Visitors was published by Jonathan Cape in 1997. Dorothea May (known as Mrs. May) is a wealthy widow living alone in a London flat, her days organized around careful routines: shopping, cooking, reading, walking in the park. She is content, or at least not unhappy — her life has the shape and predictability that she requires. When Steve, a young man connected to her late husband’s family, arrives to stay in her flat, her equilibrium is destroyed.
Steve is everything Mrs. May is not: young, careless, entitled, and utterly indifferent to the disruption he causes. He does not clean up after himself, he comes and goes at irregular hours, he treats Mrs. May’s flat as a hotel. She is too polite — too well-trained by a lifetime of feminine accommodation — to object. The novel traces the slow invasion of her private space and her inability to defend it, not because she lacks the intelligence to see what is happening but because her entire social formation forbids her from making a scene.
Brookner’s subject here is the particular vulnerability of elderly women who live alone: they are expected to be grateful for company, to welcome visitors, to accommodate the needs of younger people who will leave when they are ready and not before. Mrs. May’s politeness is not weakness — it is a deeply ingrained code of behavior that she cannot violate without violating her sense of herself. The novel’s quiet fury is directed not at Steve (who is merely selfish) but at the social system that made Mrs. May’s selflessness both obligatory and invisible.
Collecting Visitors
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$15