Harriet Said… by Beryl Bainbridge (#NovNov23 and #ReadingBeryl23)

By Rebecca Foster on November 21, 2023

Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week (hosted by Annabel) is a perfect chance to combine November challenges as most of Bainbridge’s works are under 200 pages. And today would have been the author’s birthday, too. Although Harriet Said… is the first book she wrote, it was rejected and not published until 1972, making it her third novel. I can see why publishers would have been wary of taking a risk on such a nasty little story from an unknown author. Even from an established writer this would be a hard one to stomach, subverting as it does the traditional notion of the innocence of childhood.

The title is also the first two words of the novel and tells us right away that the narrator (never named) is in thrall to her friend Harriet. The young teenager is on her summer holidays from boarding school, back in a Liverpool suburb. She lets Harriet set the agenda for their long, idle, unsupervised days: “she told me what to read, explained to me the things I read, told me what painters I should admire and why. I listened, I did as she said, but I did not feel much interest, at least not on my own, only when she was directing me.”

The girls dramatize their experiences in journal entries and make up stories for the people they meet on the local sand dunes, such as Peter Biggs, whom they dub Peter the Great or “the Tsar.” The narrator casts her relationship with him as a romance: “I wished I knew if I only imagined he cared for me, it seemed so strange the things I attributed to him. I did not know where the dream and the reality merged.” Together they decide to humble the Tsar.

{SPOILERS FOLLOW}

It’s uncomfortable for modern readers to encounter what is essentially a seduction plot between a teenager and a middle-aged man, but with the teen taking the active predator role. (And Harriet behind the scenes manipulating the interactions, rather like the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons.) We’re fixated on the question of consent, but would the ultimate sex scene be classed as a rape? “‘Gerroff’, I wanted to shout, ‘Gerroff.’ But I did not want to hurt his feelings. … I was surprised how little discomfort I felt, apart from a kind of interior bruising, and how cheerful I was.” Harriet and the narrator both have a history of carrying on with grown men, and by peeping at windows see the Tsar having sex with Mrs Biggs on the couch. None of what they do seems accidental, or unfortunate, because they seem so determined to gravitate towards the smutty parts of life.

“What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice,

And all that’s nice”

Fat chance!

“I tried to think what innocence meant and failed.”

“It was quite easy to bring myself to hurt him, he was such a fool.”

It’s not unexpected when the girls’ obsession leads to tragedy, but the exact form the collateral damage takes is a surprise. I’ve called this a ‘nasty little story’, but I mostly mean that in an admiring way, because it takes skill in plotting and characterization to make us keep reading even when all is so sordid.

Bainbridge has always reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald in her concision, but I find Bainbridge less subtle and more edgy – a good combination, if you ask me. Harriet Said… feels like it falls on a continuum between, say, Barbara Comyns and Ottessa Moshfegh. I also wondered whether contemporary novelists like Eliza Clark (Penance) and Heather Darwent (The Things We Do to Our Friends) could have been influenced by the picture of teenage girls’ malevolence and the way that the action starts with hideous aftermath and then works backwards. This was a squirmy but memorable read. (Public library) [175 pages]