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Harriet Said...
A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive.
Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences. A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.
Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences. A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.
193 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Beryl Bainbridge
66 books167 followersDame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often set among the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Award twice and was nominated for the Booker Prize five times. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 135 reviews
April 13, 2017
In Harriet Said..., the final chapter comes first. We see two girls fleeing across a field, screaming and crying. They run home to their parents to tell them 'what had happened'; the police are called. Only when the story is complete does this scene make sense. However, the dread that permeates the book is not created by the knowledge that some catastrophe will eventually come to pass. In fact, once the creeping disquiet of its plot kicks in, it seems likely this climactic event – whatever it is – will prove a relief.
The narrator, unnamed, is thirteen. Her friend Harriet is older by a year, bolder and prettier too: for the narrator, she is a figure of mingled awe, adoration and envy. The two girls are precocious and unusual, and at the same time terribly innocent in the blithely stupid way of young teenagers. They seek out people, adults, often men, to question and analyse. They have learned how to identify those most receptive to their approach, but probing their subjects with words alone is a game they are beginning to tire of.
Reading a character portrait as remarkable as Harriet Said... makes me realise how few adult authors are capable of capturing the nuances of girlhood, and how exhilarating it is when someone gets it right. The two main characters possess an odd sense of jadedness, seemingly aware their youth has already been irreparably sullied without fully understanding what that means. So much of what they do is performative, yet at the same time, this is the life they are living, these are experiences they can never undo. And we get glimpses of their childishness that make it abundantly clear how very immature they still are. One of the pivotal scenes of the book comes when the girls sneak into the Tsar's garden and spy on him having sex with his wife. The narrator's naivety is laid bare when she reacts with unrestrained horror to this spectacle:
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The narrator, unnamed, is thirteen. Her friend Harriet is older by a year, bolder and prettier too: for the narrator, she is a figure of mingled awe, adoration and envy. The two girls are precocious and unusual, and at the same time terribly innocent in the blithely stupid way of young teenagers. They seek out people, adults, often men, to question and analyse. They have learned how to identify those most receptive to their approach, but probing their subjects with words alone is a game they are beginning to tire of.
Now it was not enough; more elaborate things had to be said; each new experience had to leave a more complicated tracery of sensations; to satisfy us every memory must be more desperate than the last.For some time, one of their main interests has been a much older male neighbour: Harriet said his name was Peter Biggs and we should call him Peter the Great. But I thought the name Peter was daft so we called him the Tsar. The story is told across the course of a single summer, as the narrator, egged on by Harriet, resolves to push the limits of her 'friendship' with the Tsar. As the long summer wears on, the girls' increasing closeness to this man builds up a palpable sense of unease. It's hard to decide what's more horrifying: the Tsar's (and other men's) behaviour towards the narrator and Harriet, or the blasé combination of guile and contempt with which the girls respond. You feel you are watching people act as their basest selves, hardly understanding what motivates their own conduct.
Reading a character portrait as remarkable as Harriet Said... makes me realise how few adult authors are capable of capturing the nuances of girlhood, and how exhilarating it is when someone gets it right. The two main characters possess an odd sense of jadedness, seemingly aware their youth has already been irreparably sullied without fully understanding what that means. So much of what they do is performative, yet at the same time, this is the life they are living, these are experiences they can never undo. And we get glimpses of their childishness that make it abundantly clear how very immature they still are. One of the pivotal scenes of the book comes when the girls sneak into the Tsar's garden and spy on him having sex with his wife. The narrator's naivety is laid bare when she reacts with unrestrained horror to this spectacle:
Never never never, beat my heart in the garden, never never; battering against invisible doors that sent agonised pains along my wrists, unshed tears dissolving in my head, I crouched against the window helplessly, unable to move.In its flawless evocation of the strange contradictions of adolescence, Harriet Said... reminded me a little of Bonjour Tristesse, though Sagan's Cécile, at seventeen, looks like a veteran in comparison to these two. That it provoked some disgust upon its publication is no surprise, and it's a rare example of a story that may actually read as even more shocking now than it did in its day. It is powerful, and beautifully written – as well as the characterisation, Bainbridge's descriptions of landscape are wonderful – and altogether feels like a story I am unlikely to forget in a hurry. An author I am very glad to have discovered at last.
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April 28, 2017
Such a strange book, like a mixture of Muriel Spark and... another odd writer. I find this covered quite a taboo topic which was brave, but I didn't enjoy the writing at all! It was a drag to read until the last few pages where everything seemed to happen at once. I don't think I will be reading Beryl Bainbridge again...
January 19, 2019
Jesus. Thank goodness I have sons and not little girls. You want creepy? This is creepy!
This old story from the incredible Dame Beryl Bainbridge reminds me of the morbid calculations in 'The Bad Seed' but then slinked over with the precocious sexuality of 'Lolita.' All three were written in the mid 1950s, but this debut of Bainbridge's was actually inspired by the real-world New Zealand murder trial of two young teenagers. The writer Anne Perry was one of the girls convicted of murder, and after her prison term (they got five years only because they were juveniles) began writing successful crime stories. Bizarre irony...
To provide a book-report styled review would spoil some of this short novel for you, so I'll only say this. If you've ever seen a child manipulated into despicable acts by his or her best friend - maybe egging an elderly neighbor's car - then this tale will be relatable. What is difficult to swallow, however, is the calculated sexuality of 13 year old girls seemingly from stable homes. I've got a 14 year old kid of my own, so my "creepy meter" was pinging pretty loudly in here. There is nothing flagrantly expressed, but the ugliness is there.
With that stated, readers will know going in that there are dangerous acts going to be committed in this story and that (supposedly) childish manipulations have a role. The first few pages will bear this out, and the remainder of the story back-tracks to that opening seaside night full of screams.
While the book is disturbing, Bainbridge's writing skill buoyed the story up for me. There is repeated commentary on self-image and the stoutness of women.
"Three high bosomed women in hard bowler hats, sitting penguin-shaped on three fleshy horses, appeared at the corner of the lane. Massive and leisurely they passed our gate, filling the lane with tweed jackets and cello thighs."
As for a bit of foreshadowing, I absolutely love this excerpt. It is from a moment while an attentive mother wants to capture the sweetness of the little girls in her garden on film.
"... and the shutter clicked.
What if the film exposed not three children in the sun, but one between two spectres, wearing childish smiles. Faces that crumbled like bread in the fingers, and showed a fearful disintegration."
When so many contemporary novels are now spiraling around bad girls involved in murder, in framing their husbands for the same, or choosing ne'er-do-wells who deserve to be eliminated, the authors can thank Dame Beryl for breaking the ice for them 60 years ago.
Short, not sweet, but nice n creepy. Grab a copy!
My thanks to Net Galley for allowing me the chance to sample this dark nugget.
This old story from the incredible Dame Beryl Bainbridge reminds me of the morbid calculations in 'The Bad Seed' but then slinked over with the precocious sexuality of 'Lolita.' All three were written in the mid 1950s, but this debut of Bainbridge's was actually inspired by the real-world New Zealand murder trial of two young teenagers. The writer Anne Perry was one of the girls convicted of murder, and after her prison term (they got five years only because they were juveniles) began writing successful crime stories. Bizarre irony...
To provide a book-report styled review would spoil some of this short novel for you, so I'll only say this. If you've ever seen a child manipulated into despicable acts by his or her best friend - maybe egging an elderly neighbor's car - then this tale will be relatable. What is difficult to swallow, however, is the calculated sexuality of 13 year old girls seemingly from stable homes. I've got a 14 year old kid of my own, so my "creepy meter" was pinging pretty loudly in here. There is nothing flagrantly expressed, but the ugliness is there.
With that stated, readers will know going in that there are dangerous acts going to be committed in this story and that (supposedly) childish manipulations have a role. The first few pages will bear this out, and the remainder of the story back-tracks to that opening seaside night full of screams.
While the book is disturbing, Bainbridge's writing skill buoyed the story up for me. There is repeated commentary on self-image and the stoutness of women.
"Three high bosomed women in hard bowler hats, sitting penguin-shaped on three fleshy horses, appeared at the corner of the lane. Massive and leisurely they passed our gate, filling the lane with tweed jackets and cello thighs."
As for a bit of foreshadowing, I absolutely love this excerpt. It is from a moment while an attentive mother wants to capture the sweetness of the little girls in her garden on film.
"... and the shutter clicked.
What if the film exposed not three children in the sun, but one between two spectres, wearing childish smiles. Faces that crumbled like bread in the fingers, and showed a fearful disintegration."
When so many contemporary novels are now spiraling around bad girls involved in murder, in framing their husbands for the same, or choosing ne'er-do-wells who deserve to be eliminated, the authors can thank Dame Beryl for breaking the ice for them 60 years ago.
Short, not sweet, but nice n creepy. Grab a copy!
My thanks to Net Galley for allowing me the chance to sample this dark nugget.
April 10, 2017
about a 3.8 - rounded up
Harriet Said ... is neither horror nor thriller, and after looking at several reader reviews, I do feel badly for those readers whose cover blurbs promised them either one of the other, and I can understand the low ratings, given that expectations based on said blurbs didn't match up to what's actually in this book. I also get that people may have been expecting a rehash of the Parker-Hulme case of 1954, since publicity re Bainbridge's book made the comparison. There are readers who also expected something along the lines of Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures" and this book didn't go there.
But hold on a second -- perhaps there is a tie-in here. In 1994 Jackson noted that he wanted his movie to "focus on the incredibly rich friendship between the two girls, rather than the end result," -- as he says, "an intense relationship that went terribly wrong." While very, very different, this same sort of thing happens in Harriet Said... a dark, psychological portrait where the focus is on two very young teens (13/14) who are trying to make an entrance into the adult world while still in many ways just children, and who have no idea what they're about to get themselves into. In that sense, they're at a time of transition -- as Linda Grant says in her excellent introduction, they are "young girls in the confusion of puberty." Harriet is the older of the two girls, much less innocent than her friend who is the narrator of this tale; she is extremely manipulative, and has a "chilling disdain and ignorance of youth for the complexities of adult life."
Unlike several readers here, I enjoyed this book very much, as I have also enjoyed a number of novels written by Beryl Bainbridge in the past. It's not an easy book to read for sure, but certainly well worth the time it took me to read it twice. I suppose it all depends on expectations, but as I am so fond of saying, going into a novel with no expectations is what I do and it generally works out well.
Recommended.
more:
http://www.readingavidly.com/2017/04/...
Harriet Said ... is neither horror nor thriller, and after looking at several reader reviews, I do feel badly for those readers whose cover blurbs promised them either one of the other, and I can understand the low ratings, given that expectations based on said blurbs didn't match up to what's actually in this book. I also get that people may have been expecting a rehash of the Parker-Hulme case of 1954, since publicity re Bainbridge's book made the comparison. There are readers who also expected something along the lines of Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures" and this book didn't go there.
But hold on a second -- perhaps there is a tie-in here. In 1994 Jackson noted that he wanted his movie to "focus on the incredibly rich friendship between the two girls, rather than the end result," -- as he says, "an intense relationship that went terribly wrong." While very, very different, this same sort of thing happens in Harriet Said... a dark, psychological portrait where the focus is on two very young teens (13/14) who are trying to make an entrance into the adult world while still in many ways just children, and who have no idea what they're about to get themselves into. In that sense, they're at a time of transition -- as Linda Grant says in her excellent introduction, they are "young girls in the confusion of puberty." Harriet is the older of the two girls, much less innocent than her friend who is the narrator of this tale; she is extremely manipulative, and has a "chilling disdain and ignorance of youth for the complexities of adult life."
Unlike several readers here, I enjoyed this book very much, as I have also enjoyed a number of novels written by Beryl Bainbridge in the past. It's not an easy book to read for sure, but certainly well worth the time it took me to read it twice. I suppose it all depends on expectations, but as I am so fond of saying, going into a novel with no expectations is what I do and it generally works out well.
Recommended.
more:
http://www.readingavidly.com/2017/04/...
May 15, 2016
Set in Formby soon after the end of the Second World War, Harriet Said is one of the darkest and most disturbing fictional books I have ever read, and those of you who read my reviews will note that I tend towards the dark side! There is something very frightening about young girls, and Harriet and her nameless friend our narrator, are just thirteen and fourteen years old at a time when we imagine that generation to be cloaked in innocence.
At the beginning of the summer holidays our narrator, having returned from boarding school is awaiting her older friend’s return from her holiday in Wales, but when Harriet returns she fears their bond is not as strong as their previous time together, one where they flirted with the Italian prisoners of war close to Formby beach and then Harriet dictated their escapades to be written in their shared diary. Harriet is painted as the more attractive, confident and daring of the two girls and as the title alludes to, the one who dreams up all their schemes for amusement. Harriet’s father is fierce, his wife subservient and Harriet herself is pretty much left to her own devices. Both girls go out in the evening most often to the beach where our narrator converses with Mr Biggs, who the girls have nicknamed ‘The Tsar’.
The contrast between their assumed innocence and the knowing way they engage the middle-aged Mr Biggs attention, baiting him, spying on him and his wife all the while determined that this summer they will top all their previous adventures. We know that this pair have transgressed in the past, this is the very reason why the younger of the two was sent to boarding school. But, this book isn’t all about what their plans are for Mr Biggs, it is about the almost obsessional relationship between the girls who seem to crave each other’s attention whilst vying for supremacy, for while Harriet is said to be the leader, the turn this book takes makes that seem far from certain.
If you are looking for a book with likeable characters you can relate to, don’t choose this book where just about everyone has a deep character flaw or at best odd. This is despite the fact that it is Harriet who shows this side the most, in the way she sweetly behaves in front of her elders, charms even those in the village who distrust her and patronises her mother without her even realising it. This is a girl who will turn up at her friend’s house and converse with her mother, a woman who surely is aware that this girl has been the cause of trouble in the past, even if it isn’t of the magnitude of the here and now! And no, I haven’t broken my only rule of reviewing, this is not a spoiler as we know from the beginning that something happens which the girls are covering up, what and why is not revealed until the end of this slim book, I thought I knew but, as usual I was a little off the beaten track!
After finishing the book I found out that Beryl Bainbridge wrote this book after being inspired by newspaper stories of a murder committed in Christchurch New Zealand in 1954 by two teenaged girls. This was the author’s first book, rejected because of its content and not published until 1972 when she was already the darling of the literary world. I am now looking forward to reading more by this author. For those of you wondering how such a dark book can have such a beautiful cover, there is a scene at a fairground which neatly highlights how young these two girls actually are, yet youth doesn’t always infer innocence.
At the beginning of the summer holidays our narrator, having returned from boarding school is awaiting her older friend’s return from her holiday in Wales, but when Harriet returns she fears their bond is not as strong as their previous time together, one where they flirted with the Italian prisoners of war close to Formby beach and then Harriet dictated their escapades to be written in their shared diary. Harriet is painted as the more attractive, confident and daring of the two girls and as the title alludes to, the one who dreams up all their schemes for amusement. Harriet’s father is fierce, his wife subservient and Harriet herself is pretty much left to her own devices. Both girls go out in the evening most often to the beach where our narrator converses with Mr Biggs, who the girls have nicknamed ‘The Tsar’.
The contrast between their assumed innocence and the knowing way they engage the middle-aged Mr Biggs attention, baiting him, spying on him and his wife all the while determined that this summer they will top all their previous adventures. We know that this pair have transgressed in the past, this is the very reason why the younger of the two was sent to boarding school. But, this book isn’t all about what their plans are for Mr Biggs, it is about the almost obsessional relationship between the girls who seem to crave each other’s attention whilst vying for supremacy, for while Harriet is said to be the leader, the turn this book takes makes that seem far from certain.
If you are looking for a book with likeable characters you can relate to, don’t choose this book where just about everyone has a deep character flaw or at best odd. This is despite the fact that it is Harriet who shows this side the most, in the way she sweetly behaves in front of her elders, charms even those in the village who distrust her and patronises her mother without her even realising it. This is a girl who will turn up at her friend’s house and converse with her mother, a woman who surely is aware that this girl has been the cause of trouble in the past, even if it isn’t of the magnitude of the here and now! And no, I haven’t broken my only rule of reviewing, this is not a spoiler as we know from the beginning that something happens which the girls are covering up, what and why is not revealed until the end of this slim book, I thought I knew but, as usual I was a little off the beaten track!
After finishing the book I found out that Beryl Bainbridge wrote this book after being inspired by newspaper stories of a murder committed in Christchurch New Zealand in 1954 by two teenaged girls. This was the author’s first book, rejected because of its content and not published until 1972 when she was already the darling of the literary world. I am now looking forward to reading more by this author. For those of you wondering how such a dark book can have such a beautiful cover, there is a scene at a fairground which neatly highlights how young these two girls actually are, yet youth doesn’t always infer innocence.
September 2, 2020
3.5 stars
Early Bainbridge. Intriguing because the reader can see already her remarkably clear, cool, dead-eyed focus and her sympathetic but never maudlin or even especially forgiving interest in young women and the way they negotiate their paths through the world.
This particular story is apparently based on a real crime but it feels almost archetypal in this telling; these young people and the villagers that surround them could be almost anyone living during the period in question, in the place delineated, and that's what makes the whole thing so chilling and so sad.
Early Bainbridge. Intriguing because the reader can see already her remarkably clear, cool, dead-eyed focus and her sympathetic but never maudlin or even especially forgiving interest in young women and the way they negotiate their paths through the world.
This particular story is apparently based on a real crime but it feels almost archetypal in this telling; these young people and the villagers that surround them could be almost anyone living during the period in question, in the place delineated, and that's what makes the whole thing so chilling and so sad.
August 30, 2015
A dark chilling novel about lost innocence during one summer holiday.
Harriet and her friend the narrator come across Mr Biggs an old grumpy man who they nick name the Tsar.
They plan to beguile then humiliate him with disastrous shocking consequences which results in a rather chilling end to the book.
Harriet is the ring leader and her friend does what she thinks Harriet wanted!
I loved the way Harriet called her Mum Little Woman!
An original and disconcerting story!
Then Harriet said!
Harriet and her friend the narrator come across Mr Biggs an old grumpy man who they nick name the Tsar.
They plan to beguile then humiliate him with disastrous shocking consequences which results in a rather chilling end to the book.
Harriet is the ring leader and her friend does what she thinks Harriet wanted!
I loved the way Harriet called her Mum Little Woman!
An original and disconcerting story!
Then Harriet said!
November 24, 2017
I was so subtly drawn into this book! It starts benignly enough with two young girls, one returning home from boarding school, to spend the summer holidays at home in a Northern coastal town. Harriet Said… is a perfect title for the book because throughout the story, what Harriet says goes. Harriet is precocious to say the very least and both girls have had previous encounters with men older than themselves. I started to wonder when and why this precocity developed and looking at the home situations of the girls I could see a connection between that and their behaviour.
The narrator or the story is the younger of the two girls, she is 13 and Harriet is 14 going on 40! Like Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier we do not know the name of the narrator and it is not until you are a long way into the story that you even notice: in some way that is a reflection of the way that the girl is treated and the way that she feels about herself. She feels that her mother loves her younger sister Frances better, she thinks she is less pretty than Harriet and once she is referred to as ‘stout’ she becomes obsessed with that as well! People take notice of Harriet and her friend takes second place, Harriet makes up nasty games and the younger girl often is the one to play the trick and get the blame. Things are not as rosy as they may appear for Harriet at home either, her father has a horrid temper and her mother is afraid of him, the house is full of shouting and arguing and Harriet is also very wary of her father, she and her mother have no control of their own lives.
Harriet is indeed a vile young lady with a cunning and spiteful mind; she finds it so easy to manipulate her friend into doing her will because her friend is desperate to impress her.
Although the reader is gradually watching the nastiness escalate, it happens at a slow pace and the final denouement comes as such a shock!
I did not feel sorry for the ‘Tsar’ as he was a truly horrid man, but I did feel sorry for his wife Mrs Biggs as she was unaware of what was happening.
Although the book was originally written in 1958 Beryl Bainbridge was unable to get it published because of the content. The story was based on the Parker-Hulme murder case in New Zealand but several publishers refused to print it one said that is was “unpleasant and indecent “. It was a fascinating read!
The narrator or the story is the younger of the two girls, she is 13 and Harriet is 14 going on 40! Like Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier we do not know the name of the narrator and it is not until you are a long way into the story that you even notice: in some way that is a reflection of the way that the girl is treated and the way that she feels about herself. She feels that her mother loves her younger sister Frances better, she thinks she is less pretty than Harriet and once she is referred to as ‘stout’ she becomes obsessed with that as well! People take notice of Harriet and her friend takes second place, Harriet makes up nasty games and the younger girl often is the one to play the trick and get the blame. Things are not as rosy as they may appear for Harriet at home either, her father has a horrid temper and her mother is afraid of him, the house is full of shouting and arguing and Harriet is also very wary of her father, she and her mother have no control of their own lives.
Harriet is indeed a vile young lady with a cunning and spiteful mind; she finds it so easy to manipulate her friend into doing her will because her friend is desperate to impress her.
Although the reader is gradually watching the nastiness escalate, it happens at a slow pace and the final denouement comes as such a shock!
I did not feel sorry for the ‘Tsar’ as he was a truly horrid man, but I did feel sorry for his wife Mrs Biggs as she was unaware of what was happening.
Although the book was originally written in 1958 Beryl Bainbridge was unable to get it published because of the content. The story was based on the Parker-Hulme murder case in New Zealand but several publishers refused to print it one said that is was “unpleasant and indecent “. It was a fascinating read!
October 19, 2016
Harriet is the ringleader. Her friend follows the lead no matter where Harriet goes. One summer the friend is attracted to a much older, much unhappily married man. Being only 13-years-old and Harriet a year older, she's not certain what she should do about her feelings.
The girls ... Harriet, actually .... come up with a plan to entice, then embarrass, and humiliate the man they call The Tsar. Their actions lead to a chilling end for all of them.
I found this book to be on the dry side. I was waiting for the suspense ...or a big gotcha along the way ... didn't happen. I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't connect with things they said and did. The ending fell a little flat for me.
Less than 200 pages, it's a fairly fast read. What I found most interesting about this book was the author's autobiography with pictures in the back. The author has had an amazing life.
Many thanks to the author / Open Road Integrated Media / Netgalley who provided a digital copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
The girls ... Harriet, actually .... come up with a plan to entice, then embarrass, and humiliate the man they call The Tsar. Their actions lead to a chilling end for all of them.
I found this book to be on the dry side. I was waiting for the suspense ...or a big gotcha along the way ... didn't happen. I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't connect with things they said and did. The ending fell a little flat for me.
Less than 200 pages, it's a fairly fast read. What I found most interesting about this book was the author's autobiography with pictures in the back. The author has had an amazing life.
Many thanks to the author / Open Road Integrated Media / Netgalley who provided a digital copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
February 9, 2015
La seducción no es un juego de niños. Sin embargo, siempre hay tramposos dispuestos a saltarse las reglas. Tahúres sin escrúpulos que no dudan en torcer a lo largo de la partida los frágiles límites de la experimentación y la inocencia. Beryl Bainbridge da muestra de ello en Lo que dijo Harriet, una sugerente novela que pretende ser subversiva y provocadora donde dos muchachas tratan de enamorar a un marido infeliz mediante sucias tretas y maniobras muy bien calculadas. El resultado, por desgracia, no es ni remotamente tan repulsivo ni impúdico como cabría esperar. No es que se trate ni mucho menos de una mala novela, pero lo cierto es que, más allá de unas cuentas escenas un tanto rocambolescas, se halla bastante lejos de toda esa fama que le precede.
October 2, 2009
First paragraph: ‘Harriet said: ‘No, you don’t, you keep walking.’ I wanted to turn around and look back at the dark house but she tugged at my arm fiercely. We walked over the field hand in hand as if we were little girls.’
Interesting book this. It follows the story of two adolescent girls on a summer holiday in a small village in England. The younger of the two, the narrator who remains nameless throughout, develops an unhealthy obsession with a local, unhappily married man. What they are walking away from is revealed only at the very end of the book, but the story charts the story of how they get there.
Both girls are discovering their own sexual power and using it against men in a very unsavoury way. The New York Times calls the book ‘a highly plotted horror tale that turns the ‘Obstinate Questioning’ of puberty into deadly weapons’. What these girls do is cruel and calculated. But they are also only 13 and 14 years old, so with whom does the responsibility lie? What they do is aided and abetted by the men but they are by no means innocent. The story does bring Lolita to mind but in some ways felt more real and more possible to me.
Interestingly when Bainbridge first wrote the book in the 50s, it was rejected for publication because it was seen to present the two schoolgirls in way which was indecent and repulsive – like teenagers would never do something like this. Sadly, no one thinks that anymore!
A quick book to read, but one that lingers. Definitely a second hand book worth buying and passing on.
If anyone else has read it, i'd be interested to chat about it. i thought it well worth reading and discussing
Interesting book this. It follows the story of two adolescent girls on a summer holiday in a small village in England. The younger of the two, the narrator who remains nameless throughout, develops an unhealthy obsession with a local, unhappily married man. What they are walking away from is revealed only at the very end of the book, but the story charts the story of how they get there.
Both girls are discovering their own sexual power and using it against men in a very unsavoury way. The New York Times calls the book ‘a highly plotted horror tale that turns the ‘Obstinate Questioning’ of puberty into deadly weapons’. What these girls do is cruel and calculated. But they are also only 13 and 14 years old, so with whom does the responsibility lie? What they do is aided and abetted by the men but they are by no means innocent. The story does bring Lolita to mind but in some ways felt more real and more possible to me.
Interestingly when Bainbridge first wrote the book in the 50s, it was rejected for publication because it was seen to present the two schoolgirls in way which was indecent and repulsive – like teenagers would never do something like this. Sadly, no one thinks that anymore!
A quick book to read, but one that lingers. Definitely a second hand book worth buying and passing on.
If anyone else has read it, i'd be interested to chat about it. i thought it well worth reading and discussing
May 4, 2016
Harriet is the dominant member of a friendship between two young girls home from boarding school for the summer vacation; the other, firmly under Harriet's thumb, is our narrator, whose name we never do learn. At Harriet's instigation, they decide as a sadistic game to lure and then humiliate a local, unhappily married middle-aged man, whom they call the Tsar. And this is the story of how they do that, and the terrible consequences.
I'd expected to enjoy this quite a lot more than in the event I did. The problem for me was the writing, which I found very uneven, so that every time my reading of the tale started to flow I'd turn the page and suddenly find myself juddering to a plod. Although Harriet shone as a character, the narrator herself remained a bit of a cipher to me, a collection of attributes of which the author periodically reminded me -- she's plump, check, timid, check -- but little more, and the same was true of the rest of the players. Because of the clumsiness of the telling and the sketchy characterization, I never became invested in the book: the events were just something I was watching, rather than experiencing.
The novel has lots of high ratings here, so obviously it speaks to others. But it didn't speak to me.
I'd expected to enjoy this quite a lot more than in the event I did. The problem for me was the writing, which I found very uneven, so that every time my reading of the tale started to flow I'd turn the page and suddenly find myself juddering to a plod. Although Harriet shone as a character, the narrator herself remained a bit of a cipher to me, a collection of attributes of which the author periodically reminded me -- she's plump, check, timid, check -- but little more, and the same was true of the rest of the players. Because of the clumsiness of the telling and the sketchy characterization, I never became invested in the book: the events were just something I was watching, rather than experiencing.
The novel has lots of high ratings here, so obviously it speaks to others. But it didn't speak to me.
August 11, 2017
Lock up your daughters...
Our unnamed narrator (I shall call her Elsie, just because I can) has returned from boarding school for the summer and is excited about getting together with her closest friend, Harriet. The girls have been in trouble in the past, and this is the reason Elsie's parents sent her away to school. It's quickly apparent they intend to get into just as much trouble in the future – constantly seeking new experiences they can record in their diary, each experience must top the one before. They are at that age, thirteen or fourteen, when their fantasies run to men and sex. And with Harriet's encouragement, Elsie has developed a fascination with an unhappily married middle-aged man whom they call 'the Tsar'. She sets out to tempt him and he is open to being tempted, but we know from the beginning that things aren't going to end well...
This is an intriguing look at the secret lives of adolescent girls, set in the '50s, at a time when many parents still demanded obedience rather than offering guidance. Both sets of parents care about their daughters in their own ways but clearly have no idea how to handle them, so that Harriet and Elsie are left to navigate their own way through their burgeoning sexuality. The thing that makes the book so disturbing is that their thoughts and behaviour will be recognisable to any woman, since we all went through that difficult stage when our physical selves were maturing far more rapidly than our emotional selves. It's also a reminder of how female friendships at that age can become obsessively close, to a point where they can take precedence over all other relationships, even family, and can develop their own secret codes of communication and behaviour. In the end, Harriet and Elsie go much further along the path of acting out their fantasies than most of us did (I hope!), but their first steps feel like ones any one of us might have taken, perhaps with similar consequences.
The book was famously inspired by the case in New Zealand where two teenage girls murdered the mother of one of them, but the story isn't a slavish copy of that, so knowing the original case is not a spoiler for the book. It was also apparently Bainbridge's first novel, though it was rejected at the time, and was only published much later once she had become an established name.
I haven't read any of her later books, so can't compare the quality of the writing, but I felt this one was a little patchy. Some of the writing is wonderful, but for such a short novel I still found the pacing rather slow, finding myself wishing it would hurry up and get to where it was going. Perhaps this was because I had more or less gathered the major points of the plot from the many, many reviews I've read of it, or perhaps it was because the end was so blatantly foreshadowed at the beginning – I'm not sure.
The characterisation of both girls is somewhat vague, but I felt that fitted well with the first-person narration. Elsie's obsession with Harriet and desire to impress her is portrayed excellently, but Harriet herself remains something of an enigma because we only have Elsie's account to go on. Elsie also hints that she, Elsie, is the submissive one in the relationship, but sometimes the reader is made to wonder if this is a true representation of their friendship, or some kind of deflection so that Elsie should be seen as the more innocent of the two.
Times change and attitudes change with them. It may be harder for a modern reader, having lived through all the horror stories about paedophiles and grooming, to feel as sympathetic towards the Tsar as I suspect a reader was expected to feel when the book was published in the '70s. It's also less politically correct (though no less true) to see young teenage girls as potential temptresses, using their sexuality as a game, only half innocently, testing their new-found power over men. All of that rang true for me, though, however much we like to gloss over the sometimes dark complexities of teenage sexuality these days.
So while I wasn't quite as blown away by this as I'd hoped, I think it's a fine example of a story that becomes very dark while still retaining a chilling level of credibility. Recommended, and it will certainly encourage me to seek out more of Bainbridge's work.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Our unnamed narrator (I shall call her Elsie, just because I can) has returned from boarding school for the summer and is excited about getting together with her closest friend, Harriet. The girls have been in trouble in the past, and this is the reason Elsie's parents sent her away to school. It's quickly apparent they intend to get into just as much trouble in the future – constantly seeking new experiences they can record in their diary, each experience must top the one before. They are at that age, thirteen or fourteen, when their fantasies run to men and sex. And with Harriet's encouragement, Elsie has developed a fascination with an unhappily married middle-aged man whom they call 'the Tsar'. She sets out to tempt him and he is open to being tempted, but we know from the beginning that things aren't going to end well...
This is an intriguing look at the secret lives of adolescent girls, set in the '50s, at a time when many parents still demanded obedience rather than offering guidance. Both sets of parents care about their daughters in their own ways but clearly have no idea how to handle them, so that Harriet and Elsie are left to navigate their own way through their burgeoning sexuality. The thing that makes the book so disturbing is that their thoughts and behaviour will be recognisable to any woman, since we all went through that difficult stage when our physical selves were maturing far more rapidly than our emotional selves. It's also a reminder of how female friendships at that age can become obsessively close, to a point where they can take precedence over all other relationships, even family, and can develop their own secret codes of communication and behaviour. In the end, Harriet and Elsie go much further along the path of acting out their fantasies than most of us did (I hope!), but their first steps feel like ones any one of us might have taken, perhaps with similar consequences.
Please God (I could feel the Tsar's hand on my shoulder) please God, send Harriet. Then I turned to face the tiger. So dingy he was with his sallow skin and thin hair brushed carefully back. For all his elegance, and graceful walk, the delicate way he moved his head, indefinably he lacked youth. Later I was to remember the stillness in the woods, the evening in an avenue of light between the tree trunks, and the Tsar with his hand on my shoulder. I did not know I loved him then, because as Harriet wrote later in the diary, we had a long way to go before we reached the point of love.
The book was famously inspired by the case in New Zealand where two teenage girls murdered the mother of one of them, but the story isn't a slavish copy of that, so knowing the original case is not a spoiler for the book. It was also apparently Bainbridge's first novel, though it was rejected at the time, and was only published much later once she had become an established name.
I haven't read any of her later books, so can't compare the quality of the writing, but I felt this one was a little patchy. Some of the writing is wonderful, but for such a short novel I still found the pacing rather slow, finding myself wishing it would hurry up and get to where it was going. Perhaps this was because I had more or less gathered the major points of the plot from the many, many reviews I've read of it, or perhaps it was because the end was so blatantly foreshadowed at the beginning – I'm not sure.
I had tried to explain to my mother that it was awful to go so early; that one looked so silly when the field was full of small children. I could not explain that when it was dark a new dignity would transform the fair into an oasis of excitement, so that it became a place of mystery and delight; peopled with soldiers from the camp and orange-faced girls wearing head scarves, who in strange regimented lines would sway back and forth across the field, facing each other defiantly, exchanging no words, bright-eyed under the needle stars. I could not explain how all at once the lines would meet and mingle performing a complicated rite of selection; orange girls and soldier boys pairing off slowly to drift to the far end of the field and struggle under the hedges filled with blackberries.
The characterisation of both girls is somewhat vague, but I felt that fitted well with the first-person narration. Elsie's obsession with Harriet and desire to impress her is portrayed excellently, but Harriet herself remains something of an enigma because we only have Elsie's account to go on. Elsie also hints that she, Elsie, is the submissive one in the relationship, but sometimes the reader is made to wonder if this is a true representation of their friendship, or some kind of deflection so that Elsie should be seen as the more innocent of the two.
Times change and attitudes change with them. It may be harder for a modern reader, having lived through all the horror stories about paedophiles and grooming, to feel as sympathetic towards the Tsar as I suspect a reader was expected to feel when the book was published in the '70s. It's also less politically correct (though no less true) to see young teenage girls as potential temptresses, using their sexuality as a game, only half innocently, testing their new-found power over men. All of that rang true for me, though, however much we like to gloss over the sometimes dark complexities of teenage sexuality these days.
So while I wasn't quite as blown away by this as I'd hoped, I think it's a fine example of a story that becomes very dark while still retaining a chilling level of credibility. Recommended, and it will certainly encourage me to seek out more of Bainbridge's work.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
August 1, 2017
Beryl es una escritora brillante, con pleno dominio de la trama desde el principio hasta el final. Sin embargo, en este libro en concreto, me ha resultado imposible identificarme en lo más mínimo con ninguno de los personajes. Algunos por su pusilanimidad, otros por sus dotes de manipulación, estaban tan en las Antípodas de mi que no llegué a ellos. Actúan por resorte, sin motivaciones comprensibles para mi carácter salvo una mandad que te lleva a preguntar ¿nacieron así o se convirtieron en eso? Falta profundizar en su pasado para poder llegar a entenderles mejor. Aún así me gustaría leer algo más de Beryl.
September 2, 2019
This little novel is dark and disturbing, but not exciting. It's not thrilling and twisty, but it's well-written and worth the read. The girls seem to be very manipulative, but very naive at the same time. I read this in a couple of hours and am glad to mark it off my to-be-read list.
May 5, 2016
Harriet Said… was Beryl Bainbridge’s first written novel, although not published until 1972 following A Weekend with Claude and Another Part of the Wood. As Linda Grant says in her introduction to this Virago edition Beryl Bainbridge is a writer whose books have “a black heart to them, in a comic chest.” An apt description I think. This is however, only the second I have read – The Bottle Factory Outing was my first, read for a Beryl Bainbridge reading week in 2012 and had certainly intended to read more Bainbridge before now. I suggested this title to my second, small book group – and I’m so glad I did – we shall have lots to discuss.
Harriet Said… is set in a Liverpool suburb close to the sea and the sand dunes of Formby a few years after the end of the Second World War. It is the long summer holidays, and our unnamed narrator, a thirteen year old girl, returns from the boarding school her parents can’t really afford, and awaits the return of her friend Harriet from a family holiday in Wales. Harriet said… is a frequent refrain, as we learn from Harriet’s friend about their friendship and the balance of power between them. Harriet, slightly older at fourteen, is a too knowing, manipulative girl, she tells her friend what to wear, what to do, what to write in the shared diary kept in Harriet’s room. Her friend, stout and a little clumsy obeys her adored, delicate little Harriet without question. In the days before Harriet’s return, the girl, reacquaints herself with the Formby sand dunes, and the sad, disappointed men who can sometimes be found there. Mr Biggs – the Tsar as he is called by Harriet and her friend is one of these, a golfing buddy of Harriet’s father – a middle aged married man.
Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...
Harriet Said… is set in a Liverpool suburb close to the sea and the sand dunes of Formby a few years after the end of the Second World War. It is the long summer holidays, and our unnamed narrator, a thirteen year old girl, returns from the boarding school her parents can’t really afford, and awaits the return of her friend Harriet from a family holiday in Wales. Harriet said… is a frequent refrain, as we learn from Harriet’s friend about their friendship and the balance of power between them. Harriet, slightly older at fourteen, is a too knowing, manipulative girl, she tells her friend what to wear, what to do, what to write in the shared diary kept in Harriet’s room. Her friend, stout and a little clumsy obeys her adored, delicate little Harriet without question. In the days before Harriet’s return, the girl, reacquaints herself with the Formby sand dunes, and the sad, disappointed men who can sometimes be found there. Mr Biggs – the Tsar as he is called by Harriet and her friend is one of these, a golfing buddy of Harriet’s father – a middle aged married man.
Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...
November 21, 2016
Está muy bien escrito, si te paras a pensar es bastante oscura y espeluznante, pero no me ha acabado de convencer del todo.
Creo que es una historia a la que se le hubiera podido sacar más chicha si hubiese estado contada de otra forma.
Creo que es una historia a la que se le hubiera podido sacar más chicha si hubiese estado contada de otra forma.
July 15, 2021
My rating is based on the atmospheric nature of the writing rather than the subject matter. This book is like a bottomless black pit of despair, hate and anguish.
November 14, 2016
This was actually Bainbridge's first novel that she'd written (even though it wasn't her first published -it came out in 1972) and apparently it's loosely inspired by the Parker-Hulme murder case in New Zealand (which you may know from Heavenly Creatures, the Peter Jackson film). However the stories are only similar in so far as they both focus on young girls who intentionally set out to cause harm to an adult; in Harriet Said, though, the goal is not murder, but just really hardcore bullying and stalking.
The story captures really compellingly what it means to be a young teen - the awkwardness, the longing to be significant, the naive sense of control, the sense of utter invincibility paradoxically laced with desperation and insecurity. The unnamed narrator and her best friend Harriet, both thirteen, spend one summer trying to 'humble' Mr Biggs, a local middle-aged man whom they call 'The Tsar': it's unclear exactly why, or even what their specific aims are, but the implication is the girls are driven by a bizarre desire for various forms of power - sexual, psychological, geographical. They stalk and bully the Tsar by following him into the woods, along the beach, to his house - but he welcomes this, even though it distresses him, and in fact organises clandestine meetings with them and at one point invites them to his house while his wife is away and basically allows one of his friends to hook up with Harriet (he also tries to sexually assault the narrator in his lounge room - which she kind of welcomes, but is also horrified by). It makes for a really unsettling dynamic where you're not quite sure what anyone really wants - but what they do want is clearly not quite right.
Importantly, even though the narrator welcomes the Tsar's sexual advances (she believes she is in love with him) the text in no way endorses the Tsar's behaviour or posits the narrator's desire as somehow making it 'okay'. She is always repulsed by the Tsar even though she longs for him, and indeed, it's clear that he is taking advantage of and actually grooming her.
I enjoyed reading this a lot, even though it was upsetting and weird and sometimes violent. Bainbridge does such an excellent job of dramatising the crazy ways that desire works, and how people often don't even understand what they want. All the characters are manipulative, but as a reader you never really know to what extent the characters understand their own powers of manipulation, or how conscious they are of the ethics of their decisions, or who has the power in any given scenario. The writing style itself seems to obscure or confuse everyone's motivations, because the narrator herself at thirteen years old is so unable to clearly perceive others' thoughts herself. At the same time she and Harriet are incredibly clever and so while they get some things right, they completely fail to gauge the severity of many situations even as they attempt to create that very sense of severity.
My one qualm is that sometimes the writing style was far too formal for such a young narrator. Even though the girls consciously try to be clever and grown-up in their language, sometime it just didn't ring true. Otherwise this was a great, upsetting and weird story that I totally recommend.
**This is a review of an ARC of the new kindle edition of Harriet Said.
The story captures really compellingly what it means to be a young teen - the awkwardness, the longing to be significant, the naive sense of control, the sense of utter invincibility paradoxically laced with desperation and insecurity. The unnamed narrator and her best friend Harriet, both thirteen, spend one summer trying to 'humble' Mr Biggs, a local middle-aged man whom they call 'The Tsar': it's unclear exactly why, or even what their specific aims are, but the implication is the girls are driven by a bizarre desire for various forms of power - sexual, psychological, geographical. They stalk and bully the Tsar by following him into the woods, along the beach, to his house - but he welcomes this, even though it distresses him, and in fact organises clandestine meetings with them and at one point invites them to his house while his wife is away and basically allows one of his friends to hook up with Harriet (he also tries to sexually assault the narrator in his lounge room - which she kind of welcomes, but is also horrified by). It makes for a really unsettling dynamic where you're not quite sure what anyone really wants - but what they do want is clearly not quite right.
Importantly, even though the narrator welcomes the Tsar's sexual advances (she believes she is in love with him) the text in no way endorses the Tsar's behaviour or posits the narrator's desire as somehow making it 'okay'. She is always repulsed by the Tsar even though she longs for him, and indeed, it's clear that he is taking advantage of and actually grooming her.
I enjoyed reading this a lot, even though it was upsetting and weird and sometimes violent. Bainbridge does such an excellent job of dramatising the crazy ways that desire works, and how people often don't even understand what they want. All the characters are manipulative, but as a reader you never really know to what extent the characters understand their own powers of manipulation, or how conscious they are of the ethics of their decisions, or who has the power in any given scenario. The writing style itself seems to obscure or confuse everyone's motivations, because the narrator herself at thirteen years old is so unable to clearly perceive others' thoughts herself. At the same time she and Harriet are incredibly clever and so while they get some things right, they completely fail to gauge the severity of many situations even as they attempt to create that very sense of severity.
My one qualm is that sometimes the writing style was far too formal for such a young narrator. Even though the girls consciously try to be clever and grown-up in their language, sometime it just didn't ring true. Otherwise this was a great, upsetting and weird story that I totally recommend.
**This is a review of an ARC of the new kindle edition of Harriet Said.
July 23, 2012
I found this little Penguin paperback, of only 152 pages, while I was attending the Classical Pursuits program in Toronto. It was on one of the hall tables bearing a sign, "Take One, Leave One," thereby encouraging readers to share their books. Because it was thin, because I was curious about two teenage girls who seem to be spying on someone's house, I took it home.
A bold and bossy Harriet has a loyal follower in her friend, of whose name we're never sure as the story is told in first person through her eyes. We only see that this friend is stout, clumsy, and so enraptured by Harriet, and what she says, that she follows Harriet's every plan.
This summer, Harriet has decided that they will "humble the Tsar", a meek and married man with whom our narrator becomes purposefully involved. They are two thirteen year old girls, who have little idea of the repercussions their behavior would have. The results of their game with the Tsar has disastrous results, and the reader is left wondering if perhaps youth is not so innocent after all.
The novel is written under an exquisite shroud of sorts, slowly revealing each facet of the plot such that one discovers this novel is actually a horror story. I found Beryl Bainbridge to resemble Daphne du Maurier, and even Shirley Jackson, by taking ordinary themes and making them dark and terrible. Some reviewers have called it an "evocation of childhood", but I would go so far as naming it what it is: wicked manipulation. It would make a perfect autumnal read.
A bold and bossy Harriet has a loyal follower in her friend, of whose name we're never sure as the story is told in first person through her eyes. We only see that this friend is stout, clumsy, and so enraptured by Harriet, and what she says, that she follows Harriet's every plan.
This summer, Harriet has decided that they will "humble the Tsar", a meek and married man with whom our narrator becomes purposefully involved. They are two thirteen year old girls, who have little idea of the repercussions their behavior would have. The results of their game with the Tsar has disastrous results, and the reader is left wondering if perhaps youth is not so innocent after all.
The novel is written under an exquisite shroud of sorts, slowly revealing each facet of the plot such that one discovers this novel is actually a horror story. I found Beryl Bainbridge to resemble Daphne du Maurier, and even Shirley Jackson, by taking ordinary themes and making them dark and terrible. Some reviewers have called it an "evocation of childhood", but I would go so far as naming it what it is: wicked manipulation. It would make a perfect autumnal read.
March 2, 2019
Ciertamente, es una novela perturbadora en muchísimos sentidos. Sobre todo, porque los personajes mantienen entre sí relaciones inquietantes. En mi opinión, ninguno puede presumir de cordura ni sentirse libre de culpa. De todas formas, no deja de parecerme una historia extraña, en el sentido de que no daba crédito a todo lo que estaba sucediendo delante de sus narices, sin que nadie se percatase ni le pusiera remedio a tiempo. Su lectura ha sido una experiencia muy agridulce que, realmente, no sé cómo valorar. Me ha dejado con mal cuerpo... pero también indiferente.
El desenlace me ha decepcionado un poco, aunque el final me ha parecido correcto. La sinopsis prometía una novela basada en un crimen real. Pero, cuando he buscado más información sobre el caso Parker-Hulme, he descubierto que una de las asesinas era la famosa escritora de novela negra Anne Perry. Sin embargo, lo que me he encontrado en esta novela no se parece en nada a la realidad. Para empezar, la víctima ni siquiera es la misma. Entonces, no comprendo por qué dice que está basada en un crimen real cuando solo se ha inspirado en la relación enfermiza que mantenían las dos niñas. De hecho, toda la novela se centra en la polémica historia de amor que mantiene un hombre casado con una niña de trece años.
El desenlace me ha decepcionado un poco, aunque el final me ha parecido correcto. La sinopsis prometía una novela basada en un crimen real. Pero, cuando he buscado más información sobre el caso Parker-Hulme, he descubierto que una de las asesinas era la famosa escritora de novela negra Anne Perry. Sin embargo, lo que me he encontrado en esta novela no se parece en nada a la realidad. Para empezar, la víctima ni siquiera es la misma. Entonces, no comprendo por qué dice que está basada en un crimen real cuando solo se ha inspirado en la relación enfermiza que mantenían las dos niñas. De hecho, toda la novela se centra en la polémica historia de amor que mantiene un hombre casado con una niña de trece años.
September 6, 2016
The only reason I finished this was because at 188 pages, I was crossing my fingers for a memorable ending, at the very least. Strike one. "The shock-power of The Exorcist, the chilling suspense of The Other" screams the front cover. Strike two. A story of two young, manipulative girls sounds like it might have some tense moments, but there was zero suspense to be found here.
February 9, 2014
WOW!!!!! What a short little psychological thriller this turned out to be! My first Beryl Bainbridge book (shame on me for not reading her sooner) but not my last. This jaded reader recommends this for some psychological horror!
July 13, 2014
This was interesting - not sure enjoyable would describe it. A very daring book, in so much as none of the main protagonists are sympathetic characters. It is certainly dark and Harriet is a truly disturbing character.
December 30, 2020
Mi aspettavo molto di più. Astoria solitamente non mi delude mai, ma questa volta devo essere onesta: il libro non mi ha entusiasmato. Una scrittura un po’ ferruginosa, faticosa. Il tema poco originale e personaggi con cui ho poco empatizzato. Non lo consiglierei.
December 29, 2010
This book has stayed with me ever since I first read it in my early twenties....20 years later, I still remember it's chilling, haunting effect. One of my all time favourites.
February 25, 2015
Creo que es más la historia en sí, que tiene su morbo y es impactante. Pero el libro en conjunto no tiene más que señalar. Una lectura tibia.
June 10, 2016
4,5 stars. My review: https://theblankgarden.wordpress.com/...
November 21, 2023
“What are little girls made of? / Sugar and spice, / And all that’s nice.” Fat chance! How about “I tried to think what innocence meant and failed” and “It was quite easy to bring myself to hurt him, he was such a fool” instead? Today would have been the author’s 91st birthday. 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.
It’s uncomfortable for modern readers to encounter what is essentially .
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.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
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.
It’s uncomfortable for modern readers to encounter what is essentially .
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.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
June 16, 2020
A 13 year old unnamed narrator and her less innocent friend, Harriet, set out to collect 'Experience', as other children might collect stamps or butterflies. Over the course of a summer holiday from school in the village of Formby on the Lancashire coast, the girls earmark a middle-aged man, Peter Biggs (who they nickname 'the Tsar', from Peter the Great), for their research. Biggs is a soft target, "slightly unsober, slightly dishevelled", keen to pander to the girls' initially innocent games.
Bainbridge convincingly captures, in this her first novel, what it means to be a young teen; the self-conciousness, the desire to stand-out, the naive sense of control, and a sense of adolescent invincibility paradoxically laced with anguish and insecurity.
There's a clear element of the autobiographical about the novel; Bainbridge herself was expelled from school at 14, cited as being a "corrupting moral influence" after a dirty limerick was found in her school bag. The narrator suffers the same fate here, and as with the author herself, was sent to boarding school.
Strictly, I suppose this is a horror novel, but as with the best writing in any genre, especially horror, it entertains in so many other ways.
Rejected by the publisher on its initial submission in 1957 due to its controversial content, then under the title The Summer of the Tsar, it was (thankfully) eventually published in 1972.
Here’s a clip, as the girls spy on the Biggs’s one night..
Bainbridge convincingly captures, in this her first novel, what it means to be a young teen; the self-conciousness, the desire to stand-out, the naive sense of control, and a sense of adolescent invincibility paradoxically laced with anguish and insecurity.
There's a clear element of the autobiographical about the novel; Bainbridge herself was expelled from school at 14, cited as being a "corrupting moral influence" after a dirty limerick was found in her school bag. The narrator suffers the same fate here, and as with the author herself, was sent to boarding school.
Strictly, I suppose this is a horror novel, but as with the best writing in any genre, especially horror, it entertains in so many other ways.
Rejected by the publisher on its initial submission in 1957 due to its controversial content, then under the title The Summer of the Tsar, it was (thankfully) eventually published in 1972.
Here’s a clip, as the girls spy on the Biggs’s one night..
Under the monstrous flesh of Mrs Biggs, the Tsar lay pinned like a moth on the sofa, bony knees splitting the air, thighs splayed out to take her awful weight. I could not breathe. Wave upon wave of fear and joy swept over me. Like an oiled snake, deep delving and twisting, Mrs Biggs poisoned him slowly, rearing and stabbing him convulsively. Her body writhed gently and was still. Ignoring the woman above him the grey Tsar lay as if dead, pinioned limply, eyes wide and staring, speared in an act of contrition. Full-blown love eddied from the woman, blowzy hips sunk in weariness, litmus flesh soaking up virtue from the body beneath.
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