Kate Atkinson

By Armelle Parey

This timely in-depth study of award-winning Kate Atkinson's work provides a welcome comprehensive overview of the novels, play and short stories. It explores the major themes and aesthetic concerns in her fiction. Combining close analysis and literary contextualisation, it situates her multi-faceted work in terms of a hybridisation of genres and innovative narrative strategies to evoke contemporary issues and well as the past. Chapters offer insights into each major publication (from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war) in relation to the key concerns of Atkinson's fiction, including self-narrativisation, history, memory and women’s lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526148513

Book preview

Kate Atkinson

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELISTS

Series editor Daniel Lea

already published

J.G. Ballard Andrzej Gasiorek

Julian Barnes Peter Childs

Pat Barker John Brannigan

A.S. Byatt Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos

Jim Crace Philip Tew

Howard Jacobson David Brauner

James Kelman Simon Kővesi

Iain Sinclair Brian Baker

Graham Swift Daniel Lea

Irvine Welsh Aaron Kelly

Jeanette Winterson Susana Onega

Kate Atkinson

Armelle Parey

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Armelle Parey 2022

The right of Armelle Parey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4852 0 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Series editor’s foreword

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Kate Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity

1Coming-of-age novels: Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird

2Forays into other genres: theatre and short stories

3Defamiliarising detective fiction with Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, Started Early, Took My Dog and Big Sky

4Re-imagining the war in Life After Life, A God in Ruins and Transcription

5Of endings in Kate Atkinson’s novels

Bibliography

Index

Series editor’s foreword

Contemporary British Novelists offers readers critical introductions to some of the most exciting and challenging writing of recent years. Through detailed analysis of their work, volumes in the series present lucid interpretations of authors who have sought to capture the sensibilities of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Informed, but not dominated, by critical theory, Contemporary British Novelists explores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction, and situates key figures within their relevant social, political, artistic and historical contexts.

The title of the series is deliberately provocative, recognising each of the three defining elements as contentious identifications of a cultural framework that must be continuously remade and renamed. The contemporary British novel defies easy categorisation and rather than offering bland guarantees as to the current trajectories of literary production, volumes in this series contest the very terms that are employed to unify them. How does one conceptualise, isolate and define the mutability of the contemporary? What legitimacy can be claimed for a singular Britishness given the multivocality implicit in the redefinition of national identities? Can the novel form adequately represent reading communities increasingly dependent upon digitalised communication? These polemical considerations are the theoretical backbone of the series, and attest to the difficulties of formulating a coherent analytical approach to the discontinuities and incoherencies of the present.

Contemporary British Novelists does not seek to appropriate its subjects for prescriptive formal or generic categories; rather it aims to explore the ways in which aesthetics are reproduced, refined and repositioned through recent prose writing. If the overarching architecture of the contemporary always eludes description, then the grandest ambition of this series must be to plot at least some of its dimensions.

Daniel Lea

Acknowledgements

A section of Chapter 1 is a revised version of articles that appeared in The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies 20 (2013) and in Nathalie Martinière and Estelle Epinoux’s Rewriting in the 20th –21st Centuries: Aesthetic Choice or Political Act? (Houdiard 2015). A much shorter version of Chapter 3 appeared in Etudes britanniques contemporaines 58 (2020). Part of Chapter 4 appeared in Etudes britanniques contemporaines 62 (2022).

As Kate Atkinson has Effie say in Emotionally Weird, adapting John Donne, ‘No woman is an island’ (EW 219). Genuine thanks to Paul Clark at Manchester University Press and the anonymous experts and reader for supporting the project. Warm-hearted thanks are due to family, colleagues and friends for their support and notably to Josephine McNamara for her generous encouragement and faith, to Georges Letissier and Isabelle Roblin for their valuable advice, to Andrew Guy and Sandra Robinson for their helpful proof-reading, to James and Jacques McNamara for simply being there.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Annick and Gérard Parey.

Abbreviations

Works by Kate Atkinson which are cited parenthetically throughout this book are abbreviated as follows:

Introduction: Kate Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity

Kate Atkinson arrived at the forefront of the literary scene when her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won both Whitbread Book of the Year and First Novel awards in 1995. The novel, which begins with a narrator in the guise of an omniscient foetus and then alternates chapters in the present tense on the main character growing up with episodes from the family past, was acclaimed for its high degree of inventiveness and originality (Parker 2002, 74–75; Tolan 2008, 13). About twenty years later, Atkinson won the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Novel Award in 2013 and 2015, respectively, for Life After Life, which tells the story or stories of one Ursula Todd who lives her life over and over again in the period that encompasses the two world wars, and A God in Ruins, which goes back and forth across the twentieth century with a focus on the Second World War since the main character, Ursula’s brother, is a pilot. In between, Atkinson was awarded the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2005 for Case Histories (2004) in which she introduced the character of private detective Jackson Brodie, who was to reappear in four subsequent novels to date. What these prize-winning novels taken as landmarks indicate is Atkinson’s continuing concern for storytelling, the writing of the past and her remarkable versatility in terms of form and narrative.

Born on 20 December 1951, a single child to a couple running a medical and surgical supplies shop, and an avid reader, Kate Atkinson grew up in York before studying for a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Dundee, followed by a doctorate on American fiction that was however ‘refused at its viva’ (Clark 2001)¹ but which informed her writing.² Atkinson turned to writing short stories in the early 1980s, when in her thirties. ‘In China’ won a competition by Woman’s Own magazine in 1986 and ‘Karmic Mothers – Fact or Fiction?’ won the Ian St James Award in 1993. She was forty-three by the time she published Behind the Scenes at the Museum. As of today, Atkinson is the author of eleven novels, one full-length play and one collection of short stories.³ Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) was shortly followed by Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000), all marked by firework-like expansiveness and a high degree of self-reflexivity. Emotionally Weird was written approximately over the same period (1997–99) as Abandonment (Atkinson ‘Behind the Scenes’ 2000), a play eventually performed by Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival in July 2000. Because she felt she had been ‘writing herself into a metafictional corner’ (Atkinson The Scotsman 2010) with her first three novels and especially with Emotionally Weird, she went back to writing short stories and published her collection Not the End of the World, only three stories of which had appeared or been read elsewhere before. Atkinson then returned to novel writing, now exploring realism (Tolan 2008, 10) with Case Histories (2004) followed by One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News? (2008) and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), all featuring and developing the character of detective Jackson Brodie. Following the BBC adaptation (2011, 2013) with Jason Isaacs in the leading role, Atkinson abandoned the character until she could ‘get the internal Jackson back’ (after his being externalised by the actor): she ‘kind of reclaimed him’ (Atkinson 2019, 361) in Big Sky (2019). In the meantime, the writer went back to writing about the past, mainly the Second World War and its aftermath. Life After Life (2013) offers successive versions of Ursula Todd’s life as the heroine is born, dies, is born again and so on, each time hoping to improve the world she lives in. Its companion piece, A God in Ruins (2015), intertwines different periods but focuses on Teddy Todd, Ursula’s favourite brother, his war and his life afterwards, including that of his offspring. With a similarly complex time frame, Transcription (2018) evokes London in 1940 and 1950 through a different set of characters, mostly focusing on young Juliet Armstrong enrolled as a Secret Service worker by MI5.

The reception of Atkinson’s work has been consistently positive. Life After Life featured as number 20 in The Guardian’s 100 best books list for the twenty-first century established towards the end of 2019. Atkinson’s novels are widely reviewed in Britain and in the USA and the critical academic interest in her work, not restricted to her prize-winning novels, extends beyond Britain. Human Croquet is the main object of full chapters in Julie Sanders’s Novel Shakespeares and Kevin Paul Smith’s The Postmodern Fairy Tale. Critics have pointed to Atkinson’s ‘originality and individual style that have marked her out as a significant talent’ (Rennison 12) and she has been deemed ‘a unique voice in British fiction’ (Tolan 2008, 11). Yet, her work can be said to be ‘underrated’ (Clark 2018) as it is considered in relatively few studies in contemporary fiction. The only book-length study to date dedicated to Atkinson’s oeuvre is Brian Diemert’s introductory Understanding Kate Atkinson (2020) after Emma Parker’s seminal Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader’s Guide in the Continuum Contemporaries Series in 2002. Nick Rennison included her in his Contemporary Novelists in 2005, while Fiona Tolan interviewed the novelist for the collection Writers Talk (2008) edited with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson. Her work is mentioned in Glenda Norquay’s The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (2012) in relation to genre fiction and in David James’ edited collection, British Fiction since 1945 (2015), in relation to feminism. James Acheson’s The Contemporary British Novel since 2000 (2017) includes Glenda Norquay’s scholarly analysis devoted to Atkinson’s work.

Contrary, for instance, to Zadie Smith or A.S. Byatt who have published critical essays or prefaces and contributed many pieces to the Guardian or Ian McEwan who is regularly interviewed on current affairs, Atkinson is a private writer who does not often take a public stance in public affairs, literary or otherwise, even if she has occasionally prefaced re-editions.⁴ She thus wrote introductions to Jane Austen’s The Watsons (2007) and Pride and Prejudice (2010), Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (2011) and Richmal Crompton’s William the Good (2016), on whose character she based her Augustus in Life After Life.

Atkinson remains however an ‘outsider’ (Tolan 2008, 4) in the sense she was never part of the London literary scene as she lives in Edinburgh and often locates her novels in the north of England and in Scotland; a number of her novels focus on women’s lives, and like other women authors (such as Pat Barker, Carol Shields, A.S. Byatt), she started writing after her marriage and the birth of her children. At the beginning of her public career, her winning the Whitbread Book of the Year award with Behind the Scenes at the Museum over Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh was somewhat marred by sexist and snobbish comments. As pointed out by Hilary Mantel:

On the day after Kate Atkinson’s first novel won the Whitbread Prize, the Guardian’s headline read: ‘Rushdie makes it a losing double.’ Thus Rushdie is reminded of his disappointments, Atkinson gets no credit, and the uninformed reader assumes that this year’s Whitbread is a damp squib. But read on. ‘A 44-year-old chambermaid won one of Britain’s leading literary awards last night.’

Was this the Guardian? Was this 1996? One felt spun back in time to, say, 1956. (Mantel)⁵

Literary snobbery was apparent too in the fact that ‘Richard Hoggart, chairman of the Whitbread judges, said that Atkinson had written a Post-Modern novel, but might not know it’ (Mantel).⁶

Atkinson’s work, has, however, since continued to garner praise and recognition. Atkinson was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2011. She won the E.M. Forster award granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. On top of the awards already mentioned, Case Histories was on the shortlist in 2004 for the Whitbread/Costa awards. Life After Life won the Independent Bookseller Book of the Year award, the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Woman’s Prize for Fiction in 2014. One Good Turn (2006) was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year and Transcription for the British Book of the Year in Fiction award in 2019. Possibly dissatisfied with the system of literary awards, she asked her publishers in 2019 not to enter her work in book competitions anymore (Hughes).

Academia’s relatively moderate interest in Kate Atkinson and her never once having been selected for the Booker Prize may partly be due to her best-selling results.⁷ In his glowing review of A God in Ruins, Matt Cain notes: ‘Life After Life notably missed out on many of the major literary prizes, perhaps because of critical snobbery; I’ve heard critics and fellow authors deride Atkinson because in the past she’s worked in genre and her novels have sold in their millions’. As Atkinson noticed herself, ‘there’s that curiously British form of intellectual snobbery which proposes that if you’re popular you can’t be good, if you sell you must have sold out. This is insulting to readers and audiences alike’ (Atkinson ‘Behind the Scenes’ 2000). Indeed, as Pierre Bourdieu noted, high art belongs to ‘the field of restricted production’, while ‘average’ or commercial art is mass marketed (Bourdieu 54, 82). Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss Atkinson’s fiction on the basis of a popularity which suggests high readability. Regardless of the fact that readability may be considered a quality for the relation it sets up between text and reader, Atkinson’s work is accessible as well as challenging (Clark 2003, 14; Norquay 2017, 119). Her eleven novels tackle different genres and experiment with narrative structure so that, to some extent, Atkinson seems to reinvent herself as a writer each time. Yet, there is of course something quintessential and ‘distinctive’ (Hadley) about Atkinson’s fiction – as is suggested by the fact that the writer’s name now appears in bigger font than her titles on new editions and re-editions of her novels. As an American reviewer put it, ‘On whatever shelves they are arranged, her books share some key traits: They are literary and accessible and marvels of construction; they are funny, offbeat and full of parenthetical asides, sharp and sly and tinged with sadness’ (Kaufmann). The main objective of this book is to explore the singularity and significance of Atkinson’s fiction over twenty-five years, since the publication of her first novel, while situating her work in the constantly changing contemporary landscape.

From the perspective of literary history, with her first novel published in 1995 and the latest one in 2019, Atkinson’s work stands at the turn of the century and thus seems to encompass postmodernism and its aftermath, both of which are marked by a process of hybridisation that combines elements from different sources to create a third ‘species’, a process that, as we shall see, is at work in Atkinson’s oeuvre.⁸ An aspect of postmodernism mentioned by John Barth and particularly significant when discussing Kate Atkinson’s work is that Barth’s ideal postmodernist novelist ‘aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal … he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of … professional devotees of high art’ (Barth 70, emphasis in original). This ties in with Leslie Fiedler’s earlier injunction to close the gap between high and low art forms in ‘Cross the Border – Close the Gap’ (1968).⁹ As James Acheson sums it up:

One of the features of literary postmodernism that distinguishes it from the high modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s is the difference in attitude to popular culture taken by its practitioners. Where the literary high modernist alludes in his or her writing to only the very best literature, art and music, the postmodern writer readily calls attention to various aspects of popular culture, including comic books, cartoons, films, televisions, pop art and pop music. (Acheson 2017, 7)¹⁰

Atkinson certainly straddles the divide too, when she convenes popular songs along with T.S. Eliot’s poetry in Life After Life, for instance, but also when she takes on genre fiction, like detective fiction in her Brodie novels and spy fiction in Transcription. Overall, hybridity – here used as an umbrella term for any deliberate combination of distinct elements – seems like a very apt notion to encompass Atkinson’s aesthetics because, throughout her career, she has convened and appropriated genre, from the ‘family saga’ (McDermott 68; Hargreaves 41) in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Life After Life through fantasy in Human Croquet, detective fiction to the historical novel and, more recently, the spy novel. A few critics have recognised Atkinson’s fiction as ‘genre-defying’ (Merritt 2015).¹¹ Atkinson does not write within a genre but appropriates it as another intertext with which a dynamic link is established as she instils an uncommon dimension into it and creates what Bahktin calls a ‘hybrid construction’ when looking at linguistic occurrences: ‘an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems’ (Bahktin 304). The process, in general, may thus lead to a wealth of results. As summed up by Vanessa Guignery, ‘The encounters and mixtures triggered off by hybrid processes open up new perspectives on the world and result in artistic forms which can combine different styles, languages, modes and genres’ (Guignery 2011, 3). Interestingly, in the course of hybridisation combining, as Atkinson does, a recognisable style with uncommon features, the well-known genre is scrutinised, challenged and transformed, subsumed into a novel construction. ‘Defamiliarisation’ (Shklovsky 2017), ‘re-vision’ (Rich), ‘revisiting’ and ‘rewriting’ (Moraru) thus form part of the recurring vocabulary that will be used throughout this book to examine and define Atkinson’s work.

Her literary production definitely belongs to her times, a period marked by hybridisation, but within the contemporary landscape Kate Atkinson’s distinctiveness derives from what could be termed her idiosyncratic aesthetics of hybridity that appropriates and re-combines well-known genres and techniques and resides in her complex yet approachable narratives that enable her to engage the reader in contemporary issues and insight into human concerns. This book purports to consider Atkinson’s fiction mostly in terms of the diverse aspects, instances and effects of the process of hybridisation at work.

The following pages will first consider the literary and theoretical background to Atkinson’s work before pointing to some idiosyncratic elements of her aesthetics that will reappear throughout this study: the combination of tradition and innovation particularly noticeable in her alliance of flowing narratives and fragmentation, the use of humour, the concern for history and memory and the feminist dimension of her work.

Beyond the postmodern context

Atkinson’s first novel was labelled postmodern because of its playfulness and non-linearity, and indeed the first three novels are feasts of excess, parody and self-conscious writing. Atkinson’s subsequent work, after her collection of stories, can be read as an illustration of the aftermath of postmodernism, when ‘there is a retreat from the extreme playfulness of postmodernism and the emphasis on textuality and on difficulty’ (Eaglestone 2013, 14) as ‘writers have clearly learned a great deal from the experimentalism of postmodernism and its forebears, they have integrated it, domesticated it, and returned some way to the more traditional forms of the novel’ (Eaglestone 2013, 15). In Daniel Weston’s words, ‘If the 1980s and 1990s represented the high-water mark of postmodern, hyperconscious metafiction and formal deviation, then the 2000s have been a decade in which writers have sought to digest these trends and move beyond them’ (Weston 174). In 2004, Atkinson published Case Histories, which introduced the character of private detective Jackson Brodie, a character around whom she based her next three novels. These novels seemed to indicate a turn for realism because they tackle contemporary issues and include psychologically believable characters in a familiar environment without offending verisimilitude. Yet, Case Histories and its three sequels were followed by new experimental feasts with three historical novels that use innovative narrative modes to re-imagine the past, notably the Second World War. These can be seen as part of a more recent trend where ‘[p]‌ostmodernism’s self-reflexive playfulness’ remains, now coupled with ‘an underlying sense of emotional truthfulness’ (O’Gorman and Eaglestone 2). According to Alison Gibbons, ‘realism is once again a popular mode. Emotions, furthermore, are again playing a central role in literary fiction, as authors insist on our essential relationality – our connectedness as humans to one another in the globalizing world and with fictional characters as representations of our selves’, while Peter Boxall notices ‘a new commitment to the materiality of history, a fresh awareness of the reality of the past, and of our obligation to bear witness to it’ (Boxall 12).

This trend, often linked to the beginning of the twenty-first century, is sometimes called ‘post-postmodernism’ since it ‘marks an intensification and mutation with postmodernism’ (Nealon ix) or ‘metamodernism’, which also works in relation to postmodernism: ‘metamodernism should be situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism’ as ‘many [postmodern tendencies] are taking another shape, and, more importantly, a new sens, a new meaning and direction’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker, emphasis in original). Either way, what has replaced postmodernism is itself a new hybrid construction grafted on the previous situation. As put quite simply and clearly by artist Luke Turner, ‘Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism’ (Turner). In other words, ‘the postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on – as do those of modernism – in our contemporary twenty-first century world’ (Hutcheon 2002, 181) but critics infuse its aftermath with a renewal of seriousness, sincerity, materiality, history, and so on. Looking at Atkinson’s more recent work, Glenda Norquay points to what might look like a similar evolution in this novelist’s fiction: considering it retains postmodern qualities, Atkinson’s fiction has also ‘shifted to encompass larger questions about how the self might be understood in terms of past, present and future’ (Norquay 2017, 126–127). However, one may add that in Atkinson’s case, despite their complicated construction, her novels always focus on characters as individuals, if in search of their own identity.

On combining tradition and innovation

The context for Atkinson’s developing aesthetics of hybridity is thus marked in the 2000s by ‘the fuller gestation’ (Weston 177) of the trend identified by Gasiorek in Post-War British Fiction: ‘the dichotomy between realism and experimentalism is misleading in the post-war context because numerous novelists have sought to transcend it in their writing’ (Gasiorek 17 quoted in Weston 177). Daniel Weston gives the examples of Julian Barnes’s evolution from History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters to The Sense of an Ending in which the suspicion of metanarrative is still present but held in check by a realist narrative. He also mentions Graham Swift’s change from ‘hyper reflexive Waterland to Wish You Were Here where disordered chronology is less obstructive’ (Weston 183). Jennifer Hodgson in her chapter ‘Experiment’ admits that ‘today, to speak of an experimental novel seems like a quaint anachronism, given that the non-linearity, chronological displacement, fragmentary selves, metafictional self-consciousness, multi-modality and trans-mediality that were the markers of twentieth-century experiment are seen up and down best-seller lists (in the works, for example, of Ali Smith, David Mitchell, Jon McGregor amongst others)’ (Hodgson 59). Hodgson seems to associate experiment in literature with ‘private language and broken syntax’, authors united in their ‘antipathy towards the literary and novelistic convention’, favouring ‘a predominant mode of sincerity’ (Hodgson 58). Yet, Hodgson concludes that literary experiment still builds on literary convention, if in its own way: ‘For these writers the idea that the novel, in its traditional form, is no longer fit for purpose is now a given. But their works seek to demonstrate that the failure and malfunctioning of its narrative principles and conventions can still perform important work. This is metafiction – but not as we know it’ (Hodgson 65). In Weston’s words, ‘experimentalism and realism do not always exist as polar opposites, but … they cohabit in particular texts and, increasingly over the course of the decade … the accommodation of one to another is perhaps a defining feature of novelistic variation’ (Weston 195). For her part, Atkinson rejects the notion of experimentalism in contemporary fiction, considering that ‘no one is doing anything as experimental as what was being done a hundred years ago’ (Guardian podcast on Transcription), referring to modernism, and she prefers to apply to her work the term ‘innovative’ as she tries ‘to make things new and fresh’ (Hughes). Atkinson’s work is part of the contemporary syncretism or hybridity as her fiction offers what could be called ‘literary page-turners’: ‘literary’, not merely because of its multiple intertextual references, but because it remains free from genre conventions and innovative; and ‘page-turner’ because she captures the reader’s interest in her characters and stories. As Jonathan Dee puts it, ‘Atkinson’s exceptional reader-friendliness has always been a Trojan horse, a way of delivering something pointed in the guise of something smoothly familiar. She occupies that rare cultural sweet spot wherein she scoops up awards for artistic excellence while also reliably hitting the bestseller lists’ (Dee).

In fact, Atkinson’s work combines postmodern narrative and stylistic techniques with aspects of realism.¹² Atkinson makes no claim to be holding George Eliot’s mirror,¹³ declaring ‘a novel is about itself’ (Sikka). Yet, her fiction teems with convincing characters whose emotional lives engage the reader. She uses realist conventions (such as precise geographical details of her characters’ progress through the streets of York or London or the research underlying all historical novels and implying a concern with verisimilitude and accuracy) but these are deflated by a form of self-reflexivity. Atkinson’s fiction thus offers complex plots which involve many full-fledged characters confronted with a multiplicity