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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Beryl Bainbridge

by Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Other literary forms

Beryl Bainbridge has published a remarkable number of novels, but she is also a well-known short-story writer, journalist, theater critic, and screenwriter. Her short-story collections include Mum and Mr. Armitage: Selected Stories of Beryl Bainbridge (1985) and Collected Stories (1994). Bainbridge also worked on several television documentaries, including Emily Brontë and Haworth (1982) and English Journey: Or, The Road to Milton Keynes (1984). She also hosted the series Forever England: North and South (1987) and wrote and published the companion volume to that series. As a longtime journalist, her columns from the Evening Standard newspaper were collected in 1993 and published as Something Happened Yesterday. Bainbridge drew on her experiences as an actor and theater critic for the book Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre, Pieces from “The Oldie” (2005), a collection of reviews, essays, and a memoir.

Beryl Bainbridge.

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(Getty Images)

Achievements

Beryl Bainbridge has received both popular and critical praise for her work, which has a wide English-language readership and has been translated into many languages. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1978 and was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2000. In addition, Bainbridge received many literary honors, including being short-listed five times for the Booker Prize: in 1973 for The Dressmaker, in 1974 for The Bottle Factory Outing, in 1990 for An Awfully Big Adventure, in 1996 for Every Man for Himself, and in 1998 for Master Georgie. She won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Whitbread Novel Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. In 2003, she shared the David Cohen British Literature Prize for lifetime achievement with Thom Gunn.

Biography

Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was born on November 21, 1933, in Liverpool, England, during the Great Depression. Her parents were Richard and Winifred Bainbridge, and she had an older brother. Her family moved to the town of Formby when she was still a baby. She was raised and educated in Formby. Although she was encouraged to read and write by her parents, she did not enjoy a happy home life. The stresses and strains of her early years inspired several of her books. The young Bainbridge, who wrote her first book when she was only ten years old, often used writing as a way to escape from the troubles in her home. At the age of thirteen, she produced a manuscript that would be published as the novel Filthy Lucre in 1986.

At the age of sixteen, after her expulsion from school two years earlier, Bainbridge joined the Liverpool Playhouse Company as an assistant stage manager. Many of her experiences at the theater (where she stayed until 1952) are evident in her 1989 novel, An Awfully Big Adventure.

Bainbridge married Austin Davies, an artist, in 1954. After five years and two children, however, the marriage ended in divorce. Soon after, she married the author Alan Sharp, with whom she had a daughter; that marriage, too, did not last. Bainbridge once again turned to writing as a means of escape and to provide support for herself and her children. For inspiration, she used stories from newspapers and drew from her own past.

Harriet Said, completed in 1958 but not published until 1972, was the first novel Bainbridge published as an adult. She quickly followed this novel with A Weekend with Claud, first published in 1967 and revised and republished as A Weekend with Claude in 1981. (She often revised and republished her earlier works.)

Throughout the late 1960’s and 1970’s, Bainbridge continued to use personal experience as inspiration for her writing. In 1978, she tried alternative history in her novel Young Adolf, the story of a fictional journey to Liverpool by Adolf Hitler as a teenager. Bainbridge also wrote about the life of wife murderer John Selby Watson in her 1984 novel Watson’s Apology. She did not abandon her autobiographical material during this period, however. An Awfully Big Adventure returned Bainbridge to her Liverpool roots and to her days as a young actor and stage manager.

The death of Bainbridge’s longtime editor, Colin Haycraft, in 1994 coincided with Bainbridge’s increasing turn toward historical fiction. She re-created events such as Robert Falcon Scott’s race to the South Pole in The Birthday Boys, the sinking of the Titanic in Every Man for Himself, and the Crimean War in Master Georgie.

Bainbridge also was a familiar figure on British television during the 1980’s and 1990’s. She wrote the scripts for several documentaries, including English Journey. In this program, Bainbridge led viewers in the steps of English writer J. B. Priestley as he traveled throughout his native country in 1934.

In the early twenty-first century, Bainbridge continued her ongoing fascination with the re-creation of the past in fiction. Her novel According to Queeney examined the relationship of eighteenth century writer and curmudgeon Samuel Johnson with Hester Lynch Thrale, a diarist and the wife of a prosperous beer merchant.

Analysis

Beryl Bainbridge’s novels run the gamut from thinly veiled autobiographical fiction to the strange and macabre world of murder and madness. For this reason, it is sometimes difficult for critics to provide a clear overview of her work. Nevertheless, for all their variety, Bainbridge’s works do share certain characteristic stylistic and thematic concerns.

All of the novels carry a strong sense of place, created through the use of specific and minute details. Several of Bainbridge’s books, for example, are set in postwar Liverpool. Bainbridge knows this setting well because she was a teenager in Liverpool during these same years. The depiction of working-class Liverpool is heartbreaking in its accuracy; bombed-out, gritty, and cold, Liverpool and its residents struggled through the late 1940’s and 1950’s to regain their footing. Her work is not restricted to Liverpool, however. Bainbridge is equally on target with her descriptions of the Antarctic in The Birthday Boys, the bridge of the Titanic in Every Man for Himself, and eighteenth century England in According to Queeney.

What is particularly striking is that Bainbridge’s strong and accurate evocation of place is accompanied by her ability to push the edges of narrative reliability. That is, she makes certain in her work that her reader can never be sure that the narrative voice of the novel speaks the truth. For Bainbridge, it seems, there really is no one truth, but rather competing voices, pushing individual perceptions of truth toward the reader.

Many of Bainbridge’s books provide dark humor, something that produces unease in readers. She juxtaposes death and tragedy with scenes that provoke laughter. In An Awfully Big Adventure, the main character drops the flashlight that represents Tinker Bell in a production of Peter Pan; the consternation of the children in the audience is terrible, yet funny. At the same time, one of the main characters is committing suicide offstage.

Bainbridge’s characters also tend toward the quirky, eccentric, and pathological. Rarely in her novels do readers encounter truly sympathetic characters, but her characters are rich in their complexity. Like real people, they exhibit both good and bad judgment as well as compassion and coldheartedness. Complicated and complex, Bainbridge’s characters are often not likable, but they are always interesting.

The Bottle Factory Outing

The Bottle Factory Outing, which earned for Bainbridge her first Booker Prize nomination as well as the Guardian Fiction Award in 1974, is a story of two women, Brenda and Freda, who work in a bottle factory. Bainbridge used her own experiences for this novel, having worked briefly in a bottle factory when she was younger. Although the events of the novel are purely fiction, the details are based on an actual factory environment.

Brenda is quiet, nervous, and altogether unremarkable, while Freda is bossy and manipulative. When Freda develops an attraction for one of her fellow workers, she organizes a picnic as an opportunity to spend time with the object of her affection. However, at the picnic, Freda is murdered. While Bainbridge does not typically write murder mysteries, the bizarre death of her main character is the kind of unexpected plot twist that Bainbridge’s readers have come to expect. The novel also illustrates Bainbridge’s ironic bent: Freda expects the picnic to be a sunny, warm, happy event, full of life and love; what she gets is drunkenness and death. In addition, the comic description of Freda’s coworkers disposing of her body is at odds with the horror of murder. The tendency toward black humor permeates many of Bainbridge’s later novels.

An Awfully Big Adventure

In An Awfully Big Adventure, Bainbridge once again draws on the details of her own life for her setting and plot. This novel is the story of a young Liverpool woman in post-World War II England, a time and place of unyielding deprivation and hopelessness. Stella, abandoned by her mother at birth, is being raised by her aunt and uncle, who encourage her to take a job as an assistant stage manager in a local theater company. The company provides a rich opportunity for Bainbridge to develop the quirky characters so typical of her novels.

The company is preparing to present Peter Pan, and the juxtaposition of a children’s play with the sometimes sordid and often darkly humorous plot turns underscores Bainbridge’s talent for the ironic. Further, the novel demonstrates the way that historic decisions have present consequences, an ongoing concern in Bainbridge’s work. At one point in the novel, Stella’s mother has a brief affair with an older actor, resulting in Stella’s birth. The plot of An Awfully Big Adventure winds its way through sixteen years until Stella finds herself confronting the consequences of her mother’s decisions.

In addition, Stella’s choices throughout the novel, including her penchant for speaking uncomfortable truths, lead to tragic consequences for the other members of the theater company. While many readers will find events in An Awfully Big Adventure comic, others may be uncomfortable with the close association of the humorous with emotional trauma and death.

The Birthday Boys

The 1910-1912 expedition of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team provides the fodder for The Birthday Boys. Divided into five parts with five different narrators, the novel tells the story of Scott’s ill-fated race to reach the South Pole. The irony of the Scott expedition makes it the perfect setting for the novel. Scott’s men did indeed reach the South Pole, but they found that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beat them to it. Scott and his team—Petty Officer Edgar Evans, Dr. Edward Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Robertson Bowers, and Captain Lawrence Edward Oates—died on the return trip, making the expedition virtually meaningless. Bainbridge’s ability to re-create historical settings and her thematic concern for the irony of life make the expedition remarkable in its irony.

Using Scott’s journals as well as the memoirs of one survivor of the expedition as her source material, Bainbridge is able to creatively imagine lives for the other men who died. By telling the story from so many perspectives and by her frequent use of flashbacks and reminiscences, the story of the Scott expedition grows increasingly contested and unreliable. The competing voices of the five narrators attest to the complexity of historical re-creation in fiction. With beautiful imagery and complete control of her subject, however, Bainbridge provides a strange yet compelling story that offers another way to examine the troubling journey.

Every Man for Himself

The sinking of the passenger steamship Titanic remains one of the most iconic events of the twentieth century. Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank within three hours, leading to a great loss of life. Bainbridge opens the story with the ship sinking and then flashes back to the previous four days of the journey. The flashback technique is one that Bainbridge uses in virtually all of her novels.

Bainbridge’s inspiration for writing the novel came from the clear irony of the ship’s construction. She uses the overconfidence of the ship’s manufacturers and owners, and contrasts that overconfidence with the suffering and pain experienced by those on the sinking ship. In addition, Bainbridge had an ongoing thematic interest in the ways that the British class system continued to sustain itself even in extreme circumstances, including during the sinking of the Titanic; that interest shows itself in the novel as well.

Bibliography

1 

Becket, Fiona. “Singular Events: The ’As If’ of Beryl Bainbridge’s Every Man for Himself.” In British Fiction of the 1990’s, edited by Nick Bentley. New York: Routledge, 2005. A chapter-long discussion of Bainbridge’s novel about the sinking of the Titanic. Becket is particularly interested in the interconnectedness of fact and fiction in this novel, and in Bainbridge’s exploration of loss.

2 

Grubisic, Brett Josef. Understanding Beryl Bainbridge. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. An overview of Bainbridge’s life and an analysis of her major novels. An excellent starting place for any study of Bainbridge’s work. Includes an extensive bibliography and references.

3 

Rennison, Nick. “Beryl Bainbridge.” In Contemporary British Novelists. New York: Routledge, 2005. An installment in the Routledge Key Guides series. Offers a biographical overview as well as discussion of key works, including plot devices and themes. Includes a bibliography and a guide to further reading.

4 

Wennö, Elisabeth. Ironic Formula in the Novels of Beryl Bainbridge. Göteburg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1993. One of the very few book-length studies of Bainbridge, this text provides a key reading of Bainbridge’s use of irony throughout her career. While the book is academic and challenging, it is nonetheless an important resource for those studying Bainbridge’s work.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Henningfeld, Diane Andrews. "Beryl Bainbridge." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_10410141000007.
APA 7th
Henningfeld, D. A. (2010). Beryl Bainbridge. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Henningfeld, Diane Andrews. "Beryl Bainbridge." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2026. online.salempress.com.