In past centuries, the fin de siècle has coincided with remarkable literary moments in both Europe and America. The sixteenth century ended in the eloquence of Elizabethan drama; the seventeenth, with the first echoes of the rhetoric of reason; the eighteenth, with the French Revolution and the rise of romanticism; and the nineteenth, with decadence, symbolism, and modernism. The end of our century, when literature is defined as postmodern, seems to invite a comparison with the 1890s, when modernism flourished. In this article, I will analyze the connections between those two periods in relation to Bildungsromane written by women.

The history of the genre in the West has been well studied. Maurice Beebe established the tradition of self-analytical writing by artists in the permanent tension between the parameters of “life” and “art,” which he described as the “Sacred Fount and the Ivory Tower.” The artist's struggle between those worlds has concerned writers of the genre from its beginning with Goethe and Rousseau until the great examples of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. Other scholars have noted that philosophical individualism and positivism and Matthew Arnold's ideas about the social functions of art have influenced the genre. Arnold regarded the expression of new ideas as “the business of the philosopher” rather than the poet. Those views contributed to the process that began in the last decades of the past century, by which “language died as the natural medium of truth.” Alienated from their traditional responsibilities, artists turned into demons or dandies in Baudelaire's mythology and into moral decadents in the English version of the crisis.

The “dissolution” of form that characterizes modernism can be traced to the earlier generation of decadents—Walter Pater, George Moore, and above all, Oscar Wilde. It emerges in the decadent's passion for a self-made life in conflict with society. William Butler Yeats described the generation as tragic. Art became the central subject of their writing, taking precedence over life. The artist was the only possible hero for a work of art; those writers no longer believed in the values of the past; literature could no longer imagine characters of heroic stature （Praz）. For many decadents—Oscar Wilde is a most obvious example—life became a “mode of fiction.” Virginia Woolf says of modernism: “They [the artists] cannot tell stories because they do not believe the stories are true.” In “The Leaning Tower” she comments: “the modernist male writers respond to the perceived loss of a common ground by turning inward to their own experiences.” Women writers, marginal in the modernist tradition and not invited to share in the theoretical discussion of the Bildungsromane, provided their own theoretical interpretations of that genre and its tradition. Most important, they practiced the art of self-expression. A careful look at the tradition of women's writing shows that they had written the genre for a long time and for their own artistic purposes—and continued to do so after modernism.

Bildungsromane serve specific cultural and political functions for modernist women writers. Women use the genre for self-creation and self-understanding; not as an escape from the real world （as do male writers of modernism） but as a way to approach experience with the hope of changing it. I do not think the tension between fount and tower applies to women's writing, or at least not in the same way. We must find a new model to accommodate metaphorically women's efforts at self-expression.

A number of recent studies have dealt with women's Bildungsromane. I want to develop my argument about women's Bildungsromane using the model established by Susan Gubar in 1983. In her study of Katherine Mansfield's stories, Gubar argues that with the advent of modernism, women writers at the turn of the century overcame the anxieties of their Victorian predecessors. They begin to write explicit celebrations of female culture for the first time in Western history. Gubar recognizes three main shifts in perspective that enabled feminist-modernists to reshape the genre: the revision of domestic mythology, the creation of fantasies of a woman's language, and the establishment of the mother-daughter relationship as a release from the solipsism of individual consciousness. She defines that sudden emergence of a specifically feminine art as the appearance of a female “utopian imperative.” Ten years later, Pamela L. Caughie confirms Gubar's suggestions when discussing Virginia Woolf's work: “For the modernist the lack of belief in their stories leads to despair of something lost. For Woolf, this lack of belief leads to affirmation of something gained…. Woolf responds by adapting her aesthetic model, making it more flexible and responsive to change.”

Other feminist critical readings of the period seem to question Gubar's positive revision of female modernism. Penny Brown argues that women's texts contain modernist female writers’ conviction of the presence of a “poison at the source” of woman's experience. Gubar's suggestive “utopian imperative” seems to clash with Brown's careful interpretation of many modernist texts in which the frustrated heroine ends up retreating from reality into the natural world or into the world of childhood. The heroine is forced to find an escape from her feelings of guilt and madness as well as from a powerful consciousness of entrapment and suffocation. Although Penny Brown's reading of these modernist works is convincing, the simultaneous emergence of a “utopian imperative” among modernist women writers cannot be denied. The fictional female characters in many American and European stories of the period confirm a literary destiny that is simultaneously and paradoxically “poisoned” and hopeful.

Gubar applies her arguments beyond the modernist period in which the female “utopian imperative” emerges. A few decades after the initial moment in which women writers reshape the genre to accommodate women's Weltanschauung, Gubar sees the old disillusion and disbelief in the value of women's culture returning. During the First World War women's talents and capacities were recognized, but during and after the Second World War it became increasingly obvious that power remained in men's hands and that a “feminine mystique had substituted female self-definition” （Gubar）. Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, Plath's The Bell Jar, or Lessing's The Golden Notebook demonstrate the female writer's loss of hope in her achievement of self-expression and her despair about change in women's lives.

Gubar saw a strong rebirth of the “utopian imperative,” a return of the celebratory mood in writers such as Alice Walker, Margaret Drabble, and Margaret Atwood, who published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In that second wave, the recognition and exploration of the female “utopian imperative” obsessively becomes the central subject in much of women's writing in English. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the exploration and celebration of women's literary achievements, women's self-expression, seem gradually and significantly to dominate fiction, as a substitute for the romance or the love plot of the past. By rejecting the obsolete love plot, women writers increasingly have tended to see their literary rebirth in terms of verbal survival and artistic self-realization. The awareness of women's newly achieved capacity for self-expression and self-projection in fictional texts expresses metaphorically the hope of establishing their cultural presence in the discourse of Western civilization. Women's recovery of speech is constantly celebrated in female writing of the 1970s and 1980s. The contemporary insistence on the creative potential of language has also encouraged that development. Many texts could support this argument: those of Rebecca West and Kathleen Raine in England; of Maxine Hong Kingston, Lee Smith, Jamaica Kincaid, or Mary Gordon in the United States; and of Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Joy Kogawa in Canada. Those texts represent and express different cultures, but they all insist on the personal salvation of their characters through literary achievement.

It is useful to re-examine the questions Gubar raised in light of the female Bildungsromane written and published in the last few years. Gayle Green supports Gubar's description of the emergence and decay of the woman artist's voice since the beginning of the century, but she observes a loss of the “utopian imperative” and the presence of a new hopelessness in the literary representation of female identity. In the last chapter in her book, aptly titled “Whatever Happened to Feminist Fiction?” Greene insists that “[n]ovels of the [late] eighties—even by Lessing, Atwood, and Drabble—no longer envision new possibilities…. Postfeminist backlash is … real.”

Although Greene's denunciation of a postfeminist backlash may apply to the social and political dimensions of feminism, to the real facts of women's emancipation, and also to some literary texts, I believe it is highly debatable whether it can be applied to most writing by women today. I think Gubar's model and Greene's conclusions should be read in the context of some publications by women writers of the 1990s. There may be exceptions, but I think that the emergence of women's voices in this century, particularly since the unexpected eloquence acquired in the 1970s and early 1980s, has empowered women and has produced a change of plot from which there is no return. The “utopian imperative” may have lost some of its initial energy in the recent past, but the feminist backlash can be of only limited literary consequence. Successful publication, popular support, and academic postmodernist canonization of literatures from the margins have supported the change in woman's rhetoric. The experience of self-expression and self-understanding is, I believe, here to stay. The writer's position may have changed from initial anger, defiance, and bliss to a more balanced awareness of the need for negotiation and survival, but women's texts have lost their innocence forever. In some texts of the 1990s, the initial fruitful obsession with woman's “utopian imperative” is giving way to the search for subject matter beyond the recognition of woman's verbal power, and some writers are looking into female action in a wider context than the self. One can easily confirm that many women writers today are trying to imagine their female characters as creative subjects of their stories, and as active artificers in defining women's space in the imagination of our own fin de siècle.

Anita Brookner's two Bildungsromane of the 1990s, A Closed Eye （1991） and Fraud （1992）, exemplify the irreversible change in women's writing. Compared with her previous fiction, Brookner, in those two novels, offers an important change in cultural perception. Read in the light of the theoretical models I have discussed, Brookner's change in those texts could confirm the development of the rich tradition of the twentieth-century Bildungsroman. We can understand the change in her cultural perception only as a consequence of the groundbreaking achievements of feminist writing that have transformed women's literary destinies forever.

In not subscribing to any available form of the feminist “utopian imperative,” Brookner's art shows a permanent tension between two incompatible and contradictory notions that could be defined as the classical versus the romantic, the modern versus the postmodern, the historical versus the utopian. It raises the central questions of women's writing today: Is the function of art the evocation of what is permanent, or is art entitled to suggest change? Authors of various attitudes and beliefs have defended both positions at different times. Contemporary feminist criticism, profoundly influenced by postmodernism, values the complexity of literature “not because it expresses ‘the human condition’ but because it exposes the world as constructed and therefore as capable of change” （Greene）. Writers such as Margaret Drabble confirm that belief by adding that “[m]any people read novels in order to find patterns or images for a possible future” （Greene）. The paradoxical struggle between a belief in permanence and a simultaneous need for change lies at the core of the tensions present in Brookner's pre-1990s fiction. Her novels concentrate on making such a balance convincing given the characters’ internal and external conditions. Her scrupulous artistic honesty prevents her from providing easier, more hopeful, and utopian destinies for her characters who are forced to limit themselves to the resources with which they are originally endowed. Yet I believe that in A Closed Eye and Fraud she achieves a new creative balance in the tensions she has been working with since she wrote her first novel.

Memory and utopia, permanence and change are two ways of defining the relationship of the writer and the reader to time. In the past, lack of creative time and space has been the subject of Brookner's claustrophobic fiction. By forcing her heroines to become permanent outsiders, she turned feminine isolation and loneliness into a myth of universal significance. Finding a metaphor for the author's attitudes in biblical models, one critic sees her heroines and their fixed roles as contemporary incarnations of the universal exile: “Deceived, disappointed, deeply introspective, and deprived, [her characters] wander through the maze of contemporary experience, shouldering the burdens of being stranded in a hostile, often meaningless world … they embark on an endless and cyclical journey, impelled by nostos without realized destinations: for them, there is no promised land, to ‘home’” （Hosmer）. Tired of the repetitively sorrowful world that characterizes Brookner's novels, other critics, particularly feminist ones, have expressed their sense of frustration.

A Closed Eye and Fraud break the pattern of Brookner's previous writing. Unexpectedly, the reader encounters two characters in those books for whom the writer suggests a way out of their limiting conditions, a way out of their passivity and their loneliness. Two different concepts of time are now sequentially combined in these texts. The atemporal world those characters initially inhabit, the world in which most of Brookner's heroines live, is eventually turned into a context in which time acquires specific values and lends itself to achievement, to improvement, and to actual change. Brookner's reinterpretation of time becomes one key element in the transformations she introduces into these two novels. Like her previous writings and like much of women's literature in this century, these texts consist of a long series of circular reflections on the past, connected to the present by the character's circular and always repetitive reflections.

Feminist theory has defined women's literary quest as tending to be circular, just as biological and social cycles define women's life and culture. In the texts under discussion, that circularity is empowered and given new significance. Feminist critics such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous have discovered the potential in that enriching cyclic perception; they see it as the woman writer's way of disrupting patriarchal linearity, Western teleology, and of introducing an alternate “sexual vocabulary.” But if “[gynocriticism] involves and invokes structural or imagistic circularity” and represents the “limitless energy of the female libido,” feminism also recognizes the ambivalent nature of the cycle's symbolic value. On the one hand it represents perfection, or as Cixous states in defining l'écriture feminine: “the cycle is broken only to create another cycle, in an endless process that knows no closure” （Greene）. The conception can also be understood as negative, as a “vicious cycle.” Brookner's two novels of the 1990s offer a subtle example of the transformation of feminine “vicious cycles” into feminist open structures; from claustrophobic, matrophobic texts to liberatory revisions; from structural worlds fixed to the past to circular processes capable of accommodating and stimulating the future.

Perceptions of space are also interpreted differently in these two novels. If the heroines in both texts are finally rescued back into a world of sequential change, they are also removed from a sterile, airless space into one that will allow for survival. Both heroines, Harriet and Anna, find their redemption in foreign countries, far away from the dreary landscapes of London's respectable middle-class boroughs and from the stuffy homes most Brookner characters inevitably inherit. Earlier Brookner heroines, from Edith in Hotel du Lac to Rachel in A Friend from England, travel abroad, yet they always return to their old worlds. Margaret Diane Stetz suggests that in some of her novels Brookner uses the paradigm established by Woolf in The Voyage Out. “Brookner draws on Woolf's structure of a voyage to foreign parts that will parallel a more dangerous act of mental traveling into the individual psyche.” But unlike Woolf, Brookner saves her characters in the end: “Brookner refuses to take the Woolfian course of decreeing a resolution. Her Rachel （in A Friend from England） … does not die. She comes back to England, presumably to face over and over again both the peril and the lure of letting oneself ‘sink.’ To the reader who knows Woolf's oeuvre, Rachel's willingness—like Edith Hope's in Hotel du Lac—to make that daily effort must seem doubly brave” （Stetz）. Even though Stetz insists on the importance of survival for Brookner's characters, they are still a long way from making their nostos in any creative way, as critic Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. points out.

Unlike most Brookner heroines, either trapped in their space or engaged in apparently unprogressive and endless interior voyages that end in reluctant returns after a time abroad, Harriet and Anna, in A Closed Eye and Fraud, do not return to their homes. The change these two novels introduce affect precisely the voyage's final destination, both external and internal. Their decisions not to return home seem to be a necessary step in the acquisition of self-understanding. In both cases, the feminine spaceless cycle of sterile repetition is opened up into new scenarios of wisdom, of personal growth, and of creativity.

Both tales are excellent examples of the female Bildungsroman at the fin de siècle, truly thorough investigations of women's culture. Brookner's training as a professional art historian of international reputation has very probably influenced the rigorous method of her writing and contributed to turning her into the kind of artist-observer she is, a writer who returns over and over again to her familiar landscapes and looks at them from many possible perspectives. Having rewritten the same subject for many years, her analysis has reached extraordinary precision in her later novels. Furthermore, her patient observation has produced new insights into women's lives and important discoveries about human experience. Her alertness to the complexity, the ambiguity, and duplicity of all experience allows her to reveal and convey the opaqueness and the ambivalence of facts and feelings with a remarkable artistic honesty and truth. Although her characters tend to be heroes and villains simultaneously, the important moral differences in their attitudes and in their actions are never blurred. Because those are recurrent features in Brookner's writing, the apparent differences between these last Bildungsromane and Brookner's previous ones seem slight at first glance. A closer look discloses subtly disguised, radical new approaches in both style and artistic purpose.

The narrative strategies Brookner introduces in her 1990s novels advance the important improvements occurring in those works. The beginnings of both A Closed Eye and Fraud relate directly to their endings. In A Closed Eye, Brookner first presents Harriet writing a letter to her dead friend's daughter Lizzie, inviting Lizzie to spend a holiday with her in Switzerland where she has decided to remain after the death of her daughter and her husband. The letter brings Lizzie to Switzerland, changes Harriet's perceptions, and gives her the chance to find sense in her life, to mature and survive. Fraud begins with a police search for the disappeared heroine, and the mystery is not solved until the end of the novel. Both novels have tightly knit structures that help focus the writer's purposes and emphasize the characters’ awakenings to new understandings of their functions and identity. The outcome of Brookner's intense exploration of female experience seems apparently unspectacular. Like most of her stories, these narratives are told in the third person, in an extremely flexible third person that permits the narrative to shift swiftly from the perspective of one character to those of others without ruptures and without the narrative self-consciously exhibiting its own abilities. The heroines’ point of view controls the narrative in both texts, particularly in A Closed Eye; their visions become serious explorations into their relationships with their parents, friends, and possible loves, and in the case of Harriet in A Closed Eye, also with her husband and her daughter Imogen.

Harriet Lytton, the heroine of A Closed Eye, inhabits Brookner's familiar external and internal scenarios. Like so many other Brookner characters, she is imagined as a good daughter and an obedient girl, and later as a good wife to Freddie Lytton, the rich, much older husband, to whom her parents marry her. Though obedient and submissive to both parents and husband, Harriet openly questions the values of her goodness. She sees herself critically reflected in Dickens's heroine Little Dorrit, “But Little Dorrit was beginning to horrify her…. An impossible woman, she thought, with a slight but definite sorrow. But good as I always wanted to be good.” The limitations of Harriet's submissiveness are explored and contrasted to the attitudes of other women, in particular to those of her less than submissive daughter, Imogen. The roots of Harriet's conformity are in her quiet childhood and the selfishness of her parents who grow tired of running a small shop and encourage their obedient daughter to marry a rich friend of the father, who cannot offer her real satisfaction. Conscious of her parents’ selfishness, Harriet sees them simultaneously in positive and negative terms: they loved and protected her but also thoughtlessly married her off to the wrong man. She continues to see them, and to love them, but neither Harriet nor her parents can feel comfortable again in each other's company: “Now we meet on uncertain terms, with little enough to say to each other.”

Harriet's narrative is centered mostly in her rather unhappy marriage, “a form of honorable retirement, with pleasant amenities to which she had previously had no access.” Brookner applies great understanding and precision to the analysis of Harriet's husband. Although Harriet explicitly recognizes the limitations of her marriage, she also acknowledges her own weakness and her need for the protection, stability, and affection she finds in her husband. Brookner allows Harriet to investigate the consolations to be found in a bad marriage, as well as the losses implied in what could have been a better one, such as that of her lifelong friend Tessa to the attractive Jack, who is defined as “the villainous hero of romantic fiction, the cruel lover who breaks hearts and thrills women.” Harriet's growing physical dislike of, even repugnance for, her old husband contrasts brutally to the erotic dreams Tessa's husband arouses in her. But what prevails is the consciousness of Jack's inconsistency as a husband, his neglect of Tessa, and the vulgarity of the woman he finally chooses as a lover.

The discussion of Harriet's experience of married life reflects Brookner's by now well-known attitudes toward love and sexuality. The character's longing, her sexual dreams, and her never satiated desire become a universal metaphor for the suffering and loss associated with women's destiny. The elusiveness, the sheer lack of permanence of her potential lover, his ambivalence toward his own wife, and his choice of a lover become yet another version of Brookner's persistently recurring theme that deceptions inevitably lie behind the promise of apparent sexual satisfaction and imaginable happiness. All the possible lovers, all the attractive young husbands and wives in her novels end up deceiving and frustrating the heroines’ hopes. The two younger and attractive men in A Closed Eye and Fraud are no exception, and the only vaguely consoling male character in A Closed Eye is Harriet's unattractive, if not openly disgusting, husband. Because his age prevents him from being desirable, he can offer the heroine some help and generous protection, the only satisfaction a woman can expect from a man in a Brookner story. Tessa's marriage to a sexually attractive man is destined from the beginning to the sordid kind of failure the author always associates with youth, beauty, and sexual passion. Again and again treachery, deceit, and loneliness are encountered where one would expect a natural attraction to emerge, and tragedy is often associated with the pursuit of sexual satisfaction. It occurs in A Closed Eye with Tessa's illness and death and with Imogen's guilty bleeding and death as a result of her suggested sexual promiscuity. Brookner cannot come to terms with any version of the traditional literary romance, nor can she suggest a different one. When her heroines manage to break the vicious cycles to which they have always been destined, no element of sexual reconciliation is suggested for them in these novels, no promise of redemptive love. These heroines will be authorized to survive and to find new destinies; but like the women writers of the late 1970s and 1980s who project the liberation of the literary heroine by celebrating women's access to speech, Brookner's heroines will be saved without the help of a man. Sexuality, one of the “elements central to the concept of selfhood” （[John F.] Desmond） remains largely unexplored in Brookner's texts.

Although Harriet's sexual alienation and her incapacity to approach Jack may sound familiar to the Brookner reader, a radically new element seems present in her wish to overcome her desire. That decision has to do with her loyalty to Tessa, with the importance attached to female friendship in this text. Friendship among women is one of the most interesting novelties this book offers. One of the few blessings in Harriet's melancholy existence is the company of her friends, the loyalty they feel for each other throughout their lives: “True friendship between women is rare, I know, but we were never disloyal.” When Tessa prematurely dies of cancer, Harriet confirms the strong ties that bind these women: “She had felt so close to them, the girls, as Freddie used to call them. They had spent the afternoon together, unwilling to part, in silence mostly.” The company of women, always present in the story, turns into a central metaphor at the end of the book when Tessa's daughter Lizzie helps Harriet survive her loss and desolation.

This novel further expands the understanding of the female experience, by exploring motherhood. The realm of affectionate experience Brookner usually allows her characters has been limited in Harriet's case to a mother, a few friends, and a potential lover. Exploring motherhood from the mother's perspective is an interesting contribution to the tradition of the female Bildungsroman. With few exceptions such as Tillie Olsen's stories “I Stand Here Ironing” and “To Tell a Riddle,” early women modernist writers as well as recent artists have generally projected themselves as daughters. Mother to her child Imogen and surrogate mother to her friend Tessa's daughter Lizzie, Harriet enjoys the delights of motherhood but also the increasing deceptions of her own child's growth into adolescence, when Imogen inevitably disappoints her parents. Imogen is the least attractive and perhaps the least convincing character in the novel, and she clearly is derived from the stereotypical female villains that Brookner introduces in practically all of her parables. Her selfishness and lack of feelings remain obscure and difficult to understand. Lizzie is far more interesting. An unhappy childhood, an early passion for reading, an open dislike of Imogen, as well as a recognized incapacity to tell lies are the signs that will enable her to become the new Brookner heroine. Most significant is her early wish to be a writer when she reaches the age of forty, one with strong similarities to Brookner: “‘I'm going to be a writer,’ said Lizzie… . ‘You'll have to travel a lot, and get experience, and so on,’ said Harriet. ‘Not really,’ said Lizzie…. ‘I shall get it all out of my head. ’”

The mother-daughter relationship, explored now from the perspective of the mother, investigates the suffering and deceptions of maternal love, and the final disillusionment is the daughter's tragic death. Every aspect of life must be deceptive to the heroine in Brookner's world; the rigid destinies Brookner makes available must victimize her characters and condemn them to loneliness and lovelessness. The writer's balanced analysis of all aspects of experience leaves little room in the characters’ life for rebellion or violent ruptures. In this text, the complexity of experience justifies Harriet's submission and explains her suffering. Until the very end there is no call for action in the text—just Harriet's permanent awareness of limitation and loss.

After submitting her heroine to much of the suffering and disappointment to be met in life, to a scarcely satisfactory marriage, to the loss of her only daughter to a life of vice and eventual death, and finally to the loneliness of widowhood, Brookner devises an unexpected ending, one that connects this story to her next one, Fraud. The ending lightens Harriet's tragic destiny and suggests the inauguration of a new belief in woman's destiny, a new feminine utopia. Brookner unexpectedly allows her fifty-three year-old heroine a form of survival. Away from her country and her dreary house and liberated by death from the sources of her intense suffering. Harriet renews a forgotten relationship with Lizzie, her dead friend's daughter and her daughter's only friend after her estrangement from her parents. Totally unlike the heroine's dead daughter, Lizzie promises new wisdom and affection. Lizzie has not seen Harriet for many years because Imogen had used her as a cover for her dissolute behavior; but after Imogen's death, Lizzie accepts Harriet's invitation to visit her in Switzerland, and she plays a key role in Harriet's final redemption from an inner voyage of suffering. When Harriet finally asks about Imogen's life and true death. Lizzie compassionately lies about Imogen's happiness before she died. She lies because selfless Harriet's main suffering stems from the fear that her estranged daughter was unhappy at the time of her death. After lying to Harriet, Lizzie despises herself, not for having lied, but for having hesitated to do so. By providing Harriet with a much needed peace, Lizzie becomes the knowledgeable daughter who helps her surrogate mother to survive, who supplies the consolation Harriet badly needs and deserves. In doing so, Lizzie bridges the wide gap between two generations of women; her wisdom and understanding promise her a very different future from Harriet's.

Reading Stendhal's passages on death to Harriet, Lizzie confirms the ultimate responsibility the author invests in her. Stendhal's words, mysterious in spite of their mutual efforts at translation, connect the women by their effort to understand the meaning of death. “Therefore death is nothing. It is a door which is either open or closed, it must be one or the other. There is no third way.” Only after Lizzie has interpreted Stendhal's words can Harriet come to terms with her suffering:

My life, she thought, an empty room. But she felt no pain, felt in fact the cautious onset of some kind of release, Vividly, she caught sight of Immy's face. She drew in a deep breath, laughed. There it was again, Immy's face as it had always been. She laughed again at the image of Immy's laughing face. Sinking on to the sofa she let the tears rain down. Never to lack of company again. All will be as before, she thought, and she wept in gratitude. When my little girl was young.

Like Demeter in Greek mythology, Harriet recovers the memory of her beloved child from death, recovers the innocence and spontaneity of motherly love. Harriet also recovers a new daughter in Lizzie, who though about to leave, promises to return: “'Goodbye. You'll come back? they inquired ardently. ‘Of course,’ she said, for a third time. This time it was not a lie.” That final truth, confirmed by the ever careful narrative voice, becomes for Harriet a promise of love and solidarity; she is not finally abandoned as heroines so often are in Brookner's novels. Lizzie will take care of Harriet and love her. Also, perhaps eventually, as is vaguely suggested, so will Lizzie's father.

The novel's ending lends itself to new expectations and open interpretations that profoundly modify the usually bleak final perspective of loneliness and lovelessness in which Brookner leaves her heroines at the end of their stories. It is a new voice for Brookner, that of a writer who has achieved a fresh vision after her long experience in dramatizing loneliness and closure. Harriet's affection for Lizzie promises to be fruitful and emphasizes the notions of surrogate motherhood and of female friendship.

Brookner continues to explore change in women's destiny in Fraud, published in 1992. Here she uses a device employed in other important female novels written in the last two decades: Atwood's Lady Oracle, Alison Lurie's Love and Friendship. Like Atwood's Joan Foster, Anne Durrant, the protagonist in Fraud, plans her own apparent death, only to survive in a better life. We encounter elements of female utopia and a parody of death that subvert the tradition and the literary genre that tended to specialize in the death of its heroines. Brookner's subversion of the convention in this novel becomes a new promising conclusion. Although the character in Fraud bears psychological features similar to the characters in her previous novels, Brookner dramatically transforms the destinies she devises for her heroines and their perceptions of themselves as creatures who must assume a tragic condition. She is far more daring and explicitly in Fraud than in her previous novel; we find the suggestion of an almost hopeful ending. At age fifty, Anna decides to disappear from her habitual English context, to do away with her old identity, to be born again, and to forget the self she does not feel comfortable with. After narrating her long life of loneliness and personal uncertainty, Brookner provides her heroine with the capacity to react against her dreary self.

Anna has also been a too obedient daughter who spent her best years looking after her mother. A few months after her mother's death, when the story begins, Anna is described as another of Brookner's lonely spinsters. “Like a daughter in a Victorian novel. Little Dorrit.” Initially seen through other characters, particularly through one of her few acquaintances, her mother's friend Mrs. Marsh, the elements of her uneasy identity are recognizable. The narrator admits that “Anna's feelings were masked by her terrifying all-purpose goodwill,” but the reader soon finds out, through Mrs. Marsh, that Anna's identity is more mysterious than it seems. She is in search of something, as proved by the sentence she often used that had puzzled her mother and continues to puzzle Mrs. Marsh: “It's not what I'm looking for.” Not knowing what she is looking for or her genuine interests and purposes, Anna accepts her mother's “hellish and absorbing” love and her “plaintive, pleading, gentle” possessiveness. Brookner traces this mother-daughter relationship with great care and subtlety. Anna is aware that “[t]hey had lived in a pleasant collaboration of unrealities, each secretly knowing that she was making a sacrifice for the other.” As the novel proceeds, the blame gradually but clearly falls on the mother who has used her weakness and her heart condition as an unspoken excuse to appropriate her daughter's life: “I've taken away her life… . I've ruined her life.” Amy Durrant recognizes it because “[Anna] had grown up with the knowledge that she must protect her mother from hurt, and that meant from the truth.” Anna reaches final awareness when she can admit to herself that in addition to the “mitral valve lesion … her mother's heart had failed in other ways.” After her mother had been dead for months, Anna continued to see her regularly in her meaningful dreams.

Her father's early death and her isolated life with her delicate mother meant there were few men in Anna's life. That absence, however, did not prevent her from understanding men with extraordinary clarity. She guesses correctly that her mother's late lover George Ainsworth, is cynical and unscrupulous; likewise she can distinguish the different aspects of Nick Marsh's vulgarity. Her real achievement is understanding Lawrence Halliday, the man she has always loved. She realizes “[h]e was betrayed by his looks, as she was by hears. If life had typecast her as a wise virgin, he was destined, by his irresolute blond handsomeness, to be the prey of women.” Halliday is also given a chance for self-expression. He recognizes Anna's value but allows himself to be seduced by a shallow and uninteresting woman, Vicky, whose shortcomings he soon realizes. In making Halliday recognize to himself his mistake in choosing Vicky for a wife and in allowing him to acknowledge how much happier Anna would have made him had he had the courage to marry her, Brookner grants Anna a moral authority that turns her into a true heroine.

Something about [Anna's] pristine remoteness attracted him, as might a temperate climate, a serious book. He read so little these days: his work kept him occupied, and his wife was talkative. He thought, once more, that he might have made another life with her [Anna], and suspected that it might be superior to the one he currently led.

Anna reminds him of his own dead mother, on whose goodness and sacrifice he always relied, but he has allowed Vicky to take over his life. It takes some time for Anna to understand her failure with Halliday. It takes the embarrassment of an evening at the Hallidays for her to realize the tragic personal and professional consequences of his weakness.

Anna felt immediate embarrassment on Lawrence's behalf… . She had even surprised him looking wistful, as if everything he cared for had been taken away from him…. No wonder he was such a good doctor. But he would not go far, for sharper minds than Vicky's would assess his suitability, would observe his wife. There would be dinner parties of greater consequence at the homes of colleagues, where it would be decided that Halliday, in the long run, would not make senior material.

At this stage in her novelistic career, Brookner finally distinguishes the heroes from the villains. Like Harriet, but far more lucidly and explicitly, Anna ends up in control—not only of her own story but of that of others. As soon as Anna returns from the Halliday dinner party, she takes off the “brown corded silk suit” she wears whenever she is invited out and decides to give it to her housekeeper.

Getting rid of the suit stands as a powerful metaphor for rejecting her past identity. The reader soon learns that after her disappearance she begins designing clothes for “[w]omen of my age.” Knowing herself undefined, a woman must first learn to choose her identity and her dress, before initiating any specific activity. As Harriet achieves a final understanding of death in the context of a Stendhal passage, Anna finally becomes aware of her “renewed feeling of power” by understanding the lines of a poem by Valéry.

“Après tant d'orgueil, après tant d'étrange oisivité …” How clever to put pride and apathy in the same category of misapprehension. How did it go on? The poet was after all seeking of change, of metamorphosis. “Après tant d'orgueil, après tant d'étrange oisivité, mais pleine de pouvoir …” That was it, the renewed feeling of power, power in the sense of strength, the strength born secretly, mysteriously, out of oisivité, idleness or inaction. It was the intimation of this strength which presaged change.

Anna's mysterious disappearance is not cleared up until the end of the novel when by chance she meets Philippa in a Parisian café. The question of the meaning of fraud is now explicitly introduced in the text: Philippa answers Anna's explanation of her disappearance by saying: “What a fraud you are, Anna,” For the first time, Brookner specifies the main subject she has tentatively and carefully explored in all her fiction: the terrible fraud to which women in particular, but sometimes also men, are often subjected by those who profess to love them, be they mothers or lovers. Philippa's conventional use of the concept of “fraud” becomes the key to Anna's self-explanation. The definition of the term suddenly turns into a matter of intense consequence to both characters.

“But there are many kinds of fraud,” answers Anna, “not all of them criminal. I rather think I have stopped being one, a fraud, I mean. Fraud was what was perpetrated on me by the expectations of others. They fashioned me in their own image, according to their needs. Fraud, in that sense, is alarmingly prevalent. And not only between the sexes. In the end I decided to escape.”

For the first time in her life Anna manages to communicate with Philippa and to awaken Philippa's desire for self-understanding to the point of alerting her to the notions of female abuse. Until now, Brookner has shown Anna as an uninspiring women with no experience whatsoever in love. Suddenly she gives her the wisdom not only to invite Philippa's confidence but to alert Philippa to the sudden and precise realization of her lover's exploitation of her:

“Yes, I thought I was happy,” she [Philippa] burst out. “He made me feel happy. But really I can only go on being happy if I'm married… .” “He should see that,” answers Anna, “if he's fond of you. If not, he doesn't know you at all. Or won't see. In which case it's another kind of fraud.”

Anna's new wisdom is defined in terms of her new capacity for expression, her linguistic precision in defining one term that best describes an experience that has been relevant to women's destiny, that of fraud. Her quick interpretation of the different kinds of fraud to which women are subjected implies a long and profound reading of a past in which women historically have been abused in the name of love, by the authority either of parents or lovers. The final image of the two women rejecting, almost simultaneously, the two most common forms of feminine exploitation, the two most subtle forms of fraud, implies a clear moral judgment on the part of the author. She not only allows her two heroines access to an unprecedented moral awareness but finally to decisions and action.

The last paragraph of the book becomes a significant summary of the changes introduced in Anna's story. After Anna leaves the café, Philippa remains along with her lover who has arrived in the meantime. Realizing the truth of Anna's words, and convinced by now that her lover is a fraud, Philippa decides to leave him. “Like Anna. [Philippa] hesitated, unwilling to take her leave. Then she turned resolutely, and followed the path which Anna had taken, out into the bright, dark, dangerous, and infinitely welcoming street.”

The careful wording of that paragraph is eloquently suggestive of the changed perspective in Brookner's artistic intentions. Guided by Anna's definition of the different kinds of fraud women may be subject to and by her suggestion that only a good cause is worth fighting for, Phillipa decides in the last scene to abandon a lover who does not love her enough to marry her. Although unwilling to leave, she finally does so resolutely. Anna has inspired her brave and difficult move and has taught her to leave her protected past, her accepted self, and to plunge into life, into a world that is at the same time bright and dark, menacing and welcoming.

A Closed Eye and Fraud offer new alternatives and interpretations of women's destinies and specific insights into the complexities of women's growth and independence. Those texts also prove that after the powerfully inspired female voices of self-assurance heard during the late 1970s and 1980s, after the convincing faith in the relevance of women's culture and its contribution to the understanding of women's selves and past, the voices of women writers in the 1990s can only look into the future with a rhetoric that is indisputably their own, a rhetoric that, having controlled anger, looks forward to creativity and perhaps opens up to reconciliation.