Faber & Faber

More than sixty years ago I read A. L. (Pat) Barker’s first book, a 1947 collection of short-stories entitled Innocents, and was profoundly disturbed and amazed. Since the friend who had pressed the book on to me told me that she worked for the BBC, at my next meeting with J. R. Ackerley, then no less notable as literary editor of the Listener than as an astonishingly candid memoirist, I asked him if he had ever come across a colleague called A. L. Barker. He frowned in thought and shook his head:

‘No, he’s never come my way.’

When I explained that Barker was not a man but a woman, he replied:

‘Perhaps she’s one of the secretaries.’

That he had totally failed to notice her and that she had never made herself known to him despite her admiration for his writing was typical of her self-effacement.

Barker was never one to jump through hoops or to pull ropes to draw attention to herself. The result was that she always remained, as she once ruefully put it to me, ‘a writers’ writer’, deeply admired by many of her colleagues, but far too little known to the public at large, so that she was all too often confused with ‘the other Pat Barker’. Yet her admirers will surely agree with me that in the originality and stylistic mastery of her writing she is up there with such far more commercially successful of her contemporaries as Muriel Spark, Olivia Manning and Elizabeth Taylor.

She wrote some wonderful novels, even if she herself was seldom totally satisfied with them. But for me her supreme achievement was in the field of the short story. She more than once described a successful short story as ‘an explosion in the dark’. She let off many such explosions, suddenly illuminating with brilliant clarity some previously obscure recess of human experience. In that genre she is the peer of Katherine Mansfield and V. S. Pritchett.

Francis King's novels include The Dividing Stream, winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize, The Widow and The Custom House. He is a recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize, and is the author of E. M. Forster and His World. A number of his books are available in Faber Finds.