The key to this sympathy may lie in Bainbridge's attachment to the past as a setting for her stories. Nearly every work is structured so as to take advantage of knowledge gained through hindsight. Among the places she takes her readers are World War II Liverpool, the deck of the Titanic, a prison cell in nineteenth-century England, and a Crimean War battlefield. Even those novels and stories not set in the past recover the memories of their central characters: if history does not affect one, then surely one's own past does.
The sources for Bainbridge's characters lie in her childhood and in her early family life: "I pinch newspaper stories that have a strong narrative plot," she told Willa Petschek in a 1981 interview, "then put in everything I can remember about my family and friends." Born on 21 November 1933 in Liverpool, to Richard and Winifred Baines Bainbridge, Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was the younger of two children; she had a brother six years her senior. The family moved to the small town of Formby, outside Liverpool, when she was an infant.
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