A genre which possibly does not even exist

[oursin]

Thinking about my identity as North London Guardian-reading woman Of A Certain Age, I was thinking 'Whoops, ought to be getting on with my adultery-in-Hampstead novel'. (That, my friends, will be the day...)

And it then occurred me that in a fairly broad acquaintanceship with mid-C20th British litfic, I can't honestly think of enough novels that I've read which contained the plot motif of adultery in a Hampstead setting to go any way at all to constituting a viable subgenre, largely associated with women writers, and generally deployed dismissively in a subclause to praise some work as not belonging to this despised species. The concept is still extensively evoked in reviews and by columnists (I just googled it), but does it actually represent anything that one might find on the library shelves or in a bookshop?

A number of Stella Gibbons' novels are set in and around Hampstead and Highgate, but they are not about adultery.

I have a vague recollection (and can't be arsed to go and look it up) that the protag of Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall is living somewhere in the West Hampstead/Kilburn area when she begins an affair with her cousin's husband, but that does not at all fit in with the 'Hampstead-adultery' paradigm, which is about people with too much time on their hands, plenty of money, nice houses, and exquisitely sensitive feelings. Jane is a recently-deserted poet and single mother (the novel opens with her giving birth to child no 2) living in a near-slum.

Something closer to the paradigm would be a series of now forgotten (and not, I think, unjustly-neglected) novels by Stuart Evans, the 'Windmill Hill' sequence, 1970s/80s, about a group consisting of media professionals, academics, and politicians, quite a bit of which took place in the general area of Hampstead and the plot complications did, as I recall, involve a fair amount of extra-marital shagging of one kind and another. But in my recollection had pretensions to being 'state of the nation' novels, rather than the kind of girly-wirly sensitive evocation of individual emotional states and moral angst implied by 'Hampstead adultery novel'.

So I am coming to the conclusion the Hampstead adultery novel is yet another of those spectres that haunt discourse and cannot be located to specific examples, largely used as a rather lazy way of defining 'something this is not'.

Comments

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

Another such stereotype--more coherent in describing "something this is not" than "something which exists"--is the "Aga saga." The only woman writer whom I associate strongly with an Aga is Anna Haycraft, in her incarnation as a cookery writer--which would fit, wouldn't it? (By the way, is an Aga all it's cracked up to be? Not that I will ever be able to afford one.)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

(By the way, is an Aga all it's cracked up to be? Not that I will ever be able to afford one.)

I imagine that it is if you genuinely need it to revive ducklings/puppies/lambs and also use it to heat your C16 farmhouse and hot water. But my aunt's was sheer pretension.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

If someone willed me ten thousand US dollars with the stipulation that it be spent on an Aga, I wouldn't cry. (That is if I could get it in the kitchen, which isn't a sure thing.) But I'd probably wonder how much I was actually using it in a way that can't be accomplished with my little electric stove.

If I was married to a publisher and had to cook for lots of drunken literary people I would probably be as in love with it as Mrs. Haycraft was with hers, but as someone who cooks for a household of two people who seldom entertain on any scale, I'd think about how much more someone else could be getting out of it.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

As I recall, one of the cookers in the dom sci room at my school was an Aga, or at least a solid fuel stove. Can't remember if I ever got to use it (we rotated round the various stations week by week).

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

It does sound rather heavenly for multitasking, if one has some serious multitasking to do. And with seven (five surviving) kids and the publishing company I can well imagine that Anna Haycraft owed her career to it as much as to Colin--she parked her desk in front of it, as I remember, probably with the tacit understanding that if she was dislodged so would be the victuals.

But in terms of actual cooking, as opposed to multitasking, I tend to think that a cook who needs a fancy stove to produce something creditable is a poor cook. Most of cookery is in the pre-stove preparations (the old French-Italian-etc. standby of putting in the investment of time and money for good-quality, fresh ingredients and readying them as needed) and in the attention one gives to the stove stage, not the stove itself. If the stove provides the heat more or less reliably.

Again, if one's attention was often claimed by other things one would want a stove sophisticated enough to cook pretty much on its own. And probably one could get used to that part, under any circumstances. I'd like to cook on one at least once to see what it's like.