feral passion of the unmanageable lunatic Bertha Mason Rochester and the chilly self-possession of the compulsively regulated spinster Eliza Reed. Even the Brontës, who broke so many rules, exhibit-in their obsessive emphasis on exogamy-the essential gregariousness of the British tradition, which until quite recently has not much interested itself (as North American, Latin American, and European fiction traditionally have) in the singular, the antisocial, the hermetic.
Despite their prevailing emphasis on correspondences between their narratives and those of the classic English tradition, these contemporary women novelists have interested themselves in reexamination of earlier models of 'singularity.' All these novelists share what amounts to a refusal to prescribe sociability. Drabble explores the singular woman character as early as her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1962), in the enigmatic person of the narrator's bohemian friend Simone, 'nationless, sexless, hopelessly eclectic, hopelessly unrooted.' A Simone-like figure in later novels is Esther Breuer, the sexually and socially unclassifiable art historian of The Radiant Way and its sequels. Yet Drabble's free spirits are peripheral characters. Simone's participation in A Summer Bird-Cage is limited to the postcards she sends the heroine from Italy. And Esther, one of the three school friends who center Drabble's trilogy, was dispatched to Italy in the second novel. Esther is, in fact, the least interesting of the three friends, probably as a direct result of symbolizing the woman outside norms. Defined in terms of what she does not do-marry, have a child, hold a steady job-Esther is one of nature's free-lancers, anxious even over the minimal commitment and nurture required by the potted palm a lover has given her. Over the years, she obtrudes her neurotic concern over the health of this ever- sickly plant into every discussion her friends initiate about the state of their (equally fragile) marriages.
Solitary characters such as Esther Breuer, in refusing to be changed by other characters, tend to retard the action. Fay Weldon solves this difficulty in Life and Loves of a She-Devil by chronicling the vendetta of a sociopath: Ruth may be profoundly antisocial, but she is eager to interact with people in order to secure her goal of vengeance. Byatt's -956- plot in Possession, too, becomes absorbing despite a cast of introverts (it is not promising to learn in early chapters that both of Byatt's shy modern protagonists cherish fantasies of resting in the pristine white cots of their early childhood). Byatt's four lonely literary people, past and present, are slowly drawn together by a festive plot, moved along less by actions than by the characters' growing insight into the pseudo-Victorian poetry, letters, and fairy tales inserted into the narrative that they are studying. Byatt's two modern scholars are Roland Michell, an unemployed graduate student unhappy in a relationship he has outgrown; and Maud Bailey, a feminist scholar recovering from an affair fecklessly embarked upon during a conference on 'Gender and the Autonomous Text.' Maud and Roland find each other, if only briefly, while researching an even more unlikely erotic conjunction between the two Victorians they study. Randolph Henry Ash, Roland's Browningesque poet, is discovered to have been trapped in a marriage never consummated; seeking solace, Ash had (as Maud and Roland gradually discover, searching letters and texts for clues) briefly loved the fey, difficult Christabel LaMotte, a figure reminiscent both of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. As her twentieth-century descendant Lord Bailey scoffs: '[Christabel] didn't do anything. Just lived up there in the east wing and poured out all this stuff about fairies. It wasn't a life.' Christabel LaMotte, before the discoveries of Roland and Maud, was thought to have loved only once-the artist Blanche Glover, who mysteriously drowned herself. But Maud's and Roland's researches reread Christabel as a tortured early feminist: she bore Ash's daughter but then surrendered her to a conventional married sister. Ultimately, Maud discovers that she herself, director of Women's Studies at Lincoln University, is a descendant of the child of LaMotte and Ash, and so is herself the creation of the relationship she has been reconstructing. A novel of correspondences-letters, analogies, patterns-rather than of direct actions, Possession nonetheless provides a full and genial narrative that takes its characters out of isolation and defeat.
Pym and Brookner also place their solitary characters in the center of narrative, but the festive resolution offered by Byatt in Possession is usually denied. Pym's badly dressed heroines-thirtyish Emma Howick in A Few Green Leaves is introduced to readers as 'rather the type that the women's magazines used to make a feature of 'improving''-are dreamily detached from social expectations that (in the words of Byatt's Lord Bailey) they will «do» something. In chapter 12 Emma's -957- mother thinks about her daughter and 'poor Tom' Dagnall as she drifts asleep ('perhaps the thought of Tom had induced drowsiness'); she hopes Emma and Tom will become romantically involved. The following paragraph explores Emma's own thoughts as she too falls asleep thinking of Tom: her train of thought, however, is comically unpromising: 'He was an essentially good person… But to get down to practical details or brass tacks, could Tomreally help her if she asked him? Would he, for instance, be capable of cleaning her top windows, which was what she really needed?' Gently comic in structure (with frequent imagery of death and loss adding a darker undertone), A Few Green Leaves concludes rather happily, with mild Emma's having become sufficiently aware of Tom to encourage his tentative efforts to attach her: 'She could… she was beginning to realize, embark on a love affair which need not necessarily be an unhappy one.' In Pym's bleaker novel The Sweet Dove Died (1978), however, there is no such final transformation of the well-meaning solitary woman: a kindly but embittered divorced woman ('poor Liz') lives for her Siamese cats, and an aging sentimentalist, Meg, remains devoted to Colin, an indifferent young man. These loving characters are merely absurd; and the selfish woman who centers the novel, Leonora Eyre, ends as she began, pursuing a cultivation of perfect form that protects her from her friends' absurdity and yet estranges her from any human warmth.
At first, Claudia Hampton in Lively's Moon Tiger seems, like Leonora Eyre, coldly egocentric for all her courage in facing a painful death ('God is an unprincipled bastard, wouldn't you agree?'). Claudia has always made her own rules, from engaging in a long incestuous affair with her brother to bearing a child out of wedlock during the 1940s. Lively, however, gradually reveals a sympathetic motive for Claudia's harshly autocratic independence, which has poisoned her relationship with her subdued and resentful daughter. On assignment to Cairo as a news correspondent during World War II, Claudia had briefly but deeply loved a soldier who was killed; soon afterward she had miscarried their child. Claudia then hardened; and that uncompromisingly hard voice dominates her narrative-until a luminous conclusion.
Another stubbornly idiopathic, intractable-unmarriageable-character seen finally in a kindlier light is Marcia Ivory in Pym's Quartet in Autumn. Miss Ivory lives alone following the death of her mother, the evidently more traumatic death of her cat Snowy, and her mandatory -958- retirement from a dull office job in central London. Recent radical surgery for breast cancer (which will be unsuccessful in arresting the disease) confirms Marcia as an emblem, by turns comic and poignant, of human loss. As she solemnly informs a Remembrance Day collector: 'I, too, have had something removed.' Given Marcia's recent losses, it makes a kind of mad sense when, declining into senility, she spends her days sorting a huge collection of plastic bags and counting the empty milk bottles stored in her garden shed. There is anger implicit in Pym's portrayal of this fierce yet forlorn solitude, in which Marcia numbly accumulates empty receptacles, hoarding cans of food she will never survive to be nourished by. Pym shows that Marcia's isolation is only half-chosen; it is also imposed by neighbors and co-workers who find her frightening and difficult: she avoids other people in part because she resents the hypocrisy of their occasional strained overtures. Pym's social satire is not directed at Marcia herself; perhaps it is aimed at Jonathan Cape and the other British publishers who branded her work as unpublishable for sixteen years, rejecting successive drafts of Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died between 1961 and 1977. For Quartet in Autumn opens with an uncharacteristically direct and defensive statement of theme: 'The position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.' Pym's novel will be different, however, for it is Marcia (not her saner and more presentable co-worker Letty) who posthumously becomes the novel's heroine (if heroism is power to change things) when she unexpectedly wills her mother's house to Norman, among the «quartet» of four office workers the one whose life will be most improved by this gesture. For Norman-an unpopular man only slightly less odd than Marcia herself-lives in a rented room, doesn't drive, and has never had anything of his own.
In Brookner's Hotel du Lac, Edith Hope, a writer of high-end romance novels, is also solitary until the conclusion of her novel, when-like Pym's Norman-she receives a gift, though it is only the gift of insight. Unlike Brookner's Fay Langdon, Edith Hope finally does not seem lonely-merely alone, and by choice. Edith refuses two conventionally suitable marriages in the course of her novel, choosing, in fact, 'hope'-her passionate affair with a married man who has told her he has no intention of divorcing his wife-over safety, over everything. During the twelve-hour period in which she is engaged to her second suitor, Edith writes, 'One does not receive proposals of mar-959- riage every day in this enlightened world, although curiously enough I have had two this year. I seem to have accepted them both. The lure of domestic peace was obviously too great for one of my timorous nature to
