M

M is the narrator and protagonist of Second Place. She lives on a marsh with her husband Tony, trying to maintain a balance between peaceful seclusion and bohemian sociability by offering their “second place” to visitors who meet her need for highbrow company. M has an adult daughter, Justine, from her unhappy first marriage. She briefly mentions that she has written books, but she focuses on her artistic interests rather than her literary achievements. As the basis for the novel, M is telling her friend Jeffers about the time when L – an artist she had long admired but never met – came to stay in the second place.

M is alternately defiant and anxious, forthright and evasive. As a character she pesters Tony with her “burning need to speak, to analyse,” an urge which spills out into the style and content of the narrative (30). Self-abasing yet persistently self-absorbed, M...