resist. But I shall settle down now. I shall have to, for I doubt if I have anything more to look forward to.' As Brookner sees her heroine outside of marriage-outside the reproductive, social, and what was once considered the natural order-marriage would represent a failure of Edith's integrity, a concession to her own timidity and fear of aging. Helped by the revelation that the man who has just proposed marriage to her has spent the night with another woman, Edith is able to go back to passion, knowing that it is her choice, however problematic. Her story concludes with a telegram she sends from her Swiss hotel to her «unsuitable» lover: wryly Edith changes her first message ('Coming home') — 'not entirely accurate'-to 'Returning.' So Brookner writes a reverse bildungsroman: her heroine forgets the disillusioned values she has learned and returns to what she always knew about herself: 'The tears that had fallen from her fine light eyes seemed to have sharpened her vision.'
The Tortoise and the Hare: Women and Competition A final general point of similarity among these writers is that all have shared an emphasis on women's relationships with each other; and all have considered-reaching a variety of conclusions-the proposition that women are necessarily competitors. In Hotel du Lac, Brookner's heroine describes the attraction of the romance novels that she writes: to Edith, the chief appeal is that they lie about women and competition:
What is the most potent myth of all?… The tortoise and the hare… People love this one, especially women. Now you will notice… that in my books it is the mouselike unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course… Aesop was writing for the tortoise market.
Barbara Pym, whose cool intelligence is warmed by faith (God, and occasionally even the novelist, will provide a suitable inheritance for the meek), also writes for 'the tortoise market,' though in two novels she provides a dark variation on Aesop. In novels that share similar plots, A -960- Glass of Blessings (1958) and The Sweet Dove Died (1978), Pym denies victory to the hare without awarding it to the tortoise. For the central «hares» (Wilmet Forsyth and Leonora Eyre, respectively) are not allowed to retain their power over the elusive younger man that each pursues: in both novels, a male rival finally defeats their fantasies. Pym's two plots involving attractive gay men act sardonically to exclude all female players-tortoises or hares-entirely from the race.
Beyond such individual variations on the theme of female competition, there has also been a historical shift in recent years, a change strongly evident in the differences between the narrators of the earliest and latest of the novels under consideration: Drabble's Summer Bird-Cage (1962) and Carter's Wise Children (1991). Sarah Bennett, narrator of Drabble's novel, is, like other novel characters, a creature of her times, which happen to have preceded the feminist movement and its consciousness- raising. Sarah is, in fact, generally unawakened, latent. She shares more than a surname with Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Sarah Bennett wryly-and without Elizabeth Bennet's sisterly compassion- observes the romantic difficulties of her more beautiful older sister Louise. (Louise suggests George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke as well: she marries a much older man, a novelist who sees her as a lovely possession; like Dorothea in Middlemarch, Louise is courted before and after her marriage-and visited during a miserable European honeymoon- by an attractive suitor much younger than her husband.) Drabble updates the nineteenth-century allusions-Sarah has just completed a brilliant undergraduate career at Oxford and is working at the BBC. Yet she has never seriously considered the career for which she is most suited, academics, because she fears it will make her somehow less attractive: 'You can't be a sexy don. It's all right for men… but for women it's a mistake.' Sarah's sister Louise has erred by seeking a financially advantageous yet emotionally barren marriage, an error Sarah is fully capable of seeing. She is less aware of her own folly in placing her young life in limbo as she awaits the return of her fiancé, Francis, from an extended period of study in the United States. Like Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, Drabble's Sarah Bennett is comically blinded by pride in her superior intellect; like her, Sarah is far too articulate to be either naturally charitable or universally popular. Unlike Austen's heroine, however, Sarah Bennett displays a smug consciousness of her own superiority-taking frequent solace in thoughts of her youth, intelligence, and beauty. Thinking of the legs of her dowdy -961- cousin Daphne ('muscular and shapeless round the ankles and covered in hair and bluish pimples'), Sarah thinks complacently: 'It must be so frightful to have to put things on in order to look better, instead of to strip things off.' Sarah's narcissistic flaw is the making of the novel, as her portrayal allows for satiric dissection of the by turns placid and nervous contemplation of their own «giftedness» and entitlement that preoccupy both Sarah and Louise.
Contempt for cousin Daphne (who seems modeled after Kingsley Amis's Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim, a novel Sarah praises in her own narrative) is one of the few passions the sisters share. Daphne inspires their only intimate discussion in the novel, when Louise warns Sarah against her:
'One can scarcely think of people like [Daphne]… as human beings. She's like a different species… She reminds me of those tame shabby animals in zoos… so docile and herbivorous that they don't even bother to put them behind bars… Herbivores. Sadly smelling, depressed animals.'
'And you feel you're a carnivore?'
'Well, if that is the definition of a Daphne, yes, I do. And you too. We're the predatory type, don't you think? The flesh eaters? I'd rather eat than be eaten. If Daphne weren't another species I would have to feel sorry for her, but as it is… '
'As it is,' I said, 'You devour her unashamed.'
'Oh, I don't deliberately devour… '
'But one does feed off them.'
'If you mean that my way of life-our way of life-exists through the existence of theirs… well, yes, I suppose one does. It's a minority way, isn't it, Sal? Money, theatres, books… '
'And we can't live without the herbivores?'
'How could we? We live by our reflection in their eyes.'
Drabble is no longer fond of her first novel, though it is among her best. The sketch of woman-to-woman hostilities before the feminist movement is discomfortingly sharp, which is as satire should be. (While Drabble seems rather invested in the types of privilege she simultaneously appears to be satirizing, this is true of many other satires- Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for one.) Nonetheless, Sarah Bennett does seem a product of now-defunct certainties-particularly in her assumption that ambitious women fall into two groups, necessarily opposed: attractive «flesh-eating» predators or repellent, tame 'herbivores.' In later fiction such as The Radiant Way and its sequels, A Nat-962- ural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory, Drabble has changed her focus: in those novels three women friends, closely attending to each other's welfare, center the fiction. Yet differences among women continue to interest Drabble, who is possessed by (in the words of her recent title) a devouring 'natural curiosity' about her characters and their motives. Simply, those differences are no longer seen as necessarily invidious.
If Drabble herself has moved away from Sarah Bennett's viewpoint, Sarah's antithesis is to be found in Dora Chance, Carter's narrator in Wise Children (1991). Dora's surname reminds us that she navigates by chance, lacking normal advantages (let alone the rich entitlement-money, Oxford, unlimited nurture- that makes Sarah and Louise feel so guilty). Dora, a chorus girl of illegitimate and mysterious birth, may be descended from a famous family of Shakespearean actors, but she has been raised in a seedy quarter of Brixton by a retired prostitute with a heart of gold. While Drabble's Sarah Bennett rejects any serious thoughts of a career as she awaits the return of her lover, Dora Chance has worked professionally since childhood, when she and her twin sister Nora (sisters are soul mates here, not rivals) shared billing in 'Babes in the Wood,' a holiday pantomime. Unlike Sarah-who has it all, including youth, beauty, and brains-Dora Chance is blowsy, past her years of beauty (though she would deny being past her prime). Conspicuously underprivileged, Dora and her sister received their only higher education (in a subplot lifted from Dickens's Little Dorrit) from a down-on- her-luck dance teacher. Dora has also, she makes clear, had a splendid life. Fearless as ever in old age, she and Nora conclude the narrative by adopting twins on their seventy-fifth birthday.
The traditional women's roles, theatrical and social, have eluded them: they have never married or borne children or even 'played Cordelia'-loved and suffered as acknowledged daughters: they spend their lives attempting to discover whether Sir Melchior Hazard, 'the greatest Lear of his day,' is their biological father. Yet Dora and Nora
