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Meeting the English

In Meeting the English Clanchy, previously a writer of short-stories and poems, extends her range into long-form fiction. The book draws on the ‘Hampstead Novel’ of the mid-late twentieth century and the plots of Shakespearean comedy, especially A Midsummer’s Night Dream, to produce a text which recasts the Hampstead Novel in a feminist and class-conscious light. Clanchy revisits the themes of immigration and identity which she explored in What Is She Doing Here?’ and of the impact of long illness and death through the characters of Struan, a naif Scottish boy, Phillip, a dying Welsh Playwright, and Shirin, his beautiful Iranian trophy wife. In redrawing the gender and class norms of the Hampstead Novel, and linking this genre with the reversals and transformations of Shakespeare’s comedies, Clanchy throws light on the redundancy of the hegemonic plot of the return to social and sexual norms. Meeting the English reveals both how power relations can be re-formed in the imagination and how those re-formed relations would recast entrenched assumptions about belonging and Englishness