Amanda's blog

Orange Prize and Elizabeth Jenkins

        I went to the Orange Prize ceremony last night, something that made me both glad and sad. The party itself is a kind of glamorous feminist Walpurgis Night, held in the Royal Festival Hall with Tattinger champagne, a tall and gorgeous saxophonist (whom many suspect may be a tranny) playing jazz, and a heaving crowd of brilliant women interspersed by men who look about as comfortable as the male black widow spider...All good fun, with the energy and enthusiasm women bring to such events.

I was delighted by the winner, for although I haven't yet read Marylynne Robinson's 'Home' it's high on my list, after 'Gilead.' Describing good people is, as I've discovered, one of the most interesting challenges a novelist can face, and a deeply unfashionable one too. Maybe 'Home' will change that....

However, my sadness stems from having just finished Elizabeth Jenkins's The Tortoise and the Hare. It is one of the best novels I've ever read - a near-perfect work of art, like The Leopard and Emma. Yet its author is almost entirely unread, and has no presence on the Web. She should be feted as one of our most extraordinary authors simply on the basis of this one book. 

Amazingly, Elizabeth Jenkins is still alive, at 105. She was made an OBE in 1995, and I was familiar with her only through her biography of Jane Austen, one of the few I feel sure JA herself would have approved of both for its elegance of expression and its insight.

But The Tortoise and the Hare...to describe it as a portrait of an agonising marriage is to do it an injustice. It is about Imogen, whose fading beauty and graceful self-effacement are insufficinet to keep the interest of her husband, Evelyn. A 52 year old barrister - rich, successful, beautiful in an almost feminine way and selfish - he falls for the last person anyone would expect., a plain, dowdly middle-aged woman of wealth but no tact or taste. In a Bronte novel, our sympathies would perhaps be with Blanche, but it is Imogen in her passivity and silent agony who is the heroine. She can't even drive, she doesn't enjoy sex, she is bullied and derided by her own son... she is the kind of woman in a class which, according to Carmen Callil, has vanished since the early 19850s and yet I feel I know all too many Imogens. You want to scream at her to wake up, fight, do something more than sufer - like Nora in The Doll's House - and by the end of the novel it seems that she may yet make a life for herself, and the one person in the book who sees and loves her.

That makes it sound too grim, though, for the novel is shot through with dazzling wit. There is a gloriously funny portrait of a couple who would be all too familiar to denizens of North Oxford and North London - a women writer, no less, whose pretentions and lack of maternal care are horribly satirised. Every character is drawn with an even-handed assurance. It's one of those books that I read, and learnt from in the way that you can only learn from a superior. I haven't been so impressed by anything so much since I read 'Suite Francaise' for although this is about a very different kind of battle, it's just as tense. Who is the Tortoise, and who the Hare? The answers may surprise you.

It is exactly the kind of novel that will never, ever win the Orange but which deserves to be read by anyone who loves what a novel can give. It has a foreword by Hilary Mantel, which reminds me of what a good essayist she is, and which casts new light on her own best work. I can't recommend it too highly.

I read your comments on Elizabeth Jenkins with a jolt of recognition and excitement. The Tortoise and the Hare is a wonderful book - the quality of the writing, the way she brings characters to life, and the vividness of her description. Some of her images are unforgettable - beautiful in themselves and astonishing in the way they help to evoke a character. Elizabeth Jenkins has her own voice, but I am always reminded that this is an author is steeped in Jane Austen. The balance and harmony of her sentences, perhaps. Her other fiction - out of print - is equally rewarding and I love "Honey" and "A Silent Joy". I long for someone to rediscover her and bring her back into the mainstream for others to enjoy - rather like what happened with the revival of interest in Barbara Pym in the 1980s.

It sounds a great book, I shall try and get hold of it. There were a lot of very good women writers of that vintage. I heard on 'Open Book' a day or two ago (I think it was) somebody saying that there is a new generation of women writers (Sarah Waters, Monica Ali) who are outshining the men's old guard (Maritn Amis et al) but I don't know that these things really go in waves; men/women by turns: it seems unlikely, doesn't it? I suspect it's still harder for women to be noticed; that's what the Orange prize is all about. In my own field of children's fiction, it's interesting that Philip Pullman, for example, has a terrific reputation as a real brain, an academic, a thinker - which I think is a lot to do with riding on the shoulders of Milton: the Victorian books he wrote before His Dark Materials are great fun, but no more than ripping yarns with a dash of Ruritanian intrigue. There are women writing for children whose books are as brilliantly intelligent as anything by Pullman - Susan Price and the late Jan Mark spring to mind - but somehow their intellects go disregarded.

Yes, good point Katharine. I think Pullman is an extraordinary writer, of remarkable intellect as well as style and imagination. I also agree that authors like Jan Mark never quite got their due. However I am also concerned by the amount of pastiche which has become highly fashionable. Every writer has particular influences, but there''s a point where this stops being that, or post-modernism and becomes close to parasitism.