THE BOTTLE FACTORY OUTING AND SWEET WILLIAM

Beryl Bainbridge was adamant that she was not a feminist. In fact, she went so far as to pronounce herself ‘against’ feminism (Marsh). Yet a more subtle distinction can still be made between those writers whose work consciously and consistently engages with feminist thinking, and those whose work is not consciously allied to feminism but who engage with debates that can be described as feminist. Notwithstanding her protestations, Bainbridge falls into the latter category. Indeed, the fact that she is not usually included in discussions of feminism or gender in literature is an oversight which ignores a significant aspect of Bainbridge's writing. Virginia Richter has acknowledged this and describes Bainbridge's novels as ‘feminist precisely in their refusal to underwrite the ideas of fullness, wholeness and meaning’. More recently, Helen Carr has argued that feminism could provide an important context for Bainbridge's work, describing how ‘her resistance to seeing women as victims has much in common with [Angela] Carter’ (Carr 79). But in Carr's essay, as elsewhere, the question of Bainbridge's relationship with feminism is left undeveloped. In fact, there are only two sustained attempts to place her work within the contexts of women's writing or feminism: in Femicidal Fears (2001) Helene Meyers describes The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) as a critique of male violence, and in ‘The Prop They Need’ (2001) Ana Marìa Sa´nchez-Arce offers a persuasive gendered reading of Master Georgie (1998). These represent valuable contributions to the field, but there remains more to be said.

In the centralization of Hester Thrale and her daughter Queeney in Bainbridge's ‘Samuel Johnson’ novel According to Queeney (2001), and the rewriting of the traditionally malecentred war narrative that takes place in Master Georgie, recent years have seen Bainbridge engage in a gendered critique of the past and its representation in historical discourse.