The awkward squad | 16 October 2004

The introduction to Alone! Alone! is very good. It’s modest and candid, and everything Rosemary Din- nage says about book-reviewing is spot on (e.g. ‘If it’s about misery, send it to Dinnage’ — funny, I thought that was me.) Especially this: ‘It’s sometimes like writing a diary, or a running commentary of evolving ideas.’ That’s exactly how it feels, if you review a lot — and not even very rapidly evolving ideas, in my case; my current obsessions probably repeat themselves in every review. Hence Dinnage’s idea for this book: to collect those of her reviews that hung together as a ‘running commentary’ on one of her favourite miseries, ‘outsider women’: women who, by choice or nature, ‘stood outside the boundaries of the ordinary’, and, as her title proclaims, alone.

All this was attractive, and I embarked eagerly. Part I, ‘Solitaries’ (but wouldn’t they all be solitaries?) held me. ‘Gwen John’ was as much about Augustus as Gwen, but Augustus is good copy, and I didn’t mind.