Tessa Hadley's first nonfiction collection, Alone With a Book, gathers essays written since 2000, blending biography, cultural criticism, and personal reflection. The book traces her growth as both a reader and a writer, exploring the literary and artistic works that have accompanied her along the way.
A Bookish Childhood and Early Influences
Hadley was a bookish child, feeling more at home in a library than on a climbing frame. Her father was a teacher and jazz trumpeter, while her mother was a housewife and occasional dressmaker. Prints by Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice Utrillo adorned the walls of her childhood home. Her brother, Tom, became a scholar of Renaissance art, often clashing with their mother, who had learned at art school to view pre-impressionist work as "academic and stuffy."
Hadley recalls that her parents' "feeling for books trailed well behind their interests in music and the visual arts," sparing her the burden of their judgment. Writing initially felt like a form of failure to her; she describes herself as "a slow developer and too impressionable." It was only after discovering Alice Munro in the late 1980s, when she was in her early 30s and a wife and mother, that she began to see possibilities for writing about "the small ordinary things I was expert in."
Essays on Writers and Art
The collection includes two essays on Munro, alongside pieces on other writers Hadley considers her "intimates": Anne Tyler ("indefatigably inventive"), Elizabeth Bowen ("better than Woolf"), and Anita Brookner ("What a confessional writer she is!"). As a critic, Hadley is both passionate and shrewd. She quibbles with Ferdinand Mount's essay on Germaine Greer because "he can't quite keep 'Calm down dear' out of his tone," and calls Margaret Drabble's The Millstone "the seminal 1960s feminist novel that Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is always supposed to be."
The art section, though brief, is brilliant. Hadley doubts her own visual skills, aware of "how my eye is untrained, careless of the visual construction," yet her observations are witty and fresh. On Félix Vallotton's portrait of his wife Gabrielle, she wonders: "Is Vallotton perturbed by how his wife is smiling and fatalistic, overseeing the destruction of something so closely resembling his own work?"
Religious Themes and the Power of Domestic Realism
Two of the four artworks she discusses are religious in theme. Hadley notes that Christian stories have "shaped our aesthetic and moral imagination at levels so deep we're mostly unconscious of it." During the pandemic, sheltering apart from her sons, she was drawn to Jacopo di Cione's The Coronation of the Virgin, "a grave and golden reverberation in my thought." In the current political moment, she finds herself "seeking out certain images of cruelty in art," such as Giovanni Bellini's The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr.
As a child, Hadley avoided some of Grimms' fairytales because "they were too terrible." Her own stories contain terrible things—thwarted ambitions, adultery, ageing—amid the gentle patterns of daily life. Alone With a Book makes a compelling case for keeping books and art close in good times and bad, and for the "powerful magic" of domestic realism in the right hands.
