“There are so many dodgy, unsavoury things that happen to young girls on the brink of adulthood,” says Tessa Hadley. “Of course, in some periods it would have been unthinkable for ‘nice’, well-educated girls to get into certain scrapes.” But in 1950, when Hadley’s exquisite new novella The Party is set? “Oh yes, by then I have a store cupboard full of possible jeopardies for girls who put themselves in danger while looking to grow up, looking for stuff to happen to them. Inevitably some of that stuff isn’t very pretty… but you’re using it all to grow up on.”
Over the phone from Cardiff, the critically adored 68-year-old author – whose eight novels and six short story collections often focus on “abrupt swerves” taken in “ordinary lives” – sounds a little like an old-school agony aunt: warm, insightful and crisply sensible. I can almost feel my vertebrae being nudged into more alert formation as she talks. Like anyone granted a private audience with an agony aunt, I want to talk about sex, which often disrupts her characters’ lives. She’s happy to oblige. “Sex has always seemed such an interesting subject to me,” she says. “It still does. It’s the place where the animal body erupts into the life of the thinking mind, into the conscious person. That’s got to be exciting and mysterious.”
Because Hadley didn’t publish her first novel – Accidents in the Home (2002) – until she was a 46-year-old mother of three older children, readers unfamiliar with her work might look at jacket photographs of her smiling demurely in floral frocks and not realise her books crackle with a subversive erotic charge.
Reviewing Sunstroke and Other Stories (2007), Irish author Anne Enright wrote that:
“Monogamy is not a virtue” in Hadley’s fictional world, “and the loss of it is not mourned. The characters in this collection make their – sometimes wonderful – mistakes as easily after they have children as before.” As Hadley’s tales tend to be set in the mid to late twentieth century, Enright notes that: “This may be a generational thing – her people tend to marry young – or it may have something to do with money (adultery is an expensive business, after all). These characters live at the bohemian and academic edges of the middle classes. Someone always has a summer cottage, for example. Indeed, the summer cottage, in three of these stories, is where desire is born and a new future begins.”
“Sex is the place where the animal body erupts into the life of the thinking mind”
The Party is set in Bristol in the postwar gloom when many young men were still being sent abroad to defend the crumbling British empire. The two sisters at the novella’s sticky heart are lower middle-class girls with bohemian aspirations. Their grandfather was a coalminer but their father is petitioning to join the Masons. Moira is an art student and men are drawn to her “sophisticated allure”. Two years younger, French student Evelyn feels “girlish and gauche” alongside her self-possessed sibling. “You shouldn’t talk too much,” Moira advises her. “Don’t talk right in their faces.”
Hadley introduces us to her young heroines on the night they attend a jazzy party thrown by Moira’s dashing friend Vincent, in a half-derelict old pub on the city’s docks. Evelyn is dressed in a black polo-neck and skin-tight black slacks with a wide red leather belt. Passing the bombed-out gaps in the urban scene, she longs for and fears the moment when she’ll shed her winter coat and reveal “her flat stomach and jutting hip bones… breasts thrust up in a new brassiere.”
At this party the girls meet two posh young men. Evelyn detects “something artificial and sneering barely concealed” beneath their expensive suits and subtle cologne. Hadley tells me it’s essential for a writer “to be clear about your characters, and clear about what you think of them, if you find something about them ridiculous”. So we’re invited to share her heroines’ mild revulsion as one of the “froggy featured” men gawps at them, reaching to light their cigarettes with manicured hands, “gold signet ring on one stubby finger”. Evelyn’s snap judgement is that “these two men didn’t care anything about art or literature, and she wished that Vincent hadn’t invited them; yet Moira was energised and spiky, as if she enjoyed their sparring.” The encounter will lead to what Hadley later tells me divides a “before from an after time.”
Until recently the professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University, Hadley is a crisp analyst when it comes to the mechanics of her work. She seems so certain of what makes sentences, stories and characters tick that it’s mildly surprising to remember it took her a long time to get started. “Years and years of trying and failing, but being unable to stop.” Born in Bristol in 1956, she’s the daughter of Geoff Nichols (a teacher and amateur trumpet player) and Mary (an amateur artist). She read English at Cambridge where she also earned a PGCE and briefly taught at a comprehensive school before starting a family with Eric Hadley, a teacher, lecturer and playwright. He had three sons from his first marriage and went on to have three more with Tessa. The couple co-authored two short story collections for children and Hadley kept working on her own novels while her boys were at school. Her frustration built until in 1993 she finally signed up for the creative writing course where she ended up teaching.
“I was embarrassed to be going on it,” she tells me. None of the writers she admired took such courses. “And yet I was desperate to TEST something. I couldn’t go on failing and failing again.” What she found was an audience, which enabled her to hear that “some of the language I was using was too old fashioned”. Although she loved Jane Austen and Henry James – and modelled her own prose on that of Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys – she was forced to accept that she was doing the literary equivalent of “dressing up in your mother’s high heels. The world had changed and it needed a new language.”
She found her own voice and – even though literary acclaim tends to go to “big issue” writers – fully owned her fascination with the dynamics of women’s intimate relationships. “I would love to write a state of Britain novel,” she sighs. “I love politics and I’m intensely political. I would like to be a satirist. But that’s just not how my mind is composed. So eventually you learn to get on with what YOU have to say and you get this wonderful moment when you realise: Ah-ha! That is ME on the page!”
Many of Hadley’s stories pull sharp focus onto women’s role in the home and how it diminishes them in the eyes of society. She’s always been a terrific chronicler of the way motherhood both expands and limits the appetite for life and love. Her pram-pushing characters often look with mingled envy and pity at their freer friends – conflicted sentiments that are often reflected right back at them.
“I really enjoyed exploring those issues in my novel Late in the Day (2019),” she says. “I was thinking of those men of my generation who were just so intellectually masculine, who had scorn for women’s fiction, scorn for what women read.” She thinks many men her age had “a sense there was something faintly disgusting and boring about motherhood and I love writing about that.” She also confesses to feeling the frisson of that dated gender clash. “I can even imagine a world where no men think like that any more,” she says. “So we can even have a little pang of nostalgia for some of that austere ferociousness. Those contemptuous intellectual values. There’s something to be said for it. It’s Beckett, isn’t it? Are there women who think like that? I don’t know, you know…? I think that’s a ‘man thing’.”
This makes me interested in how things felt for Hadley, going from school-run mum to literary celebrity in her mid-forties. “Well, it was beautiful compensation for middle age,” she says. “Just as the children were starting to grow up I had this lovely second life flowering.” Did it affect her marriage? She pauses, mulls, then says that the shift in her status “required some… negotiations. Those are always interesting, the negotiations, aren’t they?” Another pause. “I think my husband adapted well. But it took time. It took work – work from him really. Possibly I laid down some ultimatums… well that’s not quite right but I knew what I wanted. We rearranged.”
Hadley is acutely aware that her generation has witnessed a massive shift in the roles and goals of women. She has expressed doubt that she could write well about the lives of characters who lived before her own lifetime, but Evelyn and Moira in The Party come of age before she was born. What interested her about them was their membership to the first generation of women who felt an equal pressure from peers to gain sexual experiences as they did from their parents to “be good girls”.
She felt some of this push-pull herself when it came to writing about sex. “In my experience,” she says, “male writers are all too keen to write a sex scene and female writers often dread it.” Is that linked to the idea of self-exposure and shame? “Yes,
I think so,” says Hadley. “But shame is often quite a good indicator that you’re onto something that matters. If it’s uncomfortable then it’s probably truthful, certainly interesting.”
For the first fifty years of her life Hadley says she was “an inveterate fantasiser”. Although “a very strict director of my fantasies. They couldn’t be implausible. There would never be some man saying ‘Miss, take your glasses off, I’ve been worshipping you from afar!’ No! I’d know that person would never say that.” She thinks she built up much of her storytelling muscle crafting these fantasies. Then, in her fifties, she says her fantasy world “kind of vanished. Maybe it was the menopause. But maybe I was just putting it all into my writing.”
Hadley is one of the few women novelists my male friends love
To confront the issue, she wrote a short story for the New Yorker called “The Surrogate” in which a shy, smart girl at college daydreams about her lecturer. “She really fancies him but feels he’s way out of her league,” says Hadley. “Then she meets a gas fitter who looks a lot like him and has a bit of a thing with him. But then the lecturer asks her out. She ends up married to him and it turns out to be a real marriage like every marriage. He leaves his socks on the floor. And she ends up fantasising about the gas fitter!” Hadley laughs. “I hugely enjoyed writing that.”
She notes that our fantasies are changing, though. The mood of The Party was partially inspired by the story of how artist Paula Rego (1935-2022) met her husband, Victor Willing, at a party. Willing was married at the time and seven years older. “They spoke no words, it was almost a rape,” says Hadley. “Yet Paula Rego was just honoured, excited and flattered by that experience. They married, had kids and she worshipped his painting, his art.” I hear a shrug down the line from Cardiff. “Then how complicating that SHE was the one who turned out to be the great painter, not him. He then got MS and died young. Fascinating!”
Inside the head of one of the characters in The Party we discover a woman’s response to sex that isn’t exactly rape, but isn’t exactly out of the Mills & Boon playbook either. It’s quite refreshing to read a story in which a woman experiences sexual pleasure in that era. “She enjoyed it, yes, up to a certain point – which I think is usual for a first time,” says Hadley. “I enjoyed writing the courage it took for her to KNOW that for herself. But I was most pleased with the moment where she is there in the dark, feeling the carved oak headboard of the bed above her with her fingertips, smelling the skin of his naked back. That is the moment when she becomes aware something extraordinary has happened.”
Slipping back under her professorial hat, Hadley tells me that: “There are parts of sexual experience that won’t go into words, thank goodness. It is not a words thing. Therefore what you’ve got to do is surround it with objective correlatives – with material stuff, realisations, so that in the middle of those words and touches and perceptions and smells the thing you can’t put onto the page will come about.”
I wonder if it’s this frankness that makes Hadley one of the few women novelists my male friends love. She’s delighted to live through an era in which “the small number of men who DO read fiction are now reading women writers much more openly and generously than ever before.” Then she articulates another little thrill she worries she shouldn’t feel. “I love my women readers,” she says. “But here’s an awful confession. I do feel a little twinge of double pleasure, double victory when I’m read by men.”
Helen Brown is an arts journalist writing regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Daily Mail
