The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Bainbridge, Beryl
Bainbridge, Beryl
(
1934
–
),
novelist, born in Liverpool, and educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, Liverpool. She began her career as an actress, and her first novels (A Weekend with Claude,
1967
; Another Part of the Wood,
1968
) were little noticed, but in the 1970s a series of original and idiosyncratic works established her reputation. These include The Dressmaker (
1973
), The Bottle Factory Outing (
1974
), Young Adolf (
1978
), and Winter Garden (
1980
). Short, laconic, and rich in black comedy, they deal with the lives of characters at once deeply ordinary and highly eccentric, in a world where violence and the absurd lurk beneath the daily routine of urban domesticity, evoked in carefully observed detail: in Injury Time (
1977
), for example, a quietly illicit dinner party becomes headline news when invaded by a gang of criminals on the run who take its...
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