Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon (review)

Nick Turner’s curious and lively study of post-war British female novelists aims to interrogate the apparent masculine dominance of the canon while also examining the often elusive criteria of canonical inclusion. Turner’s brisk and accessible introduction provides a digestible history of the canon in its various forms along with a useful summary of contemporary perspectives with extensive reference to Harold Bloom and Wendell V. Harris in particular. His four extended case studies on Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Ruth Rendell, and Emma Tennant offer some insight into the combined qualities required in order to gain admission to the canon, along with those qualities that undermine an author’s canonical credibility.

Of the four, the most obvious candidate for canonical recognition is certainly Iris Murdoch; Turner himself admits that among his selection she is the strongest novelist. Yet Murdoch’s position, he argues, often has been compromised by her tendency toward sensationalism and genre-writing (borrowing frequently, as she does, from the thriller, the gothic novel, and romantic fiction), a trait that divides critics and readers. Another drawback, Turner suggests, is Murdoch’s apparent refusal to engage with the feminist ideology that characterizes the works of her contemporaries in an attempt to avoid what she describes as “ghettoization” (p. 53). Despite these apparent shortcomings, however, Murdoch does, for Turner, qualify for a permanent place in the canon. Her simultaneous embrace of the popular and the highbrow, he argues, mirrors that of Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare and finds her still profitably in print, while her ongoing academic popularity is indicative of the extent to which her work is critically relevant.

If Murdoch’s position is reasonably secure, Turner’s next choice, Anita Brookner, is deliberately more problematic. Often accused of a tendency toward repetition, which is associated more with mass-market publishing than with literary innovation, Brookner’s place in British fiction is largely the product of one work, the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac (1984), which established a formula from which she since has seemed reluctant to deviate. Brookner also has been criticized for her seemingly apathetic stance toward female identity; her characters apparently acquiesce to patriarchal values and even celebrate them, while her failure to engage with the modern world more broadly has resulted in her work being termed “spinster fiction,” a phrase Turner is openly (and perhaps justly) unsettled by (p. 77). The more pressing, more fundamental, problem with Brookner, though, may be that she simply is not appealing to the right audience. Her visibility has been substantial, yet the academic establishment clearly has found little in her work to inspire critical engagement, a situation highlighted by Turner through a reference to the relatively small number of articles in the MLA database that address her work directly, suggesting, perhaps, that her novels do not lend themselves to critical discussion.

In Ruth Rendell, perhaps his most contentious choice, Turner finds a serviceable and efficient crime writer whose literary qualities are adequate, if unremarkable. Crime fiction is a problem for the canon, and Turner’s approach does, at times, seem uncertain as to whether it is evaluating the potential canonicity of the genre as a whole or of Rendell as an individual case. There is no shortage of crime fiction that can be identified as canonical; from Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins onward, it has served as a perfectly acceptable genre for authors with considerable literary credentials. Rendell’s generic work, though, is precisely that; it fulfills the popular criteria of crime fiction rather than subverting them and so is essentially lacking, Turner suggests, in the originality or the power to surprise that is required of canonical fiction. Murdoch, as an occasional practitioner of crime-themed fiction, is illustrative of the theme’s potential to function at once both within and outside of generic boundaries and highlights the extent to which crime writing can be original and literary, but this potential is something that, in the interests of commercial success, Rendell tends...