ABSTRACT
For those who like neat compartmentalisation, Beryl Bainbridge's novels can be divided easily into two categories. There are the earlier novels, which draw upon her own upbringing in Liverpool and her personal experience to create laconic, blackly comic dramas in which the mundane and the unsettling sit side by side on the page. Then there are her historical novels of the last ten years, in which she provides her own oblique and offbeat perspective on iconic events and individuals in English history from the sinking of the Titanic and Scott's voyage to the Antarctic to the Crimean War and Dr Johnson. Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool in 1934 and left school at the age of fourteen. In her teens and early twenties she worked as an actress. Her experiences in rep were to provide her, nearly forty years later, with the material for one of her best novels, An Awfully Big Adventure.
