Bainbridge, Beryl Margaret (1933- ) novelist

Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool, England, to Richard Bainbridge, an unsuccessful salesman, and Winifred Bainbridge. The couple quarreled constantly, and Beryl’s childhood was tumultuous and unhappy. With some formal training in dance, she ran away to London at age 15 and began an acting career that lasted until 1972.

After years of acting in repertory theaters and on the radio, and after a failed marriage, Bain- bridge began her writing career. She has acknowledged the influence of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose work she imitated as a child, and her fiction often explores the violence, ambitions, and everyday lives of the lower middle classes. Harriet Said (1973), Bainbridge’s first novel, includes most of these elements. Based on an Australian newspaper story, the novel retells a complicated murder plot in which a young girl seduces an older male neighbor to kill her mother. Because of its violence and immoral characters, the novel went unpublished for more than a decade.

Later in her career Bainbridge wrote historical novels based on much more well-known events. Her Whitbread Award-winning novel, Every Man for Himself (1996), is based on the sinking of the Titanic. In a manner very reminiscent of James Cameron’s motion picture Titanic (1997), Bainbridge’s novel places prominent American figures on the ship (for instance, a young man with ties to J. P. Morgan), tells a coming-of-age story, and details the social interactions on the ship before it sank in 1912. In a passage indicative of the novel’s attention to social interaction, the narrator comments, “I found Lady Duff Gordon entertaining. . . . She had a long thin face and a haughty expression, but that was just her style.”

Bainbridge has been criticized for unbelievable plots that contain often repulsive violence, such as episodes of stalking and rape, but despite this criticism she is a well-regarded novelist. The scholar and critic Frank Kermode has written that Bainbridge is a unique and powerful writer and describes her as “an odd and in a mutated way fantastic talent.” Another scholar, Barbara Millard, agrees: “Bain-bridge has emerged as one of the most original . . . of contemporary British novelists.”

Critical Analysis. Beryl Bainbridge has been described as a master of psychological realism; her command of detail and highly concise, even laconic style allow her to create a vivid and dark atmosphere of desperation in her depictions of England’s lower middle class.

In her early novels her characters are all severely disappointed somehow, whether in failed romantic relationships, careers, or friendships. These characters remain stuck in their painful situations, prevented by their fear of the larger world from starting a new life or pursuing positive change. Her characters are both stiflingly ordinary and profoundly eccentric, retreating into idealism and romanticism in attempts to escape poverty and boredom. These attempts inevitably fail.

Critics have praised Bainbridge’s ability to mirror her characters’ unstable, fragmented lives in extremely compressed prose. She achieves such economy only through great labor, sometimes producing as many as 20 pages for every one that ends up in a book, then relentlessly cutting everything she deems redundant. Her early works draw heavily on autobiographical material as well as current events. Bainbridge has said, “I pinch newspaper stories that have a strong narrative plot, then put in everything I can remember about my family and friends.”

Her later works focus on historical figures such as Adolf Hitler (Young Adolf), portraying them in the light of human frailty and vulnerability. As with all her novels, these works feature characters who are scarcely admirable or even likeable, but Bainbridge nevertheless succeeds in making them sympathetic figures. They also feature her characteristic dark humor; for instance, while young, despairing, poverty-stricken Adolf Hitler is visiting his brother Alois in London in 1910, he receives a brown shirt from his sister-in-law, discovers the attractions of routines and uniforms by working as a hotel bellboy, and ultimately resolves never to mention that he has been to England, since he comes to despise the culture in which he can find no place of his own. Characteristically, Bainbridge depicts bad people—including someone like Hitler—not as inherently evil, but rather as products of their relationships with others. “What I do try to explain, albeit ineptly,” she has said, “is that goodness, like badness, is fostered or abandoned through the connivance or example of other people.”

In addition to her mastery of black comedy, controlled bursts of violence, and the nuances of laconic dialogue, Bainbridge is known for her tightly woven plots. Every Man for Himself, a reconstruction of the sinking of the Titanic, is particularly admired for its proliferation of intertwining subplots, set ironically in all their complexities against the backdrop of the impending disaster. It is no surprise that Bainbridge’s talents have earned her a reputation as one of Britain’s most inventive novelists.

Other Works by Beryl Bainbridge:
- The Birthday Boys. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. Winter Garden. New York: Braziller, 1981.

A Work about Beryl Bainbridge:
- Wenno, Elisabeth. Ironic Formula in the Novels of Beryl Bainbridge. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta Uni- versitatis Gothoburgensis, 1993.