Kitty in Providence is the sort of heroine an author invents in order to subject her to a life of disappointments. These are mitigated for her by academic interests—hers in the Romantic tradition, her lover's in French cathedrals. The novel is warm and delightful about donnish life, exhibiting its own kind of donnishness in a sentence like 'The dog was very old, and did not seem particularly viable.' But Kitty's plight is to be half-French, and her common sense, her clothes sense and her solid affections are all on her French side. She lives in Chelsea, but her England is a fantasy constructed around a dead soldier-father and a lover she cannot picture…. Worse: the lover is indeed as near as one can get to a fantasy Englishman, a professor with a pleasant vague smile, 'wandering around with a cup in one hand and a saucer in the other, a signet ring just visible on the finger beneath the saucer'. Ruth, in Anita Brookner's first novel, was in love with a professor with 'a neutral, faintly resigned presence': but Kitty's case is even more hopeless. Maurice is not only English, but specifically upper-class Gloucestershire; and Kitty loses him to a girl in her own seminar, out of the same Gloucestershire top drawer, who does what Kitty can't and wouldn't ever do—wear her brother's pullovers. Providence is absolutely a love story, and restates, without accounting for, the fact that neither reason nor objective grounds for liking or disliking have anything to do with falling in love. Kitty, an expert on the Romantics, only confirms the 19th-century stereotype: one thinks of Lucy Snowe in Villette. Yet Kitty doesn't get as much support from her author as Lucy Snowe. It's made to look only ironical that she is intelligent and sensitive and teaches two strenuous seminars on Romantic love in Adolphe. But one wonders why Anita Brookner should spend so much delicacy and irony on situations which she has planned from the start will come to nothing. This is now her second novel about the subjugation and defeat of an intelligent heroine. (pp. 18-19)
Robert Taubman, "Submission," in London Review of Books, May 20 to June 2, 1982, pp. 18-19.∗
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