A certain class confidence, not to say imperiousness, can be heard in well-born writers like Nabokov and Henry Green Tolstoy’s famous line about Ivan Ilyich-“Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary, and therefore most terrible”-represents surely a count’s hauteur as much as a religious moralist’s lament. Modern literature is mostly written not by aristocrats but by the middle classes. It is a characteristic phrase, from a writer of a very definite prose, with sharp outlines and a distinctly high-handed economy. “A very definite place.” So Penelope Fitzgerald described the English town of Southwold, on the Suffolk coast-a place of wet winds, speeding clouds, and withdrawn beauty where she and her family moved in 1957, when she was forty-one. Fitzgerald seemed set for early success, and yet published her first novel in her sixties.
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