The Loneliest Woman in London
Anita Brookner and Hotel du Lac
The typical Anita Brookner protagonist is the kind of woman whose friends love her but are always shaking their heads at her, mystified at how she seems to choose unhappiness for herself at every turn. She is old enough to have some romantic disappointments behind her, but not yet so old as to be resigned to a solitary life. She’s usually a writer or an academic. She’s intelligent, erudite, sensitive, and well-mannered, with a dry sense of humor and deep sense of personal integrity. She’s also lonely, unfathomably so. She longs more than anything to be loved. And, though to her friends she appears placid, accommodating, and attentive, never the kind to make a scene, her disappointment at her lot in life has given a caustic quality to her internal monologue.
These characters, so often alike in their solitudes and disappointments, bear more than a passing resemblance to Anita Brookner herself, although it annoyed her when critics pointed it out. She was the daughter of Polish Jews, with a mother who’d had a promising career as a singer and forever regretted giving it up for the dubious advantages of marriage. Anita had a career as a respected art historian before beginning to write novels at the age of 53, “out of sadness and desperation” as she told the Paris Review:
My life seemed to be drifting in predictable channels and I wanted to know how I deserved such a fate. I thought if I could write about it I would be able to impose some structure on my experience.
She never married, and later in the interview she describes herself as one of the loneliest women in London. “People have resented it — it is not done to confess to loneliness, but there it is.”
Her protagonist in Hotel du Lac, her fourth novel and the winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, is Edith Hope, a single woman of age thirty-nine who makes a comfortable living writing romance novels “under a more thrusting name.” When we meet her she is in exile at Lake Geneva, having been shipped there by friends ostensibly for purposes of what we might now call wellness or self-care. In truth, she’s meant to do penance for a transgression which we understand to be serious, although she does not give details and intimates that she is not sorry. She finds herself at a respectable but rather fusty lakeside hotel in its off-season, populated almost entirely by other women, and in the dull alienating sameness of its days she contemplates whether there is a way for her to be happy.
I read Hotel du Lac perhaps ten years ago, and though it made a deep impression on me I remember being unsatisfied by the ending, feeling as though there was something I hadn’t understood properly about Edith. In a purge of my library I nearly gave my copy away to an acquaintance, telling them “it’s about what it means to be a woman,” which was not compelling enough of a pitch for them to take it. In these past few months of solitude I found myself reaching for my copy more and more often until finally I settled in for a re-read, which can be completed in a weekend or single long afternoon.
What it means to be a woman — I wouldn’t describe it that way now, in part because she’s speaking of a specific demographic of woman, and also because her vision is narrow and bleak. But womanhood here is indeed her subject, not only womanhood but the world of women and the structures of their lives. The Hotel du Lac itself is described at one point as a place reserved for female cast-offs, a place where they can do “harmless womanly things, like spending money on clothes” and be safely out of the way. Edith has a vivid sense of the smallness of the world women are traditionally meant to occupy, particularly if they have not made themselves useful to society by marrying and having children. She recognizes the instinctive distrust the conventional world feels in the presence of an unmarried woman over a certain age, the sense of wrongness, or of a destabilizing force, and the annoyance when the woman does not act quickly to fix it. She recognizes how she’s expected to make herself compliant, quiet, and small, and how it limits her. And in the face of all of it, Edith remains deeply committed to her sense of self.
Yet this is not a book that can be easily imported into contemporary feminist language about rejecting traditional roles, embracing independence, and pursuing one’s own path. And the reason is this: Edith, like many of Brookner’s other protagonists, is deeply suspicious of other women, in particular the women who seize what they want in life, the women who demand attention, the women who play the game and win. The prosperous wives she finds shallow and dull, the sexually voracious “liberated” women terrify her. She goes so far as to say that escaping the company of women is a strong enticement to marriage. Not for her are peans to female friendship or the power of sisterhood.
Conventional womanhood is represented by a mother and daughter pair, the Puseys. The mother is charming, voluble, and rather vapid — to her Europe is “seen mainly as a repository for luxury goods” — and the daughter is beautiful but speaks little. They are rich, carefree, and oblivious to the feelings of others. They move through the world with the expectation that it will cater to their wants, and for the most part, their expectations are met. Edith is at first drawn to them, fascinated; at length she tires of them and finally recoils.
She takes aim at the kind of woman they represent:
“What I’m really trying to say is that I dread such women’s attempts to recruit me, to make me their accomplice. I’m not talking about the feminists. I can understand their position, although I’m not all that sympathetic to it. I’m talking about the ultra-feminine. I’m talking about the complacent consumers of men with their complicated and unwritten rules of what is due to them. Treats, Indulgences, Privileges. The right to make illogical fusses. The cult of themselves. Such women strike me as dishonorable. And terrifying. I think perhaps that men are an easier target. I think perhaps the feminists should take a fresh look at the situation.”
Well. When it comes to womanly alienation, the modern reader is much more likely to be comfortable with Margaret Atwood.
And yet, although we use different words and different justifications for this feeling now, the distrust has never really gone away. One of the character tropes of stories written by women is that of the More Beautiful Woman. She is gorgeous, charismatic, often selfish, given license to behave badly, and is either the open enemy of the quiet, seething, more-intelligent protagonist, or a dominating friend who turns her into a sidekick. She’s Caroline Bingley, Blanche Ingram, Rosamund Lydgate, Regina George, Rebecca DeWinter, Villanelle, Jolene. She appears too in recent novels by Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh and Zadie Smith. And in the series that spawned a thousand thinkpieces about the complexities of female friendship, showing that interest in her is inexhaustible, she’s Lila Cerrulo. And usually one of the most important things about her is that men are enraptured by her.
Our less-beautiful protagonists observe her with a deep sense of unfairness and longing. They were brought up to be good, to be unselfish and avoid drawing attention to themselves, and find that consequently they have been relegated to smaller lives, while the badly-behaved women reap their rewards. Is that, they ask, what we must be like to be loved?
With this sensibility, you might assume that Edith Hope is largely ignored by the men around her. But, in fact, she is given not only one love interest, but three. There is Geoffrey, who in the novel’s backstory proposes marriage to her, and is by her description kind and affable. There is David, the married man with whom she is having an affair, whose company she longs for, and of which she gets so little. And then there’s Mr. Neville, the only male guest at Hotel du Lac, witty and devilish. He does not love her, but he thinks that they might solve each other’s problems.
In a pivotal scene, he lays out for her how she might escape her lonely life:
“If one is prepared to do the one thing one is drilled out of doing from earliest childhood — simply please oneself — there is no reason why you should ever be unhappy again… You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish. It is the simplest thing in the world to decide what you want to do — or rather, what you don’t want to do — and just to act on that.”
He is meant to seem sinister and mercenary in this scene, and Edith likens him to the devil. But his language is one that has become familiar to us in this era of You Are A Badass, and Edith has precisely the problems that modern psychotherapy is good at assuaging. You can imagine her therapist asking her: Do you think you don’t deserve happiness? Are you ashamed of your feelings and desires? Why is it so frightening to ask for what you need?
I, as the reader, want Edith to listen to him. Stop the self pity, I want to tell her. Stop being friends with people you don’t like and spending time doing things that bore you. Stop being accommodating to people you don’t respect, and waiting to be chosen by men who give you nothing of themselves. Instead, start getting comfortable with drawing attention to yourself. Buy the clothes, spend your money, talk to people who intrigue you, speak your mind! Love can exist without terror and illusion, and there’s a place in the world for you if you if you stop pretending not to want the things you want.
These same things, of course, are things I tell myself.
On my first read I found the ending puzzling. Edith experiences it as self-affirming, as a refusal to compromise herself and buy into a world she sees as a sham. But to me it read as a defeat, as an affirming only of her commitment to her own unhappiness. It still reads that way to me, but I understand it a little better. She feels that buying into the sham would prevent her from seeing clearly the truth about life.
Anita Brookner’s heroine, who wants to be seen and to be loved, stops short of letting readers love her. At the crucial moment, when we hope she will take flight, she disappears into her private, thorny nest, silent and watchful.