Providence was published by Jonathan Cape in 1982. Kitty Maule is half-French, half-English, a lecturer in Romantic literature at a London college. She is beautiful, intelligent, and devoted to her subject — the novels of Benjamin Constant and the philosophy of Romantic suffering. She is also in love with Maurice Bishop, a colleague whose charm, ease, and social confidence represent everything Kitty, for all her cultivation, lacks.
The novel’s irony, like that of The Debut, is between what the heroine knows intellectually and what she can do with that knowledge. Kitty understands Romantic love as a literary phenomenon — she can analyze its mechanisms, trace its history, explain its pathologies — but understanding does not protect her from experiencing it. Her love for Maurice is hopeless (he is interested in another woman, more vital and less cerebral than Kitty) and Kitty knows it is hopeless, but knowledge and feeling operate in separate compartments.
Brookner’s method — common to all her early novels — is to trace the inner life of a woman who is too intelligent to deceive herself but too principled to adopt the strategies (manipulation, seduction, strategic withdrawal) that might win her what she wants. The result is a particular kind of suffering: the suffering of someone who sees clearly and is powerless to change what she sees.
Collecting Providence
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1982): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good: $20–$50