Woman Who Talked to Herself
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A. L. Barker's engrossing novel looks at the life of a middle-aged storyteller, her fictional world and the individuals who inhabit it. Characters such as Mrs McSweeny and her husband Murdo who receive hallucinatory information about the Second Coming; or Elinor Dunphy, an elegant older woman visited by a beautiful and free-spirited young man who makes veiled sexual overtures to her; or Lalla, a divorcee, who falls in love with her son's form-master, only to learn that his apparent advances to her are just a cover for his passion for her son.
These humorous yet tragic vignettes are all concerned with unfulfilled and usually perverted sexual relations - but how do they relate to the narrator's own successful marriage?
A. L. Barker (1918-2002) was a short story writer and novelist. Born in St Paul's Cray, Kent, she lived in the same milieu where London borders on Kent and Surrey, for the rest of her life. As her Oxford DNB entry says it was 'the chief setting for her work, which often seemed to partake of the quotidian mysteriousness and even abandonment of these areas.'
Her first selection of short stories, Innocents, won the Somerset Maugham award in 1947. Of her short stories, Robert Nye has written, 'stories as carefully composed as poems, quiet and delicate and reserved perhaps, but oddly lingering in the mind.'
Although a stranger to commercial success, she never wanted for admirers, Jane Gardam, Francis King, Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, John Sutherland, Deborah Moggach, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill, A. S. Byatt, Adam Mars-Jones, Nina Bawden and Victoria Glendinning being just some of them.
A. L. Barker deserves to be better known. Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing her entire oeuvre, six volumes of short stories - Innocents, Novelette with Other Stories, Femina Real, Life Stories, No Words of Love and Element of Doubt - and thirteen novels - Apology for a Hero, A Case Examined, The Joy-Ride and After, Lost Upon the Roundabouts, The Middling, John Brown's Body, Source of Embarrassment, A Heavy Feather, Relative Successes, The Gooseboy, The Woman Who Talked to Herself, Zeph and The Haunt.