Beryl Bainbridge

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By 2001 BB had published sixteen novels, written in an almost bald style which exploits her satiric eye for ordinary domestic life and for unexpected melodramatic interruptions of it. Many of her later novels are historical. She also wrote short stories, travel or topographical books with a hint of social studies about them, a newspaper column, and plays for both stage and television.
  • BirthName: Beryl Margaret Bainbridge
  • Nickname: Basher
    This was her nickname at school.
    Clapp, Susannah. “The Buffalo in the Hall”. London Review of Books, Vol.
    39
    , No. 1, 25 Jan. 2017, pp. 9-10.
    9

  • Married: Davies
Grave of Beryl Bainbridge in Highgate Cemetery. The stone reads "Beryl Bainbridge, DBE, 1932-2010, Writer, Loved and Missed"

Milestones

21 November 1932

BB was born in Menlove Avenue, Liverpool, the younger of two children. The family had moved to this smaller house a year before, after a financial crash.
She habitually gave her age as a couple of years less than it was.
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury , 2016.
5
The Trustees of FreeBMD,. FreeBMD. http://www.freebmd.org.uk/.
Bainbridge, Beryl. Something Happened Yesterday. Duckworth, 1993.
127
Bainbridge, Beryl. “Waiting for the Biographer”. Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Mark Bostridge, Continuum, 2004, pp. 206-11.
208
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury , 2016.
22

October 1974

BB published The Bottle Factory Outing, a novel which puts to use her experience as a worker sticking on labels at a wine-bottling plant in London a few years earlier.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1976
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Bainbridge, Beryl. Something Happened Yesterday. Duckworth, 1993.
158-9

6 September 2001

BB published another historical novel, According to Queeney, about Hester Thrale and Samuel Johnson , whose narrative sticks unusually close to its sources.
Eilenberg, Susan. “Leaf, Button, Dog”. London Review of Books, 1 Nov. 2001, pp. 13-15.
13

2 July 2010

BB died suddenly in the early hours, in hospital, after holding onto life with astonishing persistence following a recurrence of her cancer.
Flood, Alison. “Beryl Bainbridge dies, aged 75”. The Guardian, 2 July 2010.
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury , 2016.
482

26 May 2011

BB 's final novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, was published, completed by Brendan King , who added no new material but used the notebooks Bainbridge was working on when she died.
Bragg, Melvyn. “Always leave them wanting more”. The Observer, 22 May 2011, p. 43.
43

Biography

Birth

21 November 1932

BB was born in Menlove Avenue, Liverpool, the younger of two children. The family had moved to this smaller house a year before, after a financial crash.
She habitually gave her age as a couple of years less than it was.
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury , 2016.
5
The Trustees of FreeBMD,. FreeBMD. http://www.freebmd.org.uk/.
Bainbridge, Beryl. Something Happened Yesterday. Duckworth, 1993.
127
Bainbridge, Beryl. “Waiting for the Biographer”. Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Mark Bostridge, Continuum, 2004, pp. 206-11.
208
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury , 2016.
22

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