Class portrait Nobody else writes about middle England so acutely

Tessa Hadley's first novella depicts women in refreshing ways

- ALEX PEAKE-TOMKINSON

There is no one who writes better about middle-class life in 20th- and 21st-century Britain than Tessa Hadley. She knows just the right details, even if they sometimes get repeated across her fiction: both Jill in The Past and Phyllis in Free Love wear the Nina Ricci perfume L’Air du Temps, for example. Perfume aside, this is Hadley’s first novella and its first chapter was originally published as a short story, Vincent’s Party, in The New Yorker.

One winter's night in post-war Bristol, Evelyn - on the cusp of adulthood - is getting ready for an art students' party: "She hoped that she looked spectacular, hair scraped back from her face like a dancer's and breasts thrust up in a new brassiere." This seems to me a far more realistic description of how young women feel about their looks, rather than being riven with self-loathing about their appearance or being one of the many accidental beauties who populate contemporary fiction (these unassuming stunners appear in even the very best novels: for example, most of Gwendoline Riley's heroines and also many of Sally Rooney's would fit the bill).