THE BIRTHDAY BOYS AND EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

Bainbridge's path to writing The Birthday Boys (1991) and Every Man for Himself (1996) was a circuitous one. The friendship between James Barrie and Robert Falcon Scott came to her attention during her research for An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) and this set in train a series of connections: ‘I thought what a strange couple, but of course, the idea of the lost boys in never never land leads logically (to my mind) to my next book, The Birthday Boys. And that led to the Titanic’ (Guppy 260). Barrie led to Scott and Scott led to the other icy tragedy of 1912, the sinking of the Titanic. This in turn led Bainbridge to embark upon the quartet of historical novels that have defined her later career. The sustained departure from the smaller-scale territory of her early fiction was, Bainbridge has claimed, also inspired by external upheavals, most notably the death of Colin Haycraft, who since the early 1970s had been Bainbridge's close friend and mentor as well as her publisher, and with whom she later conducted a long-running affair. His death in 1994 led to a change in the dynamic between Bainbridge and Duckworth: ‘Robin Baird-Smith, the new president at Duckworth, came around and asked me what I wanted to persuade me to stay’, she told an interviewer in 1998, ‘Just like that, I said ‘‘A three book contract,’’ though I'd never had one before. Off the top of my head I said I'd write about the Titanic, the Crimea and Dr. Johnson.’ Although a huge personal loss, Haycraft's death gave Bainbridge a peculiar ‘sense of freedom’ because it allowed her to pursue historical topics she would not otherwise have had the confidence to tackle: ‘I could never have written those books if Colin was alive, he'd have said I didn't know enough about it, so that's the reason I got onto that and it flowed out…. He'd have wanted to butt in’ (Marsh).