Rendell's novels are of two kinds: those in a series centered around Inspector Reginald Wexford and those novels which take as their subject the criminal or emotionally disturbed mind. Although most of her works are set in Kingsmarkham, a village about an hour from London, they offer two very different and often contradictory visions of the universe. The fourteen Wexford novels have a moral center and present an optimistic view of the possibilities for personal growth, love, and responsible choice, generally embodied in the characters of Wexford, his subordinate Michael Burden, and their families, whose stories comprise an ongoing subplot. These are novels which Jane S. Bakerman (April 1978) says explain Rendell's "real center of interest: a varied and compelling examination of friendship and love--and their too frequent companion, selfishness." Rendell's other novels, which exist individually rather than as parts of a series, suggest an altogether different world, one in which individuals are psychologically flawed, morally callous, and often capable of easy murders. These works have no Wexford or Burden to redeem them or to offer hopes: "It is," as Julian Symons (London Sunday Times, 12 April 1981) observes, "the frustrations and absurdities of ordinary people that Ruth Rendell notes like an uncensorious Recording Angel." At the same time she is, says Douglas Johnson (London Review of Books , 7 March 1985), "meticulous in describing the details of everyday life, the food that is bought from the supermarket, the geography of the buses and tubes around North London, the plants and flowers that surround the houses." Indeed, as he argues, "the precise emphasis on the real and ordinary makes the eruption of the fantastic all the more terrible." Rendell has also published three novels under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine.
This is a free page. This page contains 200 words. This
biography contains 12,656 words (approx. 42 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Ruth (Barbara) Rendell Access Pass.
