Output details

Clever Girl

Clever Girl is a novel of a woman’s ‘ordinary’ life in England in the second half of the twentieth century. The research questions included: 1 How to write, uncharacteristically, in the first person – it seemed to me that my usual practice of ironic distance in the third person would make it impossible to tell the story as if it was important enough. 2 How could the character’s nature, investing her story with an almost heroic resonance, be reconciled with the novel’s perspective, both mapping her individual struggles onto the wider context of changes – political, cultural, educational, social - for women in Britain in those decades? 3 What was the right, the fresh form that could deliver new insights into a not unfamiliar story (education derailed by pregnancy, experiments in relationships, tussles to claim autonomy and authority? 4 How can a novel usefully act as a form of record, in investigating a particular historical personal dilemma? –. The novel investigates a specific individual’s nature (as I’ve invented it), taking hold of her intelligence at some point like pulling a sword from a stone – and then her being waylaid, en route to her brave adventure, by her biology (like a Green Knight?). The novel reads without the multiple perspectives that have seemed important for me to use at other times. The reader should intuit a further perspective behind Stella’s own – not critical of hers, or undercutting it, but surrounding it and presenting it as an ‘example’, even as a ‘type.’