The Debut (published in the US as A Start in Life) was published by Jonathan Cape in 1981 — Brookner’s first novel, written when she was fifty-three and already a distinguished art historian (she was the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge). The novel is about a woman who has read the right books and drawn the wrong conclusions.
Ruth Weiss is an academic specializing in Balzac. She has absorbed the great novelist’s lessons — that the world is governed by self-interest, that virtue is punished, that success belongs to the ruthless — but she has been unable to apply these lessons to her own life. Her upbringing (by intellectual but feckless parents who relied on her goodness while pursuing their own pleasures) taught her that being good would be rewarded. Balzac taught her that being good is the fastest way to be destroyed. Ruth knows intellectually that Balzac is right, but she lives as if her parents were.
The novel traces Ruth’s repeated failures to assert herself: she loses romantic opportunities to bolder, less scrupulous women; she subordinates her own needs to her parents’ demands; she arrives at middle age having served others without being served in return. Brookner’s irony is structural: the novel about Balzac makes the same argument Balzac made — that the world punishes the virtuous — and Ruth is both the scholar who understands this and the character who proves it.
Collecting The Debut
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1981): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75