Penelope Lively, a Booker Prize-winning English author, now 88, has selected the best of a lifetime’s worth of her short stories in a handsome new volume called Metamorphosis.
She describes in her introduction how these tales come to her: “They are served up by life as lived, but in disguise.” The works collected here cover the events and issues that preoccupied Lively at the time of original publication; their dates range from the late 1970s to 2016.
In one of the most memorable, “The Crimean Hotel”, a widow on a tightly policed trip to communist-era Russia forges a connection with an English-speaking sailor. That story, Lively recounts, sprang from something similar that happened to her during a writers’ trip to the Soviet Union in 1984 and was “prompted by that encounter, but much else”.
The title story, “Metamorphosis, or the Elephant’s Foot”, is one of two new novella-length pieces that bookend the collection. “Metamorphosis” offers us a woman’s life history in several chronological parts, each one named for an old-fashioned object that is invested with meaning. The first is titled “The Elephant’s Foot”, after an umbrella stand made from a long-dead animal, an “unappealing metamorphosis”. It belongs to the great grandmother of Harriet Mayfield, a child born in London in the early 1900s. Lively signals early on that Harriet is part of a changing world — her father has forbidden “the name of that Pankhurst woman to be mentioned again”.
The elephant’s foot — like the other objects that structure this story: a pearl button, a parasol and a tortoise-shell mirror — also has its history told. It is eventually thrown by a workman into a skip in the 1950s. (This was foolish, the narrator points out, as in another 60 years or so “he could have got £250 for it on eBay. Tastes can change, too.”) Harriet’s life spans the 20th century, although Lively is careful to cut the story off before her life ends, a happy ending of sorts.
Meanwhile, the second new story, “Songs of Praise”, presented last in this volume, shows us a family “celebration” after the death of Martha Relford. We see Martha — artist, mother, friend — only through others. Lively describes the composed “dry humour” of Colin’s speech about his late wife, while the wise authorial voice interjects that: “All marriages carry freight, some more perilous than others. The Relford marriage appears to have borne up well, or so it seems.”
As we soon learn, this couple shared an explosive, perilously freighted, secret for decades. Now only Colin, and Lively’s readers, know it. Martha, after her death, has fragmented. “There are now many versions of Martha, many truths, perhaps many untruths.”
In Metamorphosis, Lively also tempers her perfect rendering of the speech and manners of the brittle surface-skimmers of English society with a glimpse of what lies beneath. Years after the second world war — which she spent as a brigadier’s personal assistant in Jerusalem — Harriet realises how the language of the time “evaded reality”. There were so many deaths, talked about so lightly: “The tank crews who had been burned alive in tanks that ‘brewed up’ . . . the men who ‘stopped one’.”
I am one of many people now in advancing middle age who grew up reading Lively’s very successful 1970s novels for children. Her continued presence in our own lives is a comfort and a rare gift. Those books, such as The House in Norham Gardens (1974), often focus on bookish young people who perceive (or think they do) the unseen and supernatural, forging a connection between the past and its vivid intrusions into the present. They hold up brilliantly now — I read Norham Gardens to my own daughter — and have been reissued for a new generation.
The author’s preoccupations have, happily, not changed in the intervening decades. Her 2013 memoir, Ammonites and Leaping Fish, dealt with the realities of ageing, as well as the complex emotions around the “things” and people in our lives.
Lively’s humane vision and accessible, fluid writing style is universal but perhaps this collection resonates most acutely for the older reader. Here we find characters who want to connect with their own past before it is too late, who want to seek truth or justice for the endless slights against women in society over the decades, or who simply, like Colin, the widower in “Songs of Praise”, in the end allow the dead their secrets.
Metamorphosis: Selected Stories by Penelope Lively Fig Tree, £20, 336 pages
Isabel Berwick is the FT’s work and careers editor and host of the Working It podcast
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