Anita Brookner's explorations of women's loneliness address contemporary issues of gender, culture and the relationship of literature and life. She examines the dislocation arising from simultaneous impulses towards personal fulfilment and social integration （and the resulting conflict of moral identity and social codes）, through the treatment of various cultural experiences in her narratives. Her protagonists manipulate （and are manipulated by） these experiences out of a confused sense of what ‘Englishness’ represents, and a desire to belong which is constantly undermined. What seem to be poignant yet drily witty romantic novels in fact represent the uneasy relationship between the centre and those it relegates to the margins.

In his examination of Christina Stead's novel The Man Who Loved Children, Jonathan Arac considers the process of literary refunctioning. He claims that in the character of Sam Pollit, Stead takes popular cultural perceptions of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens （rather than the substance of any text either produced） and makes them tools of characterization and, by extension, of social criticism. She does so by appropriating ‘human images that had been displaced from the relatively autonomous realm of literature into the culture at large, then combines those images, and [she] sets them to work again within a new piece of literature, which allows for a fresh exploration of their possible effects, thus giving them a different force when they again are shifted from her literary work into the larger culture, and her readers’ lives'. Brookner ultimately does the same sort of thing with Virginia Woolf in Hotel du Lac. In her first two novels, her use of specific literary texts arises from her interest in a deluded approach taken to texts as guides. Brookner argues that ‘the lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just'. She extends this interest to a broad range of cultural phenomena, which she makes tools of her ambiguous social criticism, while exploring them as signs of cultural displacement and the conflict between personal and social forms of identity. I propose to explore this representation in three quite similar early novels: A Start in Life （1981）, Providence （1982） and especially Hotel du Lac （1984）. Arac says of Stead's The Man Who Loved Children that ‘it not only enacts but represents the process’ of refunctioning. This is true regarding the treatment of various cultural phenomena in Brookner's fiction as well; some signify the means by which these women try to gain acceptance, while always underlining the reasons they are marginalized, but the treatment of literary influence represents their ways of coping with life on the periphery of a closed circle.

Brookner's protagonists are incapable of becoming what their culturally displaced parents （at least one is always of Continental origins or background） would have wished or what they want to escape into being. Like Ruth Weiss in A Start in Life and Kitty Maule in Providence, Hotel du Lac's Edith Hope is dislocated by her inability to reconcile her upbringing with her desires, in a life for which she is well-suited intellectually and temperamentally but ill-equipped socially. （Ruth and Kitty are academics; Edith writes popular romantic fiction.） Despite their maturity in years, all three seem childlike in their lack of cynicism and their eager desire to please. Yet they have never known innocence or freedom; they have had to dwell in the shadows of and be responsible for culturally alienated, immature parents. They are burdened by the discipline if not the substance of belief, by an artificially imposed morality which has more to do with books than experience, or more with the surface than the substance of custom. Brookner claims the ‘moral rectitude’ of her characters ‘comes from a grounding in nineteenth-century novels and nineteenth-century behaviour'. This deliberate anachronism robs all three of effective manipulative skills, yet contributes to the fascination with a class-specific ‘Englishness’ that determines their choice of cultural experiences.

Brookner explores her protagonists’ dislocation and reveals their self-definition and capacity for delusion chiefly through three cultural phenomena: apparel and physical presentation, relationships with men, and texts used as guides, or; clothes, men and books. Taken together, these phenomena reflect various modes of existence: contemplative and private, sexual and social. Choices regarding them are influenced by the way ancestry informs each protagonist's adult identity. In all three families, erratic flamboyancy is contrasted with a sense of order and tradition. Edith is reasonably forgiving of her parents and cognizant of their adulthood, perhaps because they are both dead and she has assimilated their memories into the accumulation of her own adult experience. The exaggerated childishness of the Weisses or the Maules becomes in the Hopes a concurrent interdependence and incompatibility of people who are dissimilar yet both displaced, inadequate and too self-absorbed to nurture a child. In all three cases, cultural displacement means a sense of lost order or value. This leads to a preoccupation on the daughter's part with appropriateness and ‘Englishness', and a misplaced trust in any cultural phenomena she takes as signs of belonging.

Ruth assimilates the past by accepting her grandmother's cutlery and ultimately adopting her role as caregiver; Kitty allows her dressmaker grandmother to attire her and so presents herself neither naturally nor manipulatively. For Edith, the process is more subtle. Her mother's obsolescence is defined more through behaviour than physical detail （though all three novels emphasize cluttered, airless rooms）:

Her strange mother, Rosa, that harsh disappointed woman, that former beauty who raged so unsuccessfully against her fate, deliberately, wilfully letting herself go, slatternly and scornful, mocking her pale silent daughter who slipped so modestly in and out of her aromatic bedroom, bringing the cups of coffee which her mother deliberately spilled. And shouting, “Too weak! Too weak! All of you, too weak!” Sighing for Vienna, which had known her young and brilliant, and not fat and slovenly, as she was now. （Hotel）

Although her life is not as obviously structured by ancestral influence as Ruth's or Kitty's, Edith is at least partly aware that her work, her style, even her attitudes towards men, bear her mother's influence in their contradiction of her mother's way of life.

One of the most striking evocations of Edith's personal style is a description partly detached from her perspective: ‘Dressed for dinner, in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first mean in public’ （Hotel）. Edith is not consciously preoccupied with clothes, yet her choice of attire reflects her awkwardness and misplaced obsessions. The Liberty silk dress and plain kid pumps do not imply the artlessness of Monica's ‘crepe de Chine blouse hanging rather gauntly from her long neck and narrow shoulders’ （Hotel）, the unconscious correctness of Madame de Bonneuil's plain gowns, or the manipulativeness behind the elaborate, assertive attire of the Puseys or Penelope Milne. These others all represent a level of confidence and social integration Edith only partly admires and never achieves. The contrast between such people and the protagonist informs Providence （where the admiration of them is greater） more explicitly. The delicate and scrupulously well-dressed Kitty feels inadequate beside the unaffected, inherently sexual charm of Maurice Bishop and Jane Fairchild, the undeluded disregard for fashion of her colleague Pauline, and the deliberate flamboyance of her neighbour Caroline. Pauline says of Kitty ‘that she gives the impression of someone not quite at home here’ （Providence）, an assessment which could apply to the appearance of all three protagonists, and which suggests a link between physical presentation and cultural displacement. They lack the sense of security which would allow them to dress with greater ease, and the cunning to do so with obvious purpose. Ironically, such confidence and cunning are characteristic of those on the inside of the English mystique, so they lack the very tools they need. Consequently, like Edith in her Liberty silk dress, they are clothed through external influence （advice of others or choice of role models）, and are at once appropriate and uncomfortable. All three do experiment with deliberate dressing, yet Brookner carefully makes her descriptions of their altered appearance qualify whatever success they attain. When Edith changes her hairstyle and puts on a new dress and perfume, this behaviour is a prelude not to some bold venture, but to her habitual writing and dinner. The reactions of the Puseys indicate her apparent success: Jennifer's approbation is the recognition of feminine wiles; Mrs. Pusey's disapproval concedes the threat these wiles imply. However, Brookner qualifies the attire chosen by revealing that Monica has suggested this more glamorous dress, and that once attired, Edith ‘paced up and down in her room, unwilling to exchange her silence for the pleasantries of the evening’ （Hotel）. Silence, insularity and passivity are characteristic of all these women; even when most assertive, they dress not so much to be noticed as to be accepted while retaining their privacy. Nevertheless, they are noticed, because they never quite belong.

In a personal as well as this generally social sense, Brookner's women desire acceptance. They believe a socially integrated identity would impose order on an existence which to them is chaotic or absurd. Thus, they idealize a domestic, romantic love as part of their fascination with ‘Englishness'. Ruth's relationships with men—with the egotistical Richard Hirst, with her older, married lover Professor Duplessis, even with her short-lived husband Roddy—enact her desire to abandon the fractured world of her parents and their housekeeper, in their apartment where life ‘was lived on the periphery; the main rooms no longer had any function’ （Start）. Although occasionally intrigued by the faded glamour of this life, she longs for structure and purpose, which are partly granted by her studies, yet she remains alone. Hence, she mostly expresses love through performing the conventionally wifely function of cooking.

All three protagonists display little interest in food unless they are feeding a man. The preparation and consumption of food serve more as a metaphor for power in their relationships than for sexual attraction and activity. The man tends to consume while the woman watches; eating never becomes a shared domestic activity. Edith, whose relationship with David is primarily sexual, reflects during her exile to the Hotel du Lac,

Her own appetite was gone, quite gone. It hardly mattered what she ate these days, since she no longer mattered to herself. But those lovely meals that she cooked for David, those heroic fry-ups, those blow-outs that he always seemed to require when they eventually got out of bed, at such awkward times, after midnight, sometimes, leaving it till the last minute before he raced back to Holland Park through the silent streets. ‘I never get this stuff at home,’ he would say lovingly, spearing a chip and inserting it into the yolk of a fried egg. Anxious, in her nightgown, she would watch him, a saucepan of baked beans to hand. Judging the state of his appetite with the eye of an expert, she would take another dish and ladle on to his plate a quivering mound of egg custard. （Hotel）

This option of subservience results from what these men represent. In A Start in Life and Providence, Brookner is explicit: Richard Hirst and Maurice Bishop stand for socially integrated, traditional values represented by a religious faith which reflects the security of their position, while the atheism or agnosticism of the women reflects their sense of fragmentation. The protagonists insist on domestic elements in their relationships because they want the possibilities of order and social acceptability which Kitty decides a certain sort of man can represent:

I want to be part of a real family. I want my father to be there and to shoot things. I do not want my grandmother to tell me what to wear. I want to wear jeans and old sweaters belonging to my brother whom of course I do not have. I do not want to spend my life in this rotten little flat. I want wedding presents. I want to be half of a recognized couple. I want a future away from this place. I want Maurice. （Providence）

The contrast in appearance of Kitty and Maurice underlines his appeal for her: Kitty is ‘artfully put together', a passive qualification, while Maurice is ‘ineffably natural', an innate quality （Providence）; he lacks her self-consciousness and artifice. However, his Englishness is the core of both his allure and his impermeability. Kitty realizes that she has rejected her French heritage and made a photograph of her dead father ‘her image of England just as she had made Maurice her ideal of England’ （Providence）, yet elsewhere she admits that Maurice's smile ‘closed her out, while closing in something highly significant, something that she did not know, something foreign to her’ （Providence）. This allure of English stability becomes part of the dilemma Edith confronts in Hotel du Lac. Edith is involved with rather than in pursuit of David, who is contrasted not so much with her as with Philip Neville. The attraction of both men involves conventional qualities of upper-middle-class Englishness. Though suggesting different periods, each represents a pragmatic approach to life which replaces the Christianity of the earlier love objects, and, again, a financially secure, predictable existence. The contrast is largely in the sort of limited involvement each offers Edith: while with David she has a clandestine, primarily physical affair, with Mr. Neville she would have a socially acceptable, yet passionless marriage.

The men themselves are of similar social position and reflect not so much the sort of landed tradition Kitty sees in Maurice as the financial success ethic of the Thatcher era in England. Although her philosophical concerns are not so explicitly outlined as in the earlier novels. Brookner's sense of social contemporaneity is strongest in Hotel du Lac. The self-absorbed mercantilism and materialism of her English characters, especially Mr. Neville and the Puseys, belong very much to the late twentieth century. These qualities are contrasted with those of people who have both ‘old money’—Monica and Madame de Bonneuil—and cultural tradition. Similarly, the young urban professional David's vapidity is suggested by the vagueness of his physical description （he is only ‘a tall, lean, foxy man’ with ‘a long nose'; Hotel）, but he and his wife embody for Edith a contemporary English form of adulthood, ‘a world of, among other things, investments, roof repairs, visitors for the weekend. And shall we take your car or mine? That was one of the remarks that she had overheard David make to his wife, and it had come to possess an almost totemic significance’ （Hotel）. On the other hand, Mr. Neville is a man of principle, and since Edith never loves him （although she admits the logic of his analyses）, she can observe him more objectively.

I suppose Mr. Neville is what was once called a man of quality. He conducts himself altogether gracefully. He is well turned out, she thought, surveying the panama hat and the linen jacket. He is even good-looking; an eighteenth-century face, fine, reticent, full-lipped, with a faint bluish gleam of beard just visible beneath the healthy skin. A heartless man, I think. Furiously intelligent. Suitable. Oh David, David. （Hotel）

Patricia Waugh writes of Brookner's protagonists that ‘[their] moral strengths function as weakness in the patriarchal, consumerist, and acquisitive world of the post-1960s, and they themselves internalize this disparaging view of their qualities, resulting in a perpetually low self-esteem’. I would add that this perceived social inferiority always coincides and conflicts with a strong sense of personal identity which prevents them from entirely abandoning their moral codes. Their choices of cultural experience are not a simple desire to ‘pass'. By Hotel du Lac, these choices are complicated by a desire for love which surpasses the desire for acceptance. The belief in and pursuit of ‘love’ are to Edith what the desire for social integration and an ordered existence are for Ruth and Kitty. Brookner suggests an inadequacy of this principle through David himself, who does not return Edith's passion, and through Edith's own desire for social normality, a desire which attracts her to both men she nearly deserts David to marry: the kindly Geoffrey Long, who simply offers passionless propriety without any stated philosophy to justify it, and Mr. Neville. However, the pragmatism of the latter is no alternative, because Edith （unlike Ruth or Kitty） recognizes that dislocation is her identity, that in the clear separation of dissonant elements which would permit choice, she would have to sacrifice part of herself to make a choice. Pure pragmatism is for her dangerous, as she realizes when she discovers her error in assuming Jennifer to be innocent, and decides to reject Mr. Neville.

More than by clothes or men, all three women find their problems of identity complicated by their application of literature to life. After all, in literature they are seeking more than a way into the centre; they are seeking some truth about existence. Yet they misread their chosen texts by imposing what they want to believe on them. Ruth and Kitty fail to realize that the lives of the fictional heroines with whom they are intrigued have been ordered by an intelligence and related through a perspective different from their own （and from Brookner's）. Ruth comes closest to making the connection, through her various attempts to relate Honore de Balzac's novels to the course of her life, but when Kitty confesses ‘I lacked the information’ （Providence）, she could be speaking for herself and Edith. Both live by illusions because they lack the assertiveness to find things out or they assume that other people's definitions coincide with theirs. Hence, Kitty cannot read the signals of Maurice's involvement with Jane Fairchild, and Edith misjudges virtually everything she impulsively defines, from Monica's social position to the Puseys’ ages.

As I suggested at the outset, Brookner makes more explicit use of her literary subtexts in both earlier novels. The outcome of Eugenie's fortunes in Balzac's Eugenie Grandet parallels that of Ruth's—both are deceived and disappointed in love—but Brookner's narrative voice is not Balzac's, and Eugenie is not dislocated in the way Ruth is, as a comparison of introductory passages attests. Balzac's initial description of a house in a village merges general and particular elements, yet in merging, they retain their separate integrity; this is not the fluctuating impressionism of the description which opens Hotel du Lac. A specific place becomes a microcosm of France and the actions of the characters become typical of human nature, yet the characters retain their own interest. Conversely, A Start in Life begins by providing both Ruth's own perception of her dilemma and a generalized external perspective of her. Brookner reveals Ruth's fluctuating transparency and opacity, as well as the limitations in self-awareness of this woman who ‘blamed her looks on literature … Her appearance and character were exactly half-way between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she was scrupulous, passionate, thoughtful, and given to self-analysis, but her colleagues thought her merely scrupulous, nothing her neatness with approval, and assuming that her absent and slightly haggard expression denoted a tricky passage in Balzac. In fact she was extreme in her expectations and although those expectations had never been fulfilled she had learnt nothing’ （Start）. Most significantly, Brookner introduces Ruth's preoccupation with texts as guides, and her struggle to decide whether to accept a romantic or virtuous （European or English） approach to life: her ‘moral education’ has ‘dictated, through the conflicting but in this one case united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, but that she emulate those of David Copperfield and Little Dorrit’ （Start）. Balzac presents Eugenie in the context of the external forces that shape and betray her; Brookner depicts the effects of those forces at work from the perspective of the protagonist who fails to recognize them. Also, whereas Eugenie retains her religious faith despite the vagaries of the world, Ruth lacks such a totalizing principle, although she is drawn to a systematic interpretation of life: she wants at once a reliable moral code and a sense of integration amongst fairly amoral people.

The relationship of literature and life in Providence is rendered with greater irony. Kitty Maule detaches the contingencies of living from her area of study, the Romantic Tradition, and particularly the anomalous text she teaches, Benjamin Constant's Adolphe. More than Edith or Ruth, Kitty not only concedes a division between her work and private life, but between the nature of her work and her concerns: ‘Real life seems to impose such insuperable problems that it is quite restful to think about something entirely different and for which I take no responsibility’ （Providence）. Yet, in a way, she desperately wants to make a connection, to believe that her interpretation of this text has validity in her own life. What fascinates her about Adolphe is its structural emphasis on the power of words in their purity to convey unornamented information, ‘the juxtaposition of extremely dry language and extremely heated, almost uncontrollable sentiments…. [Even] if the despair is total, the control remains’ （Providence）. While she might understand how the unsparing rationalism of Adolphe made his tale dissonant with an age of tremendous social and imaginative upheaval, she fails to see how her own perspective is that of Ellenore, his rejected yet misguidedly devoted mistress. Kitty misconstrues words, refusing to concede multiple levels of meaning, and overlooks the possibilities of chance （rather than providence or determinism） in an absurd universe. Hence, the word ‘love’ means something quite different to the ineffable, secure Maurice and the serious, questing Kitty. She not only lacks the information, she frequently lacks the capacity or the experience to know it exists.

In Hotel du Lac, Brookner does not relate her narrative to a specific informing text: she turns instead to the refunctioning of a more generalized cultural icon. Elaine Showalter, considering the weight of the past on contemporary English women's fiction, argues that ‘[in] trying to deal with this recognition of an ongoing struggle for personal and artistic autonomy, contemporary women writers have reasserted their continuity with the women of the past, through essays and criticism as well as through fiction. They use all the resources of the modern novel, including exploded chronology, dreams, myth, and stream-of-consciousness, but they have been profoundly influenced by nineteenth-century feminine literature, sometimes to the point of rewriting it'. Brookner's own cultural displacement lessens the appeal of this particular tradition for her. In her first two novels, she draws on French fiction of the early nineteenth century, incorporating it in the lives of Ruth and Kitty much as it entered hers: through study. In Hotel du Lac, she defines Edith's dislocation more subtly, through social myths associated with popular romantic （rather than historically Romantic） fiction. Yet despite the sort of fiction she produces, Edith adopts as literary icon a popular conception of Virginia Woolf, to define both her public and private personae.

Woolf is an ironic choice. The popular conception of romantic-fiction producers, like Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele, seems to be of opulently materialistic, aggressively feminine women, more like Iris Pusey or Penelope Milne. Yet Edith seems to recognize this discrepancy in choosing a pseudonym, Vanessa Wilde, at once evocative of the fiction she writes and structurally reflective of her private muse's name. Her public Virginia Woolf persona receives little approbation from others. When her agent, ‘viewing the hollowed cheeks and the pursed lips', reflects that Edith appears ‘remarkably Bloomsburian’ （Hotel）, he does so while mildly alarmed at her impassioned outburst in an exclusive restaurant. Elsewhere, Mr. Neville only sees unsuitable clothes and unhealthy looks in her affectation and urges her to get rid of her cardigan: ‘Whoever told you that you looked like Virginia Woolf did you a grave disservice, although I suppose you though it was a compliment’ （Hotel）.

As well, her perception of the fiction she writes does not arise from critical and imaginative detachment; she is not an aspiring Woolf toying with popular culture. Although she has the freedom domestic and financial burdens Woolf felt necessary for artistic achievement, Edith writes sentimental novels which she claims recreate a wish-fulfilling cultural myth for essentially passive, mild-mannered women. In fact, Edith writes for herself and partly misjudges her audience. The only women revealed as readers of her work are the manipulative Iris Pusey and Penelope Milne, and Edith's mother, a thwarted manipulator. These books appeal to such women because they affirm a status quo in which this audience and its values can thrive.

According to Patricia Waugh, Edith writes ‘romances which are a plea for the acceptance of traditional courtship and marriage, but in her own life she reveals that these institutions cannot ultimately satisfy her own emotional and intellectual needs. Edith tends to blame herself, however, seeing her “innate disposition” as the source of her exclusion from wedded bliss. She feels unable, therefore, to identify with those women who seek to change the institutional basis of romance, and her writing seeks to contain protest, to protect her liberal view of the fatalistic working out of the human character. Brookner's novel as a whole, however, fails to suppress the contradictions inherent in this position'. Edith's connection to her fictional material underlines the ambiguity with which Brookner treats the relationship of fiction and reality in this novel. This ambiguity differs from the more straightforward criticism of texts as guides in A Start in Life, or the ironic treatment of delusion in Providence. Edith is both condemned to dislocation by her belief in romantic love and granted a creative means of accepting her situation by writing romantic fiction. For her, love is less a sublimated desire for social integration （as it seems to be for Ruth and Kitty） than an emotional principle which allows her to confess without irony to David in another unmailed letter, ‘You are the breath of life to me’ （Hotel）. Unlike Ruth or Kitty in their pursuits, she realizes that David does not reciprocate this sentiment, yet she persists in wanting to give it expression in her life and can do this through her affair （futile as it is） with him and through her admittedly contrived fiction.

Similarly, her adoption of the Virginia Woolf persona both exacerbates her loneliness and permits her a privacy in which she is comfortably herself; she also has a genuinely Bloomsburian freedom of spirit her friends lack, which Brookner makes clear in Edith's rejection of marriage: she chooses to be socially unacceptable. She has a sense of home, of ‘a room of her own', if not a satisfactory social identity, and within her house and garden can attain the impressionistic appreciation of physical environment that characterizes much of Woolf's writing: ‘Sometimes it was still light when she went to bed, but as the light was of such very great interest to her she would put down her book just to watch it fade, and change colour, and finally become opaque and uninteresting’ （Hotel）. Moreover, Patricia Waugh claims that Brookner's fiction ‘is similar to Woolf's in its perception of the relational basis of identity and its portrayal of her women characters’ obsessive need for and fear of connection'. Despite the sort of books Edith produces, she embodies in her life both independence and its cost, issues Woolf addressed in considering the social role of the woman artist.

Where this form of refunctioning approaches what Arac proposes is in Brookner's refusal to make any one novel of Virginia Woolf's a specific subtext of Hotel du Lac. Instead, she embeds, often ironically, aspects of Woolf's works in her own. For example, if Edith resembles Lily Briscoe of To the Lighthouse in her solitude and her real if limited vision, she longs for the domestic and social status of a Mrs. Ramsay, or a Clarissa Dalloway, only realizing at the eleventh hour the inherent loneliness and inauthenticity of this role. Yet Edith is never presented reading or reflecting on a Woolf text; her writer of choice during a moment of anxious leisure is Colette. This refusal challenges the reader to confront what constitutes ‘Virginia Woolf’ in the novel. While Hotel du Lac gains richness and subtlety through an awareness of the subtexts I have indicated, the reader need not be familiar with them to perceive what the Virginia Woolf persona as a popular icon consists of: the wan thinness, piled-up hair and cardigan （so much Edith's conception of herself that she is hardly aware of her own sensuality）, the anxiety and talent for solitude, yet also the love of the garden, and the odd grace and toughness under the pressure to conform.

While the ending of Hotel du Lac is more encouraging than those of the earlier novels, it is also ambiguous. Edith seems in more subtle and quotidian ways caught between the polarities of the Romantic Tradition which strike Kitty: ‘the ability to stagger on through a life exaggeratedly devoid of normal happiness, or the ability to admit a radiant fragmentation of the mind that would put one out of the struggle altogether’ （Providence）. Edith seems at the end to act with an authority quite unlike the bewilderment of Kitty or the passive stoicism of Ruth. However, her tearing up the only letter she would have mailed to David is a clearer rejection of closure than occurs in either other novel. She rejects stability based on bloodless pragmatism, even if she must still live in a social world defined more by this new rationalism than by traditional forms of totalization, and so must remain dislocated. She consigns herself to the possibility of heartbreak so that she can maintain her integrity. Yet to marry Mr. Neville would be, by Edith's principles, to consign herself to despair. According to Anita Brookner, ‘To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle', yet she also claims to have intended Hotel du Lac as ‘a love story pure and simple'. Her refunctioning both of conventional notions of romantic love and of Virginia Woolf as cultural icon permit Brookner to examine the dislocation inherent in Edith's conception of love and in that of the fiction she produces. By Anita Brookner's standards, then, to allow Edith to make a choice other than her ambiguous one would have been artistically dishonest.

The emphasis on stereotypical preoccupations of women could be read as a trivialization of Brookner's philosophical and cultural concerns, a case of reach exceeding grasp, or as a timid refusal to deal in depth with greater issues in favour of the neat enclosures of popular romantic fiction. Her protagonists, as much as they may ponder literature, also spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about their clothes and engaged in the man hunt. However, in these early novels, Brookner manipulates these stereotypes of the romance novel, to demonstrate how its idealized heroine would fare as a fully developed character in the England of the 1980s. Her protagonists fit the ideal conventions in many ways: they are demure, pretty but not overly, isolated and guileless little princesses. But Mr. Rochester in contemporary England does not marry plain faithful Jane. He marries the bold, secure inheritor of useful family connections, and reserves the other for comfort when his wife proves an embarrassment. Any contract she is offered is based on sexual gratification or social appearance, never on a principle of love. Yet Brookner's protagonists differ from their popular-romance counterparts in that their guilelessness is not innocence. They are marginalized as much by their own sense of moral identity as by the aspects of gender and culture that inform that identity. Brookner represents their social position （and their perception of it） through various forms of cultural iconography, particularly English. By Hotel du Lac, she suggests that strength and self-awareness are found not so much in finding an access to the inner circle, as in recognizing why you are on the periphery.