Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...NATURAL CURIOSITY by Margaret Drabble (Viking; $19.95). In a sequel to The Radiant Way (1987), the author offers a Victorian-style novel about some decidedly contemporary English women...
Wander into the Reeves private hotel, a tidy Victorian row house overlooking Shepherd's Bush Green, and you can easily imagine yourself in any of central * London's small, discreet hotels. The woman at the front desk will offer a cordial greeting as you check in, tell you about the facilities and invite you to have tea or a drink at the bar. Unless, of course, you are a man. In that case, you will be urged, very graciously, to leave...
...field of expertise, Robyn doesn't know the first thing about industry. At one point, when touring a factory, Robyn has to ask Vic what a foundry is. And when she arrives at the factory for the first time, she naively expects it to be something out of a Victorian novel; "Where are the chimneys?" she asks...
...this point Lodge simply pulls an ending out of a hat--every one gets saved. The novel simply falls back on what Robyn describes as the standard solutions of the Victorian novelist: legacy, marriage, emigration and death...
...Nice Work covers new ground, particularly in its analysis of Thatcherite Britain in relation to the Victorian industrial era. It is just as consciously literary as either of the first two, but it has a firmer grounding in the contemporary social and economic problems of modern-day Britain...