Time is the essence

Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’ rather than ‘somewhere’. Hadley labours under perceived limitations: she is distinctively British, writes about the middle classes, and turns out, as the puff on the back rightly says, ‘the quintessential domestic novel’.

Those who are put off by this description — probably mostly men — miss out on a vast range of female authors, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler. Poor souls, they are missing

only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its vanities, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

That just about sums up Tessa Hadley.

Her subversive wit is Austenesque; but in many ways she is more like Tyler. Her novels span decades of change.