Free The Modern Library by Colm Tóibín, Carmen Callil Page B

Gates of Ivory (1991).
    Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
     
     

Maureen Duffy 1933–
     
1962 That’s How it Was
     
    There is a nobility about this semi-autobiographical novel. Though it captures a particular time and place of poverty – the East End of London before and during the Second World War – its sense of longing is universal. It is also an unusual addition to the literature of tuberculosis, that disease which infiltrated so many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century families, so often recorded in novels of the time. Most remarkable is the dogged poignancy of its portrait of the love of a child for its mother.
    Louey Mahony, one of eight children in a family decimated by TB, falls for an Irishman, Paddy, who leaves her with an illegitimate girl Paddy of her own; the child tells us this story. Poverty and bombing are not the only problems Louey has to face: Louey’s TB is of the slow, struggling kind, and Paddy grows up mostly in other people’s houses, or, when Louey marries again to give a home to Paddy, with an illiterate stepfamily, peace and money always in short supply. Paddy rages, and escapes, but always her eye is on her mother Louey: resolute, neat as a pin, loving, a good woman who is allotted absolutely nothing by the country she lives in. There is an elegiac quality about this novel, and an anxious yet lyrical strength in Duffy’s writing, which fits like a glove the love story she tells.
    Maureen Duffy was born in Sussex. She is a poet and biographer, and her fiction includes The Microcosm (1966) and Love Child (1971).
    Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.
     
     

Daphne du Maurier 1907–1989
     
1951 My Cousin Rachel
     
    Some of the most satisfying entertainments of the Victorian age were novels such as Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne , which sensationally used domestic circumstances as the setting for intrigue, secrets, violence and death.
    Daphne du Maurier is the direct descendant of this tradition, and My Cousin Rachel a great achievement in this genre. On an estate in Cornwall in the nineteenth century, Ambrose Ashley raises his nephew Philip with servants, dogs, neighbours, tenants – but no women. Ambrose, in Europe, encounters the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and in six months is dead, having sent a sequence of troubling letters to Philip accusing Rachel of extravagance – and worse. Philip, the image of his uncle in every way, is possessed by hatred for Rachel until she comes to stay: small, large-eyed , an enchantress, she bewitches Philip entirely.
    My Cousin Rachel follows every twist and turn of a heart obsessed; du Maurier’s considerable artistry is rooted in her control of hypnotic detail and psychological tension so that even the removal of a vase of flowers takes on a sinister significance. Simultaneously she mocks and reverses our conventional expectations of the sexual desires that drive men and women, always leaving questions in the air. Resolutions unresolved: that was her hallmark, as was providing entertainment of the highest order.
    Daphne du Maurier was born in London and lived mostly in Cornwall. Many of her stories – ‘The Birds’ (1963) and ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1938) – and novels were filmed, the most famous being Rebecca (1938).
    Age in year of publication: forty-four.
     
     

Bret Easton Ellis 1964–
     
1991 American Psycho
     
    American Psycho is both a morality tale and a comedy about capitalism and materialism. The abject consumerism of the protagonist and his friends who work on Wall Street, their obsession with brand names, chic restaurants and new trends, and their vicious snobbery are combined with elaborate descriptions of the murdering and dismemberment and torture of women.
    The cold, dispassionate tone in which the violence is described has been much misunderstood: the tone of American Psycho has the moralistic edge of Swift, suggesting a connection between the