Principal characters
Charlotte and Lulu Lyons, two young sisters
Marlene, their mother
Dr. Cherry, Marlene’s boss
Robyn, a young girl
Valerie, Robyn’s stepmother
Marise, Robyn’s mother
Cecilia, a teenage girl
Angela and Ken, Cecilia’s parents
Heloise, a divorced businesswoman
Delia, a violin teacher
Across multiple novels and collections of short stories, British writer Tessa Hadley, who first enjoyed literary success in the early 2000s after decades of writing in obscurity, has worked to craft an atlas of human behavior. Usually focusing on the daily lives of various middle-class people living in the United Kingdom, particularly in England and Wales, Hadley dissects these characters’ hidden regrets and desires while paying exacting attention to their thoughts and behaviors. A practitioner of literary realism, she captures the complex family dynamics that define her characters’ lives and seizes on moments of crisis; in Hadley’s stories, such crises often present characters with the opportunity for change, even if the characters do not always pursue these opportunities.
Hadley’s fourth short story collection, After the Funeral and Other Stories, first published in 2023, follows this pattern. The twelve stories included in this collection present a gallery of children, teens, and middle-aged people who are trying to carve out a space for themselves amidst their often-stifling lives. Hadley’s focus in these stories is largely on the women who, for the most part, constitute her principal characters. Hadley writes primarily in the third person, with only the occasional switch to first person, which allows her to seamlessly jump from the perspective of one character to another, taking the reader deeper into their conflicting thoughts. Taken as a whole, the collection is a multifaceted portrait of disappointment, but also a source of occasional moments of hope and possibility.
One thread that runs through the book is the desire to live an alternative, artistic life. Several of the women in the book have pursued such a life, whether through following an actual artistic practice or simply by leading a bohemian life at odds with societal expectations. These women range from early middle age, such as the singer Lynette in “Dido’s Lament,” to late middle age, like the violinist Delia in “The Other One.” In the brief story “Mia,” Hadley features a prototype of the artistic figure, the teenaged Alison, who aspires to work as a chef and tries to fix her appearance into what she understands to be an artistic style of beauty: “hollow-eyed and scowling, dark and disabused and thin.” For Hadley, this artistic ideal that her characters pursue can be both a pose and a serious calling. She writes in a way that is sympathetic to these questors, even if she occasionally offers up details that make them look ridiculous.
In general, the bohemian women without artistic aspirations are the ones Hadley portrays with less sympathy. The worst-case scenario for the bohemian lifestyle, in Hadley’s view, is portrayed in stark fashion in one of the collection’s strongest stories, “Funny Little Snake.” In the story, the main character, Valerie, is a twenty-something woman and the second wife of an older husband, Gil, a professor. At the beginning of the story, Gil’s nine-year-old daughter, Robyn, who lives with her mother, is visiting the couple. It is the first time that Valerie has met Robyn and she is shocked by how backwards and unresponsive the young girl is. She is unable to button her own her coat and she seems distant, almost as if she were not fully there. Toward the beginning of the story, Valerie has to take Robyn back to her mother’s house in London; when Valerie arrives there, she sees a nightmare vision of the bohemian lifestyle at a dead end. Robyn’s mother, Marise, is in bed and Valerie is greeted by Marise’s younger lover, Jamie. The house, which is an old Victorian gone to seed, is filthy and unfit for the raising of a child. Marise comes across as rude and unpleasant when she finally wakes up and meets Valerie.
If this archetypal bohemian woman does not come off well in “Funny Little Snake,” then neither does a different character type that runs throughout the collection: the self-satisfied man. This type of man, typically an unreflective husband, appears in different guises throughout the collection, ranging from the appealing, charismatic, yet careless man, represented by Martin Donoghue in “Men” and Frank in “Old Friends,” to colder types, namely Gil in “Funny Little Snake.” If Marise makes for an indifferent mother, then Gil fails similarly as a father. Although he does not live with his daughter, he seems to have little interest in Robyn when she does come to stay and expects Valerie to take care of her. He is a particularly self-absorbed type of career academic, a selfish man who cares only about himself and his career. With parents like these, it is not surprising that Robyn has turned out the way she has, but Valerie represents a ray of hope, a warmer, more engaged parental figure in the young girl’s life.
Some of the most effective stories in the collection involve women facing moments of decision or revelation in their lives. These women range in age from the teenage Cecilia in “Cecilia Awakened” to the middle-aged protagonists of stories like “Dido’s Lament” and “The Other One.” “Cecilia Awakened” is one of the stronger stories in the collection and is filled with subtle and eye-opening observations. In that story, Cecilia is on vacation with her family in Florence, Italy. Her older parents are somewhat eccentric: her mother is an author of historical novels and her father is a university librarian. They are private people who have created a rich, intellectual world for themselves and for Cecilia, a world that, until the beginning of the story, she has embraced. During their trip to Florence, however, the façade of this carefully constructed life starts to crack and Cecilia begins to understand just how far outside of mainstream life her parents have positioned her.
The cracks come early in the story and build up until Cecilia can no longer ignore them. The first sign comes when Cecilia realizes that Signora Petricci, the proprietor of the hotel where the family is staying, may not think highly of them. Although Cecelia’s parents have stayed at the hotel before and like to think of Signora Petricci as an old friend, Cecilia detects in the proprietor’s face a hint of disapproval, signaling impatience, disdain, or mere indifference. Cecilia imagines, in detecting this subtle hint on the Signora’s face, that the proprietor is thinking about her father as a “fussy little man.” The next morning at breakfast, already feeling a sense of hostility from their surroundings, Cecilia observes a group of Italian girls at the next able and thinks that, unlike these girls who look like they fit in, Cecilia herself is out of place. “There was something wrong with her top,” the narrator relates, aligning her voice with Cecilia’s perspective, “and with her trousers, they didn’t fit, or they didn’t look right.” Comparing herself with these girls, Cecelia realizes that they belong to the world and that she and her parents do not.
After this realization, Cecilia spills hot chocolate on her top and then continues to sulk for the rest of the vacation. In narrating the rest of the trip, Hadley keeps the story close to Cecilia’s perspective. Cecilia is on the verge of making a major realization in her life, but because of her youth and inexperience, she does not know exactly what is happening to her. By sticking with Cecilia’s thoughts, Hadley allows the reader to experience the process of this young girl grasping for understanding and achieving something of a breakthrough.
Cecelia’s final revelation comes at the end of the story when her father insists on seeing a collection of frescoes in the crypt of a church. At the moment of their visit, though, a church service begins and the frescoes are off limits. Cecilia’s father, however, insists on seeing the frescoes anyway, which the family does, despite the displeasure of an old monk guarding the crypt. As Hadley describes Cecilia’s feelings, the girl “hated the old man [the monk], but felt in the churning of her adolescent shyness that he was right: this was his place, not hers.” In that moment, her sense of her distance from the rest of the world is complete. In many ways, this is the essential realization that comes to most people during adolescence, and Hadley presents Cecilia’s situation as both universal and highly specific to herself.
After the Funeral and Other Stories was published in 2023 to rave reviews. Calling Hadley a “supremo of the short story,” Kate Kellaway, writing for the Guardian, praised the writer’s technique of “non-elaboration,” in which she leaves space in the stories for the reader to “fill in the gaps, make judgments on the quiet.” Comparing the pleasures of reading Hadley’s stories to that of reading Jane Austen, Kellaway also praised Hadley’s “superb” skills in creating a sense of atmosphere in her stories.
These sentiments were echoed by many other reviewers, including Lauren LeBlanc for the Boston Globe. LeBlanc called Hadley a “consummate storyteller, equally at home writing novels and short stories” as well as “dependably brilliant.” LeBlanc praised After the Funeral for the same qualities the reviewer had found in Hadley’s other writing, finding it “impeccably literary, emotionally satisfying, yet unexpectedly unsettling.” Similarly, Yvonne C. Garrett, writing for The Brooklyn Rail, found the book to be “both a greater introduction to [Hadley’s] work and for [people] already familiar with Hadley . . . a great addition.” Praising the book for its “deft and often beautiful prose” and its “astute but compassionate characterization,” Garrett concluded that Hadley had produced a “wonderful collection.”
These qualities that the critics found in After the Funeral made the book a notable presence on year-end lists, including Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2023, among other honors. The praise this collection received the year it was published only confirmed what Hadley’s newest readers and oldest fans already knew: Hadley, with her signature mix of empathy and relentlessly dispassionate observation, is arguably one of the true contemporary masters of the short story form.