Clever Girl

Written by Tessa Hadley

Narrated by Julie Teal

One woman's life, from childhood to middle age, by Britain's most acute, perceptive novelist of ordinary lives Clever Girl follows the story of Stella, from her childhood with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama - violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, two sons by different fathers – yet it is Hadley’s observation of ordinary lives, of the way men and women think and feel and interact, that dazzles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Audio
• Release date: Feb 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471231698

Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short story collections, most recently Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.

Reviews for Clever Girl

[seseeley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intimate observation of what men and women think of life and love and relationships as they go through the details of daily life. One woman's life told through vignettes: from child of a single mom in England to a single mom herself as a hippie, to marriage and middle age. Nice use of language.

[lar0que · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Episodes in the lives (sic) of a "clever girl", Stella, through the 1960s and a communal experience to the present. Beautifully done and set in and about London, Stella is thrust in a life-long journey of managing the "null" of reliving her Mum's life while retaining her clever observations and outlook on her own lives. Hadley infuses Stella with the ability to rule the day in a reflection of the past.

[nyiper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I kept looking for who was supposed to be so "clever" in this book---the writing was good, beautifully descriptive but I wasn't thrilled with the main character and kept waiting for her to show that she really WAS clever...with her life?

[ambermcwilliams · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Paces along with Hadley's usual perception and sensitivity, catching the ambiguities and unpredictability of life in general, and love and learning in particular.

[sigmundfraud · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

CLEVER GIRL by Tessa Hadley came highly recommended to me but I was disappointed. Nothing happens. I don't read action books but I need more action than this contemplative treatise offered. Hadley writes well but I didn't care about her characters.

[thelostentwife · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really struggled with Clever Girl, I'm going to put that right out there first. I seriously flirted with putting it down about five times, all before my usual minimum pages to be read before doing just that (63 pages, by the way). But I pushed through and forced myself to pick up that book and .. around page 60, I finally was caught. It's not often that I struggle like that for a book I end up rather enjoying by the end, but still.. my experience was tainted by those first 59 pages and, frankly, for a book this size (only 212 pages on my e-reader) that's a bit of an ouchie.Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on March 18, 2014.

[bookchickdi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Most people lead ordinary lives, and their stories may not at first appear to be that fascinating to others. Stella is one of those people in Tessa Hadley's Clever Girl. Stella lived with her single mother in a city in 1960s England. Her mother told her that her father had died when Stella was a baby, but Stella learned that he had actually left them.She was close to her mother, as it was just the two of them. That is, until the day Stella's mother remarries, and Stella gets a stepfather and then a baby brother. Stella does well in school, she is a clever girl, until she discovers boys and falls madly in love with Val. They spend all of their time together, but something is not quite right.Stella makes one mistake that changes her entire life and future. Instead of graduating and going to university, Stella becomes pregnant, and Val heads off the United States to avoid trouble, not even knowing he will be a father.Clever Girl realistically shows the difficulties of being an unwed mother, having a child so young. Stella and the baby move from her mother's home to stay with her aunt. I love this description of Stella at this time:"I wasn't quite grateful enough; this was just a flaw in my character at that time in my life, I couldn't help seeing things bitterly, looking at everything-even kindness- with irony."Stella ends up working and living at a boys boarding school. She leaves there to move in with Fred, an old teacher of Val's, who now teaches at the boarding school. From there she ends up living at a commune, having another baby.She has two young sons to support and no good job prospects. She moves back in with Fred, who adores her sons. Stella's life suffocates her, and she takes to running away; she drops the boys off at her mother's, and then she runs away, not knowing when she will return.Stella finally gets to be a clever girl when she goes to university. Like many older students, she focused on working hard and succeeding."It was such a relief to be clever at last. For years I had to keep my cleverness cramped and concealed- not because it was dangerous or forbidden but because it had no useful function my daily life."We get to see Stella from childhood to middle-age and though she may be an ordinary person,Hadley tells her story in such a compelling way as to make her life interesting to the reader. It took me awhile to appreciate Stella, but by the end of the novel, I truly did.Clever Girl reminded me of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn and Alice McDermott's Someone, both in style and substance. All three of these celebrate the life of an ordinary woman, leading a quiet, yet ultimately meaningful life.

[msbaba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Clever Girl,” by Tessa Hadley, is an affecting, subtle, and insightful literary novel pulsing with the important truths of everyday life. It’s a work of fiction that could easily be mistaken for a memoir. The author gives us an ordinary life made extraordinary. It’s the life of Stella, born in Bristol, England, in 1956. I was captivated by Stella’s voice. It was fresh, open, real, and honest, a voice that held nothing back. Stella talks to us in vivid emotional detail, telling us about the milestones in her life from age 10 through 50. Her narrative takes the form of a series of ten linked stories. Most of the chapters deal with her teenage and young adult years. For Stella, these are years of tumultuous transition. Her life becomes one perpetually in the process of being interrupted and upended by fate. As a result, Stella’s tale becomes one of growth, change, and the need to adapt…and that is what this clever girl does: she is very tough and flexible. In many ways, this is a saga of resilience.Together the ten linked stories reveal the rich and quiet value of an ordinary life, a life teeming with every type of emotion that we humans are capable of experiencing. In its entirety, the book is restrained, affecting, deeply poignant, and but most of all, warmly life-affirming. Stella is as true to life as any fictional character can be. The book is far more than an outstanding literary character study. It made me want to hop on a plane, fly to Bristol, knock on Stella’s door, and gently nudge this friend (for that’s what Stella seemed to have become over the course of this book) to continue to tell me more about her life.So what about the title? Is Stella really a clever girl? And how is this important to the tale? There are multiple meanings to the book’s emphasis on “clever.” One has to do with raw intelligence. In the beginning, Stella’s confident she will be able to use her good brains to get an academic degree and rise above her underclass Bristol roots. But as Stella’s life progresses, it becomes clear that her strong character, fortitude, and resilience help her succeed far more than her native intelligence. We learn that there are many ways of being clever. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Naturally, it’s the time-honored story of a life of proverbial quiet desperation, but it ends on a note of life-affirming joy. It made me feel good. Hadley is a remarkable writer and this work shows stunning emotional depth. I recommend it highly.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Domestic set novels have long been disparaged. They are said to not have enough excitement or not to deal with large enough themes. And yet they frequently deal with the same themes that more wide ranging novels do, just in a more concentrated and subtle form. People have the potential to learn and grow in their everyday life just as much as they do when on a quest, on an adventure, or facing the unknown. The best domestic novelists prove this fact easily. Tessa Hadley is a beautiful writer and she knows the perfect pitch for a novel centered tightly around one woman, her life, and the small and large choices that determine her trajectory and yet, despite this, her new novel, Clever Girl, somehow just misses the mark. Written in a series of chapters structured as short stories or vignettes, Stella is a child when the novel opens. She lives with her mother in a tiny flat in Bristol. She's been told that her father is dead but eventually learns that he left when she was a toddler. Stella is a curious and clever child, content to live simply with her mother and spend a lot of time with her nearby grandmother. The novel takes the reader through Stella's childhood, her becoming a teen mom and dropping out of school, living in a commune of sorts, depending on unlikely friends, going back to school as a mature adult, and eventually into her settled and somehow unsatisfactory feeling middle age. Although Stella shows promise when she's young, she makes bad decision after bad decision. Her life seems to be undirected but in fact she makes deliberate choices that lead her to each stage in her life. And after each choice, she is lucky enough to have an extended network step in and support her in moving forward. Although a novel, the story is told entirely in Stella's voice looking back in time, making it feel like a reflective memoir. And despite it being told chronologically, there are some disconcertingly large gaps in the narrative. These gaps may not have changed Stella's character but because they are missing, some of the links between her stages in life feel like they are missing vital information as well. Stella's narration comes across as disconnected and emotionally detached. This could be because she is telling the story in hindsight but it makes it hard to feel in the moment with her and makes her life seem mundane despite events that should have added excitement. The novel's pacing is slow moving and so no matter how much I wanted to like this clearly well written novel, I just never warmed to it or to its main character who never seemed to change or develop. The bigger themes are missing here and without them, the story just meanders. As much as I loved Hadley's Married Love, set in similar situations to those that Stella finds herself in, I just didn't feel the same tug of recognition and emotional truth that was present in that collection.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For some reason, I felt as the though Stella was much older than I am, although we are the same age. Others reviewers felt they knew Stella by the end of the book and I did not. For such a small book, it covered a long span of her life and I found that diluted her.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was interested in this book because its protagonist was born around the same time as me and so we had a number of experiences in common. The protagonist, however, is a woman (I'm not), and she finds herself pregnant without an ongoing relationship with the father of the child - nor does she have a relationship with her own father. In fact, she doesn't know if her father is alive or dead, and has never met him. She then goes on to have another child, without being sure who the child's father is, and then the prime candidate for the fathering position dies. Later she adopts another fatherless child. Getting the idea of a theme developing here? Yes. "Fathers: Do they have any useful role at all?" might be one summary. Surprisingly, I think the book's answer is "yes".

[bobbieharv · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At first I thought I was going to really like this book, but as it went on for some reason it became more and more tedious. I liked the early coming-of-age parts, but as she grew older and older I felt as if I was getting to know her less and less. Somehow the book created a distance between me and Stella, so that by the end I was glad to not have to read about her anymore!

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The clever girl of the title is Stella, born in 1956 and raised by her single mother. Her upbringing makes her fiercely independent, so when her mother remarries Stella is not thrilled; within hours of moving into a brand new tract house with him, she already knows she does not like living with him. Her luck with lovers is bad; one disappears the day after he makes her pregnant; another dies while she is pregnant with her second child. It seems that in all her relationships, no child is raised by its biological father. Told from Stella’s point of view as a 50 year old woman, she writes with awareness of her mistakes and misconceptions in the past. The chapters each tell of a different time in her life and we watch her as she figures out life. She is a clever girl; extremely bright and a lover of books- at least most of the time. Despite her high marks, when she becomes pregnant the first time she leaves school and home to do things her own way. After her frustration as a child of being under the power of her father and mother, she makes sure that she is never dependant on anyone again. She always pays her way. She also chooses her own family- friendship and closeness trumps blood in her book. A number of reviewers have stated that they did not like Stella; I didn’t dislike her at all but she felt rather remote to me. Even during her times of great loss I didn’t feel her pain; she is a character so independent that she doesn’t even need for the reader to care for her. But I liked the book. I couldn’t love the book because of the strange disconnect from Stella (the other characters are even more distant), but I thought it was very well done.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well, I see that I'm in the minority on this one: but I loved it. I can understand why it isn't to everyone's taste. As another reviewer noted, not much happens: it's just the story of one woman's life, and not a particularly extraordinary life at that. She makes friends, does well in school, argues with her mother and resents her stepfather, falls in love, gets pregnant, drops out of school, works as a housekeeper and then a waitress, joins a commune and gets pregnant again, witnesses the murder of her baby's father, returns to school but ends up dropping literature in favor of occupational therapy, has an affair with a married man, gets married, adopts a baby, watches her kids grow up. So no, not a very exciting plot. But what makes this novel exceptional is Hadley's brilliant, sensitive writing and the subtle way that she reveals Stella's thoughts and emotions. Each chapter is a short story in itself (and some were published independently), yet each links somehow to those that went before; and in each, we see how events have changes Stella perception of the world, of the people in her life, and of herself. In some ways, it's the very ordinariness that comes across as extraordinary. At the end of the book, Stella is 50, and she is both the same and much changed from the "clever girl" of the first few chapters. I suspect that readers much younger than Stella will appreciate this novel less than those who are over 50--at an age when one begins to reflect on the past with greater understanding and to develop much more tolerance for and acceptance of the present as the future grows shorter. Hadley's descriptions are perfection. For example, she describes the experience of skipping as a child so well that someone my age can actually feel it again. Marriage is described as feeling like a yin and a yang crammed into a space that is too small for either--perfect! By the time I reached the last page, I felt like I really knew this woman. This is a book that I am sure I will return to in a few years.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Episodic infancy-to-middle-age novels have rather fallen out of fashion since Roxana and Moll Flanders, but the "just one damn thing after another" approach to fiction can still be very effective, as this book demonstrates. Hadley spent quite some years writing about her heroine Stella (several chapters were originally published as standalone short stories) before stitching it all together into a novel that takes her from a sixties childhood in a single parent family in an inner-city district of Bristol right through to 21st century middle-class life outside Taunton with an Aga, a businessman husband, and a complicated extended family of children and stepchildren that would do credit to a Margaret Drabble heroine. There's not much obvious coherence in the plot: the things that drive the course of Stella's life are almost all complete accidents, good and bad: the point of the book seems to be in her ability as first-person narrator to take a step back from herself and look coolly at the things that are happening to her and how she has dealt with them. And of course in Hadley's clever ability to capture the feel of each of the decades she whisks us through in a few telling images. The question of Stella's "cleverness" doesn't quite come to the fore quite as much as the title leads us to expect. This isn't a Jeanette Winterson novel in which the clever heroine is constantly surrounded by stupid people of both sexes. Hadley quietly allows Stella to switch her interest in bookish things on and off at will, depending on the stage of life she happens to be going through — it's OK to be perceived to be clever at school and later on as a mature student at university, but it's not a good look when you're a struggling teenage single mum and part-time waitress. Obviously, that's something that real people (women in particular) feel obliged to do in real situations, but it struck me as behaviour you don't often see in fictional characters. Interesting.

[mahallett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Strange story but pretty good.

[laroque-878544 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Episodes in the lives (sic) of a "clever girl", Stella, through the 1960s and a communal experience to the present. Beautifully done and set in and about London, Stella is thrust in a life-long journey of managing the "null" of reliving her Mum's life while retaining her clever observations and outlook on her own lives. Hadley infuses Stella with the ability to rule the day in a reflection of the past.

[essesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intimate observation of what men and women think of life and love and relationships as they go through the details of daily life. One woman's life told through vignettes: from child of a single mom in England to a single mom herself as a hippie, to marriage and middle age. Nice use of language.