<scp>B</scp> ainbridge, <scp>B</scp> eryl

• Main Author: Richter, Virginia
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Wiley 2010
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444337822.wbetcfv1b001; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2F9781444337822.wbetcfv1b001; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444337822.wbetcfv1b001

Beryl Bainbridge's fiction centers on crisis, ranging from private incidents – teenage rebellion leading to incest or murder ( An Awfully Big Adventure , 1989; Harriet Said , 1972), twisted love relationships ( Sweet William , 1975), disintegrating families suddenly confronted with violence and death (The Dressmaker , 1973; Injury Time , 1977) – to highly public and even “national” disasters such as Robert F. Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition ( The Birthday Boys , 1991) or the sinking of the Titanic (Every Man for Himself , 1996). Bainbridge's work can be divided into roughly two groups. The first, which includes most of her earlier fiction, draws on working‐class life in her native Liverpool. These texts are partly based on autobiographical experience, but they also incorporate historical characters transposed into the Bainbridge universe of stifling working‐class domesticity, such as Hitler in Young Adolf , depicted on a spurious visit to his relatives living in Liverpool in 1910. Bainbridge's interest in historical characters and events deepened in the second group of her novels, written mostly from the 1990s onwards and including, in addition to the books on Scott and the Titanic, Master Georgie (1998), set during the Crimean War, and According to Queenie (2001), about the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale, viewed through the eyes of Thrale's daughter Queenie. Her latest novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (2008), is the first to move beyond an exploration of Englishness and to turn to an American topic, the assassination of Robert Kennedy.