It was with great sadness that the death of Dame Beryl Bainbridge was received last week. Bainbridge was one of England's most entertaining writers. Her work carried through it a characteristically mordant, self-deprecating streak, typical of many writers from the North of England - where hopelessness and haplessness are doled out in equivalent addictive measure. Although not perhaps her best novel 'A quiet life,' written in 1976, has all the hallmarks of her very particular fiction: familial alienation, thinly veiled despair and, that old familiar, barely concealed violence; of one kind or another. In common with most great artists her work retains and confides a marvellous humour and it is this overriding quality, which she ably demonstrated throughout the bulk of her work, which remains central to her story-telling.
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