The Dressmaker at 50: a novel that encapsulates Beryl Bainbridge’s idiosyncrasies
An uncompromising and funny story of love and death, The Dressmaker was the first of five novels by Beryl Bainbridge to be shortlisted for the Booker.
Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine. Although Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, she never won. Some degree of correction occurred in 2011 when, after a public vote, her 1998-shortlisted novel Master Georgie won a one-off prize, The Man Booker Best of Beryl.
She was an actress (appearing in Coronation Street) before becoming a novelist and much-loved, cigarette-dangling public figure. The author of 20 novels, she found her greatest success with historical fiction. Of the 1977 judging, she recalled that the chair, Philip Larkin, ‘was completely silent most of the time. Nobody dared say a word to him and he never said a word back.’ Of her own multiple nominations, she said: ‘I’m just very pleased to have been noticed’.
- Prizes judged
- The Booker Prize 1977
All nominated books
The mundane and the macabre collide in Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly comic tale about the shockingly unexpected consequences of a young girl’s heartbreak.
Surprises abound in Beryl Bainbridge’s unsettling comic novel, praised by fellow author Graham Greene as both ‘outrageously funny and horrifying’.
A darkly perceptive coming-of-age tale set in a Liverpool the 1950s from Beryl Bainbridge, tied together at the end with her trademark skill.
Beryl Bainbridge’s fictional history chronicles the fate of the privileged passengers of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage.
Beryl Bainbridge explores the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures - and hidden secrets - of her enigmatic central character.
Beryl Bainbridge’s masterly evocation of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters, in all his wit and glory.
