyond: “These stories do
not end but they spin away from one another, each on its own course.”
Although a comic scene in a Penelope Lively novel is more
likely to take place in a restaurant than in a drawing room, Lively’s writing
has been described as classic comedy of manners, and here one immediately
thinks of Jane Austen. A very modern
kind of comedy of manners Lively’s would be, however: a sly comedy, in which
the author’s ironic commentary is at times merely implicit, located in the
lacunae between one scene and the next.
Thus in How It All
Began, the transition from a scene in which Jeremy Dalton wakes up to the
prospect of financial ruin as the penalty for his infidelity, to a scene in
which his lover, Marion, plans a financial coup, proceeds from the close of
Jeremy’s scene:
“Divorce would be ruin…He might as well jack in the
business, and set up as a house clearance firm with a van and a sleazy flat
over a garage.”
To the opening of Marion’s scene:
“Marion’s lunch with George Harrington took place at a
restaurant she knew to be pretty swank.”
Where comedy of manners exemplar Jane Austen informs the reader of her opinions–––both aesthetic and
moral–––regarding characters’ behavior, Penelope Lively might use, as above,
transitions from one scene to the next to state ironic juxtapositions––leaving it up to the reader to draw conclusions.
It is not only the reader who is given more freedom by the
new comedy.
Penelope Lively’s characters are considerably more
autonomous than those of Austen, writing in the 18th century. If Austen’s Emma
deserves a scolding from Mr. Knightley for mocking Miss Bates at Box Hill, that
is nothing compared to the disapprobation that Austen’s heroine directs towards
herself later in the novel. That disapprobation is formulated explicitly in
Austen’s authoritative prose. There is nothing like this iteration of authorial
judgment in all of Penelope Lively:
With
insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody’s
feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny.
She was proved to have been universally mistaken: and she had not quite done
nothing, for she had done mischief.
Emma, Penguin 1966, p 402
On the whole, Penelope Lively avoids the language of
judgment, even though the moral dimensions of many situations she
describes––from the neglect of the child Martin in Judgment Day to the socially damaging insider trading unleashed in How It All Began–– surpass the imbroglios of which Jane Austen’s
Emma is culpable.
For all that we
can readily distinguish, in Austen, between characters capable of
development, like
Emma and Knightley, and flat, comic characters like Miss
Bates, Austen’s comic world is not neatly
divided into many-faceted characters
on the one side,
and one-dimensional characters on the other. Such a division is
more typical of
Dickens’ comic world, peopled as it is by heroes and heroines,
by villains, and by grotesques whose tics and
manias have their literary antecedents
in comic types
suffering from an imbalance in the four Humors.
Where Dickens’
comic characters loom larger than life, Penelope Lively’s both imitate life and
understate it. Small fry, leading humdrum, even insignificant lives, Lively’s
characters attain a larger stature, and sometimes a quirky grandeur, within the
bounds of the worlds they seamlessly inhabit.
Dickens’ comic types frequently dominate the narrative, much
like Big Top clowns cavorting and sprawling across a stage. Penelope Lively’s
men and women are nothing like circus performers. Rather, they become fodder
for the author’s irony in the course of painfully making life’s big and little
mistakes. In this they sometimes resemble novice stand-up comedians whose jokes
don’t quite come off––at other times merry pranksters who get caught by the
local cops.
There are no grotesques in Penelope Lively’s comic universe,
no wicked Uriah Heeps of startlingly odd physical appearance; no hypocritical
Pumblechooks; no Micawbers whose one-liners (‘something will turn up’) tag them
as characters with a degree of fixity at their core; no figures like the Aged Parent, whose comic identity
is tied to the exaggeration of a tic. Thus, in Great Expectations, the Aged’s son Wemmick and guest Pip perform
exaggerated, almost slapstick capers around the Aged P., nodding vigorously to
perpetuate the pretense of a conversation between themselves and the old man,
who is completely deaf.
Lively’s wicked characters have no physical traits that give
them away. Her hypocrites, like Mark in How
It All Began, may be fixed essences, but rendered with psychological
realism, they can stay under the radar while partaking of a dynamic with
self-reflective characters who can and do evolve.
From our 21st century vantage point, we can
perhaps best see Penelope Lively’s new comedy by way of contrast both to the
world of Dickens and to the world of Austen. Lively’s comic universe contains a
varied cast of characters whose traits are distributed variously for each
character: round or flat, eccentric or normal, comically rendered or
realistically portrayed.
Lively’s characters are more fortuitously comical––as though
seen from the perspective of a laughing cosmic deity who knows all the play of
chance–– than the characters of Austen or Dickens, neither of whom contemplated
chaos theory. Lively’s characters may not be as fixed as grotesques or snobbish
matrons, but they are comically ‘built to last’––with eccentricities buffered
by great rolls of metaphorical baby fat: the insulation of inexperience. Thus
Henry, for all his insufferable vanity, once embarked on an adventure in
television, becomes a babe in the woods. Having watched him fall so
precipitously before, we feel a sneaking sympathy for his lordship. Whatever
happened to judgment?
Judgment in Penelope Lively’s world, the author’s judgment
and the reader’s, has been translated into a new language. We laugh. And
laughter purges. But our laughter doesn’t remain a visceral experience. We are
not at the carnival. We are not in thrall to a Dickensian view of human nature,
needing exorcism.
We read on, observing with amusement. Our amusement doesn’t
stay merely cerebral though. We are not in an eighteenth century parlor. We are
not limited to the observation of human folly, to the evidence of the five
senses.
Nor does this new theater tell only of lovers reshuffled and
sorted by comedy, their progression towards happiness as predictable as an
infant’s stages of development.
We no longer laugh the laughter of the 20th
century: the laughter of the hollow men.
We are in the society and the geography of the 21st
century, are in Newton’s universe and in the quantum universe of random
perturbations. The quantum universe is strange to us, but we know its
entanglements to be real.
Knowing what we know (what we think we know)–––of history,
of the singularity, of the remote past and of the far future––we laugh our
human laugh, the laughter of the present.
Reading the new comic novel, we laugh with our heads thrown
back, we laugh with our shoulders and bellies, and then again silently, with
just the hint of a smile. We observe with our eyes wide open, then look
inwardly with eyes fast shut. We ponder a thing with our minds and feel it once
again with our hearts. All this time, this reading time, we are guided by
something better than reason. Better even than sanity. We are guided by the
lighthearted––dare I say lively?––wisdom of the author.
Key Quotation
[There is] an inherent ambiguity around the idea of meaning and coherence in story,
which is trying to impose order on life as lived, where order there is not. I
think the storyteller is not so much trying to create an ideal, as play around
with “what if,” propose outcomes that may seem to have coherence, or to be
inevitable. Perhaps story is some kind of distorted mirror image of life. But
in the last resort I think it is an expression of a basic human drive—we have
always told stories, not necessarily to supply meanings, but just because
humankind seems to need them.”
***Penelope Lively, Interview, Penguin Reading Guide
Word in Context: Agglomeration
“London is said to be an agglomeration of villages. Not at all.” (How It All Began, p. 28)
Agglomeration: noun: a jumbled
collection or mass.
Writing the Rhythms of Speech
“Anton said, “Before I came to this country, I was in a
very bad time. I think you know. My wife––who go. No job. And I thought––I can
do nothing, or I can do something. So I do something––I decide to come here. Choosing––choice. We talk about that once,
with your mother, remember?”
(How It All Began, p. 222)
Narrative Structure: Plans, Chance, Serendipity, Mischance
(and
underlying it all, teleological storytelling)
COMEDIC STORY: Forays,
Reversals, (Re)conciliations: Timespan: from the day Charlotte is mugged to the
day she returns home
· COMEDIC STORY: Features Henry, Marion, Jeremy and
Stella most prominently
· Cameos: George Harrington, Delia Canning, Mark, Peter
Newsome
· Comedic story: Foray: Henry’s trip to Manchester
· Comedic story: Reversal: Henry’s speech a disaster
· MAIN COMEDIC STORY: Henry tries to restore his
reputation
· SECONDARY COMEDIC STORY: Jeremy, Marion, and Stella
· TERTIARY COMEDIC STORY: Marion and George Harrington
· Foray: Jeremy tries to restore his marriage
· Reversals: Jeremy meets with obstacles: Stella’s
sister, Peter Newsome
· Foray: Marion redecorates a flat for George
Harrington.
· Reversal: George Harrington goes missing; Marion not
paid
COMEDIC STORY: Separate, intertwining
storylines for Henry, Jeremy, and Marion
· CORE STORY: BILDUNGSROMAN:
from (relative) Innocence to Experience
· Features characters capable of learning from
experience: Charlotte (reflective; voice closest to author’s); Rose: learns
through observation, reaching out to others, love; Anton: learns through openness
to new experience, tutorials with Charlotte, reading, love, and personal
transformation.
· Charlotte learns through the changes brought about by
her mugging: living with Rose, teaching Anton, talking with Gerry.
· Rose learns through changes brought about by her
mother’s mugging: changes in Henry, the presence of Charlotte in her home, and
through her relationship to Anton.
· Anton learns through living and working in a new
country, his tutoring by Charlotte, his walks around London with Rose, and his
relationship with Rose.
· Because of its emphasis on learning from experience,,
the core story (or story of the ‘straight’ characters) is teleological: it
moves in a definite direction: from (relative) innocence to experience. Thus
the ‘purposefulness’ of the core story contrasts with the shape and thematics
of the comedic story, which occurs, and has its momentum maintained by,
happenstance.
Comic
Characters in How It All Began
Henry
[As seen by television
executive Delia Canning]
“Unbelievable.
You don’t come across people like this today, at least she didn’t. She eyed
him. A certain awful appeal, there was no getting away from it……
Almost a parody. You’d have to have him
wearing a waistcoat and watch-chain, and that suit, or something similar.” (p. 101)
Jeremy
“Jeremy…is
someone whose occupation is the acquisition and disposition of a superior form
of junk––reclamation, after all, is just that--–who spent most of his time
scouring the landscape for antique doors, wash basins, chimney pots, old
brewery signs…Jeremy did not see his wares as superior junk or himself as a
serendipitous junk hunter. Of course not. He saw himself as a connoisseur, as a
skilled investigator”. (p. 25)
Mark
“Mark had, of course, an eerie affinity with
Henry himself, and would have been offended to be told that, like Henry, he
recognized determined application to an area of scholarship as the route to
distinction: make yourself the ultimate authority on something and you were
away. It didn’t terribly matter what….He was thinking of taking over the
Scottish Enlightenment entirely, flood the market with articles, then a book
(beef up his thesis, so not too much extra work).elbow out the competition by
hinting they were all superannuated hacks. This would take time……” (p. 164)
“And thus was the arrangement born. Mark had
done a quick investigation of the shelves and reckoned that he could get this
stuff sorted within a few weeks, couple of months max, if he went hard at it.
But he would not go hard at it. This would be an
on-going process, a lengthy, time-consuming
process which would fund Mark’s own, concurrent work. He could fiddle about
with Henry’s papers, in a leisurely way, for part of the day, and get on with
the Scottish Enlightenment during the rest.”
(p. 165)
Straight
Characters
Charlotte
“Charlotte views her younger selves with a
certain detachment. They are not herself, but other incarnations, innocents
going about half-forgotten business. One is not nostalgic about them––dear me,
no. Though occasionally a trifle envious: physically spry, pretty sharp
teacher, though I say it myself, all my lot got As at A level, no question.
And
further back yet, young Charlotte. Gracious, but look at her, stepping out with
men, marrying, pushing a pram.” (pp.
7-8)
Rose
“And Rose knows that dictionaries will never
be the same again. Dictionaries will be forever imbued, sanctified,
significant, suggestive. They will not be just themselves, but this moment,
these moments, being here, like this, in this place, her and him, in this now.
She will always have this now, tethered to Collins and Chambers and the Shorter
Oxford.” (p. 168)
Anton
“In Glass, they studied an engraved Victorian
goblet, and Anton thought fleetingly of his wife, who had been irrelevant for a
long while now. She hung there for a moment, a reminder of lost emotion. I had
forgotten how to feel, he thought. And now I am feeling what I must not feel.” (p. 192)
Hybrid
Characters
Marion
Though part of a comic subplot, Marion is a
many-sided character who is capable of
self-knowledge.
Marion has lunch with George Harringtons
“He is an architect of the recession….strictly speaking one
should not be breaking bread with him. In fact George Harrington should not be
breaking bread himself, let alone Brittany scallops with a bean, shallot and
parmesan cream sauce or tian of smoked chicken with wasabi mayonnaise and
pancetta crisps, but here he is, in a suit that Marion’s shrewd eye knows to be
the best, evidently in good spirits, and with the maître d’ bowing and scraping”.
(p. 52)
ENDING &
POSTSCRIPT
“So that was the story. These have been the
stories of Charlotte, of Rose and Gerry, of Anton, of Jeremy and Stella, of
Marion, of Henry, Mark, of all of them. The stories so capriciously triggered because
something happened to Charlotte on the street one day. But of course this is
not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device; we
like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But
time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory
does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on and on. These stories do
not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course.” (p. 224)
Biography
Biography – “Penelope Lively,” by Jacqueline L. Gmuca, in Modern British Women Writers: An A-Z Guide, Vicki K. Janik and Ivan Janik, Editors, Greenwood Press, 2002
Legacy in Literature
· English Literature
· World Literature
· Feminist Literature
· Women’s Literature
· Historical Fiction
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