The paying guests by sarah waters6/7/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() It is this prose and its transitory feminine perspective that Waters offers a pastiche of in The Paying Guests, using as her starting point the characteristic predicament of a genteel household of women driven by necessity to let out rooms in their large and now – father and brothers being dead – half-empty Camberwell villa. ![]() ![]() This style might be described as the attempt to depict the loss of propriety while remaining proper, and the result was some exquisitely tortured and distinctive prose that did not age well and consequently has been undervalued – though never entirely neglected. Writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor could use the domestic novel to grapple with the intricacies of a broken civilisation and the reconfiguring of gender and social roles it entailed. This was also a period in which a new kind of literary realism was born, in particular a female style, as a result of the loss of men and male authority and values. S et in London in the 1920s, Sarah Waters' sixth novel concerns itself with the transitional social world of postwar Britain, and with the new forms of licence, mobility and self-definition to which the smashed civic order was giving rise as the old constraints of class and gender fell away. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |