the past. While strongly committed to revising traditional notions of female sexuality in such nonfiction as The Sadeian Woman (1979), Carter's fiction over the thirty years of her career became increasingly genial, ebullient, tender, allusive. All reviewers recognized the revisiting of Shakespeare (especially his early comedies) in her final novel, Wise Children. Carter herself (who early in her career had declared a preference for Racine) told the London Sunday Times in 1991 that she had always seen herself as a character in Shakespeare, but had increasingly identified with his comic creations: 'All these years, I've been fighting the Falstaff in my soul. All these years, I've had this deep conviction that I was the Prince of Denmark when, really and truly, I was Juliet's Nurse.'
An emphasis on continuities in English culture is even clearer among the others. Barbara Pym's habitual allusions to canonical English poets and novelists (particularly to Jane Austen) are often misread as merely nostalgic, a misconception that subsequent discussion of Pym's three late novels will challenge. Fay Weldon, like Pym, has long been associated with notably «English» projects: she achieved her earliest fame as -940- the scriptwriter for several episodes of 'Upstairs, Downstairs' and wrote the teleplay for the BBC's serialization of Austen's Pride and Prejudice in 1983. In Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen (1985) even Weldon's title stands as an affirmation of English cultural continuities, from Austen to Lewis Carroll's curious girl-child to Virginia Woolf's classic essay on first reading David Copperfield. In Alice, Weldon presents an aunt's defense of novel reading to a niece who has turned to punk rock. The «Englishness» of The Life and Loves of a SheDevil (the controversial novel on which this chapter's discussion of Weldon will focus) is more veiled: Weldon has told interviewers that the novel was set in suburban Australia. Yet a specific setting is not disclosed within the novel itself, and the world of this text looks much the way Margaret Thatcher's Britain would probably look to Jane Austen: a place of increasing material comforts but decreasing emotional contact: 'Eden Grove is a friendly place. My neighbors and I give dinner parties… We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories… It is a good life. [My husband] tells me so. He comes home less often, so does not say so as often as he did.'
A. S. Byatt's Possession stresses a continuum of English settings (and literary achievement) extending from the past into the present. Set partly in the nineteenth century, Byatt's novel is, among other things-as Diane Johnson recognized in the New York Review of Books-'an affirmation of the Victorian novel.' Anita Brookner, the only child of Jewish emigrants from Poland, was seven when her sensitive father guided her through the works of Dickens, hoping that this quintessentially English writer would help his daughter to master the strange new culture into which the family had been transplanted. While Brookner has protested in interviews that she still feels like an estranged outsider in England, she nonetheless situates most of her fiction-Family and Friends, 1985; Latecomers, 1989; Brief Lives, 1990- in London during World War II and the immediate postwar period. Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (1987), too, which declares itself as a 'history of the world,' nonetheless concerns itself mainly with wartime Egypt (where Lively spent her childhood) and pre-and postwar England. Margaret Drabble (like Barbara Pym) chooses contemporary rather than historical English settings. Yet in the last thirty years, Drabble has turned increasingly from her early novels of veiled autobiography-fictional accounts of marriage, motherhood, divorce-to a remarkable chronicling of the shifting political and economic fortunes of England itself: its recession -941- of the 1970s in The Ice Age (1977), for instance; and its retreat from the welfare state during the 1980s in The Radiant Way (1987) and its sequels, A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1992).
The frequent allusion to specifically «English» experience (literary and historical) in the novels of these writers is appreciated by anglophilic American readers but has been in recent years increasingly out of fashion in Britain itself. Increasingly since the establishment of the Booker Prize in 1969, the judges (newly appointed each year) have chosen fiction written from multicultural or postcolonial perspectives-including Booker Prize novels by Salman Rushdie (1981), Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), Keri Hulme (1985), Peter Carey (1988), and Ben Okri (1991). Writers from the Celtic cultures within Britain and Eire (Glasgow's James Kelman, for instance, short-listed in 1989), have also been receiving long-delayed recognition. In contrast to these new voices, so often intent on dramatizing a break with tradition, the seven writers discussed in this chapter emphasize their ties to canonical fiction and specifically English subject matter, and may have seemed to the Prize committees by contrast rather tame. As mentioned, Carter is not a true exception to this rule, though her writings on sexuality (and such protofictional projects as her bawdy feminist revisions of fairy tales) at least made it clear that an interest in allusion to canonical literature is not necessarily an indication of reactionary values. Others among these seven have actively contributed to a perception of their work as conservative. Margaret Drabble, goaded in 1967 by an interviewer marveling at her love of realism (she has written a book on Arnold Bennett), declared roundly: 'I'd rather be at the end of a tradition which I admire than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.'
In the years that each won the Booker Prize, Possession, Moon Tiger, and Hotel du Lac were all perceived as conservative choices. A factor in the success of these three novels was probably that all marked a change of emphasis, a new direction. Anita Brookner was an art historian who had produced highly regarded studies of Watteau, Greuze, and David before beginning her career as a novelist in 1981; and Hotel du Lac, the least chilly of Brookner's early narratives (the heroine's surname «Hope» is finally apposite, not ironic) remains her most ingratiating novel. Penelope Lively was until her first appearance on the Booker shortlist best known as a writer of historical/folkloric fiction for young adults: Moon Tiger took her constant theme-the haunting persistence of the past-to a more powerful level than earlier novels. A. S. Byatt's Posses-942- sion, too, was her breakthrough novel, less dryly academic than earlier fiction almost overwhelmed by the influence of Iris Murdoch. (Byatt, a former lecturer in English, published the first book-length critical study of Murdoch in 1965.) At the time she was named to the Booker shortlist, Fay Weldon was best known, as mentioned, as a playwright, scriptwriter, and cultural gadfly, not as a novelist.
By contrast, Drabble, Pym, and Carter — the three of highest reputation in the United States — demonstrated between 1962 and 1992 a steady commitment to quality fiction writing: all have loyal followings of readers who tend to see their separate novels in the context of their careers as a whole. Drabble's first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was published in 1962 when she was twenty-four; Angela Carter's Shadow Dance in 1965 when she was twenty-five. Pym (delayed by World War II) was thirty-seven when she published Some Tame Gazelle in 1950; it was begun in 1935, when she was twenty-two. Again, without denigrating those who have been recognized by the Booker Prize committees, it may be observed that the traits that the prize favors-the big book, the breakthrough book, the novel-of-the-year rather than the lifetime achievement-have subtly disadvantaged all these seven writers, especially the three most exclusively committed to the possibly dying tradition of novel writing. Steadily productive novelists working veins of subject matter that they have gradually made their own (a description that covers all these writers) have in recent years been taken somewhat for granted in Britain.
Daughters of Austerity One final point of preliminary background should help to focus subsequent discussion of these writers' novels: the related matters of their age and their shared preoccupation with the English past, literary and historical. This interest has, as mentioned, often been misread as insular and nostalgic-except in the case of Angela Carter, even reactionary. Yet true nostalgia requires some experience of the halcyon days revisited; and except for Barbara Pym (born in 1913 and a generation older than the rest when she began to publish) these novelists all were infants or children during World War II. They were born in 1928 (Brookner), 1933 (Weldon and Lively), 1936 (Byatt), 1939 (Drabble), and 1940 (Carter). Except for Pym (who served in Italy as a Wren during the war), all experienced severe disruptions early in life. Angela Carter was -943- born in Eastbourne several months after her mother had been evacuated from South London because of the blitz; the family was separated from her father, a journalist who stayed in London. Later in the war, Carter was evacuated again, to a mining village in South Yorkshire. Antonia Drabble Byatt and Margaret Drabble, who are sisters, were separated when Antonia was evacuated from Sheffield to Pontefract in Yorkshire. Weldon, born in Worcestershire, emigrated to New Zealand early in childhood but following her parents' divorce returned to England with her mother, grandmother, and sister: the disruption of her parents' marriage, not the war itself, displaced Weldon. Lively, born in Cairo, spent her childhood near an active theater of combat. Brookner, although herself born in London, was, as mentioned, the only child of Jewish émigrés; she grew up keenly aware of her family's marginal status as displaced persons: 'We were aliens. Jews. Tribal… I loved my parents painfully, but they were hopeless as guides.'
Given this shared background of early estrangement and disruption (common to people of their generation,
