One reason I don’t like books by contemporary writers is that many of them seem to come from privileged backgrounds, with prestigious academic credentials and a socioeconomic status that protects them from the burden of working for a living. Poets are not much different: they find meaning in the everyday tasks that the rest of us must perform simply to live. Ashby’s review of Alone with a Book by Tessa Hadley sets a bell ringing in my spirit, instantly piquing my interest in the life of a kindred spirit in stories. What makes Hadley unique among her contemporaries is her delight in the ordinary, the seemingly mundane and trivial.
My literary heroines are Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Prudence in A View of the Harbour, Macabéa in The Hour of the Star, and Renée in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. What do these women have in common? They have no glamorous jobs with PPO health insurance or weeks of paid vacation, nor the kind of intricate intellectual vertigo that places them on a higher pedestal. And if a character is the opposite of these women, she usually rebels against social norms or thrusts her fist toward the sky while chanting for social equality without knowing what it is. Have I forgotten books about ideology and identity, which are so in vogue? Or the confessional memoirs published by celebrities, and so forth? What a medley of public existential angst, clamoring to become bestsellers or national bestsellers.
Hadley is a woman of letters who draws wisdom and beauty from life through her intellectual curiosity about the three value paths in logotherapy: creative, experiential, and attitudinal, which can be achieved by fulfilling the duties daily life gives us. I am uncertain whether Hadley wrote her essay and her other books with the tenets of logotherapy in mind, but these values seem to match her worldview and her literary world. In Charlotte Brontë’s terms, an author should write what is true to herself and therefore true to life, just as her little sister Anne Brontë did in Agnes Grey. Anne drew on her own experience as a governess, enduring—with the grace of a swan and the attentiveness of a cat—the haughtiness of those who employed her to educate their children. Agnes saw the precarious human emotions in her employers’ flaunting of influence and beauty. I am certain that Hadley would love to write about an Agnes Grey of our time.
What distinguishes Hadley from others is her view of Christianity as a positive influence that has shaped cultural imagination and our idea of beauty, a way to see beauty in human life. This is remarkable because it is uncommon to find Christianity as a foundation for artistic inspiration in the aesthetic expression of human emotions. She remains in awe of religious paintings, including The Coronation of the Virgin by Jacopo di Cione and The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr by Giovanni Bellini. Hadley finds Christianity’s magnanimity in life and art rather than in the Church’s catechism.
I regard myself as a ghost lover, as many of my beloved writers have become stars in literature’s constellation. To me, their work feels more inviting, letting me know more about the characters through whom the writers delineate silhouettes of themselves. But I cannot help but think that writing about someone with no six-figure income, a big house without a mortgage, and/or glittering academic credentials and beauty has become an oddly rare literary subject, at least for now.
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