Bainbridge, Beryl 1933–

Ms Bainbridge, an English novelist, evokes in her fiction the world of Liverpool's working class with what has been called melancholy realism. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 21-22.)

[In The Dressmaker (published in America as The Secret Glass), Beryl Bainbridge has evoked] with ruthless realism the darkest days of 1944—and, a million miles away from heroics, [adumbrated] in one grim little tale the cataclysm that war created in working-class society….

To have disinterred so many nasty things in the woodshed and yet evoked a workaday image of Liverpudlian optimism and resilience, in so few claustrophobic pages, is a remarkable achievement. Miss Bainbridge's imagination pushes her towards nightmare, and her eye for detail is macabre; but because she writes with taut, matter-of-fact simplicity this seems as authentic as any contemporary image the camera has preserved of that mercifully...

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