John Bayley
Like Jane Austen's father, I incline to feel that most good novels are by women. But this has been a disappointing year. Mary Wesley a wash-out; Anita Brookner not at her best. Penelope Fitzgerald, another Booker prize-winner, made a promising start in The Beginning of Spring (Collins, £10.95), but it turned into one of those playful rather than funny novels which men go for. Dan Jacobson's Her Story (Deutsch, £8.95) I thought very moving and also just inside the period were Angus Wilson's Collected Stories (Seeker, £14.95). Scholarly and interesting: Christ- opher Ricks's edition of A. E. Housman's Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Allen Lane, £18.95). Thy Hand Great Anarch! (Chatto, f25), a second instalment of autobiography by Nirad Chaudhuri, went with another splendid personal memoir by Richard Cobb, Something to Hold Onto (John Murray, £12.95). Browning really comes back to life in the marvellous third volume of the new Oxford Browning (Poetical Works, edited by Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler, £60), and his wife was the subject of a good biography by Margaret Forster (Chatto, £14.95).
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