When I first read Hotel du Lac, I thought it was a portrait of a miserable life. Dowdy middle-aged woman goes on holiday by a lake and faces up to a future without love. Why not, I thought, just go the whole hog and buy a noose? When Anita Brookner, who died last week, gave an interview for her Booker prize-winning novel, she seemed to confirm this view. “I feel,” she said, “I could go into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s loneliest, most miserable woman.”
I was 20 and doing a degree in English literature. I had just had my heart broken, by a nice chemistry student who then went – I’m sure it’s coincidental – to do a PhD in Australia. Everyone kept telling me that there were plenty more fish in the sea. If there were, I didn’t see them, or perhaps they didn’t see me. I went to an awful lot of weddings on my own. I held an awful lot of babies. I shed, to be honest, an awful lot of tears.
I was older than Edith, the heroine in Hotel du Lac, when my mother sent me a card saying: “Looking for Mr Right?” Inside was the answer: “Try fiction!” We both laughed, but it was a slightly hollow laugh. My mother often tells me that she’s the only person she knows who doesn’t have any grandchildren. The message is unintended, but it’s clear: I have failed.
If this is failure, quite a few of us have failed. Almost a third of us now live on our own. A fifth of women don’t have children. For women with degrees, the figure is over a third. You can argue about the reasons. We are too picky. The blokes aren’t up to scratch, or prefer younger women with bigger breasts and smaller brains. Or we are bad at compromise. Or all of the above, or none. All we know is this. Our culture prefers not to acknowledge that we exist.
Yes, of course there are single women in literature. There are shrews and battleaxes and colourful eccentrics and tweedy detectives and a carnival parade of pretty young women just waiting to be picked and saved. And then there are the ones who didn’t get picked, or who were picked and tossed aside. The Miss Havishams and Miss Bateses, struggling on with their tiny lives and knowing that they will rarely be mentioned without the word “pity” or “poor”.
When Bridget Jones hit the bookshelves, and then the big screen, there was a big sigh of collective relief as youngish, brightish, normal-looking single women finally saw a version of themselves that didn’t actually make them wince. You didn’t have to knock back quite so much chardonnay to be pleased that someone else was talking about the challenges of Christmas in your childhood bed. Plus, we had a new name. If “singleton” didn’t sound quite as carefree as “bachelor”, it was certainly better than “spinster”, which usually followed the word “sad”.
Sex and the City followed. A world of bad dates, dry manhattans and very, very expensive shoes. If we couldn’t quite match the lifestyle, some of us could match the bad dates. In the end, of course, they all got paired off, apart from Samantha, who, given the choice between a stable relationship and an exhausting sex life, would always opt for sex.
Sex was at the heart of it. These beautiful, brassy, bracingly frank women had big hopes for big homes and big lives, with plenty of money and plenty of sex. All very glitzy. All very entertaining. But this is not how most women live.
The women in Brookner’s novels could not be less like the Sex and the City girls. They are polite and self-disciplined and shy. They are not fiercely independent – they are not fiercely anything – but they work hard and do their jobs well. Like their creator they have a clear-eyed view of the world. They would like to believe that the meek will inherit the earth, and that the mousy get swept off their feet by handsome Mr Rochesters, but they know that it’s the bold and brassy who usually win.
This week, I re-read Hotel du Lac. Thirty-odd years on, it felt like a different book. Edith, the romantic novelist at the heart of it has run away from her wedding, at 39, to a dull man she thought might be her last chance. Sent by her friends, in disgrace, on a solitary holiday at the Hotel du Lac, she meets another dull man who offers to marry her and give her the social position he thinks she needs. He doesn’t love her. She doesn’t love him.
“I do not sigh and yearn,” she says, “for extravagant displays of passion”. What she wants is something much more modest. “What I crave,” she says, “is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards.” But you can’t do this, she decides, with someone you don’t love. And so she turns him down.
Brookner’s heroines are single not because they are too dowdy, but because they are too honest. They know that life is full of compromise, but they still see a compromise too far. If they don’t exactly live what the philosopher Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”, they have certainly learned to live with quiet courage because of the choices they have made.
People don’t talk all that much about quiet courage. They don’t think that navigating the world on your own needs courage. Politicians love “hardworking families”. So what does that make single people? Lazy? Feckless? Or a chunk of society that barely warrants a mention in a budget speech?
Brookner, as her obituaries made clear, “never married”; but she was certainly “hardworking”. She was a distinguished art historian and the first woman at Cambridge to be Slade professor of art. Starting at 53, she wrote 24 glittering, uncomfortably truthful novels which gave a voice to the unassuming, the modest and the quiet. She also wrote a novel called Look at Me, but spent her life trying to make sure that no one did.
When she said she was the world’s “loneliest and most miserable woman” she was, of course, being ironic. She was, she said, contented. She would have liked children, but wrote books instead. What she knew was what I didn’t know when I was 20: that there are an awful lot of different ways to live a life. Oh, and she won a Booker prize. This brilliant, quiet woman won a Booker prize, and she won it for a book that placed a much greater value on quiet thought than on noise.