Beryl Bainbridge​ died in 2010 at the age of 77. Her devotion to cigarettes and whisky meant that she had collected a number of diseases, but she was still working on the last of her eighteen novels, The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress, in her final days. ‘At least I’m trying,’ she wrote to her editor as she sent off another few pages. She was a worker. One of the things she worked on was a reputation for eccentricity – a stuffed buffalo in the hall, plaster saints in the front room, wildly unpredictable behaviour at social gatherings after a few drinks. She chose to be seen as a woman who lived on her own terms, but that wasn’t always the way she felt, and she came to resent the persona she had created for herself: ‘I don’t see how you can be eccentric and still … pay the bills, and own a house, and babysit for six grandchildren every week.’ She was an actor before she became a novelist, and her scorn of propriety was in part a performance.

If the discipline behind Bainbridge’s work was easily missed, that didn’t mean she was ignored. She never lacked supporters and critics generally approved of her novels. Her national standing was confirmed with a damehood in 2000, an honour which she prized, though it didn’t make her decorous. She was shortlisted for the Booker five times without ever winning (no one forgets this). She remains a figure who is hard to place – widely appreciated, but not a member of any acknowledged group of writers, and without much discernible influence on those who came after.

Her mother, Winnie, would have been delighted by that damehood. Bainbridge was brought up in Formby, a coastal town just north of Liverpool, and the fading fortunes of Merseyside throughout the 20th century have led to the notion that she had a hardscrabble upbringing. In fact, she was in many ways a privileged child. Winnie, who came from a well-to-do family with social pretensions, went to a finishing school in Belgium. Richard Bainbridge was a successful businessman when Winnie married him; but Bainbridge & Co failed before Beryl was born. This was not what Winnie had expected. Her disappointment, and her attempts to maintain her position on a diminished income, defined Beryl’s early years. A nephew described Winnie as a woman who would wear ‘a hat with a veil and full make-up if she stepped outside the front door to collect the paper’. Patricia Routledge, just three years older than Bainbridge and also brought up on Merseyside, remembered women like Winnie with the valiantly absurd character of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping up Appearances. The marriage survived, but it was marred by the conflict that Bainbridge recalled in A Quiet Life (1976). Winnie was part of a generation of middle-class women who had been taught that finding the right husband would guarantee a secure status. She never came to terms with the sense that she had been cheated.

Though money was tight, there was a substantial house, a car, a telephone and regular outings. Bainbridge, like her elder brother, Ian, was sent to a fee-paying school. Ian was good at passing exams, though the breakdown he suffered at eighteen suggests that his success didn’t come without cost. It soon became clear that Bainbridge, an erratic schoolgirl, was not going to follow her brother’s example. Winnie began to think that her daughter’s best prospects might lie in the theatre. Piano, dancing and elocution lessons were provided (any trace of a Scouse accent would have horrified Winnie). Bainbridge won a gold medal from the London Academy of Music, Drama and Art at the age of twelve and the Liverpool Echo proudly recorded her success as ‘a noted recruit to the ranks of dramatic art’. Her five years of education at Merchant Taylors’ School ended when her mother discovered a sexually explicit poem in her gymslip pocket (she had illustrated it) and took it to the headmistress. Bainbridge was asked to leave – to the relief of all concerned. A brief period at the Arts Educational School, a hard-nosed boarding school, was equally unsuccessful. Bainbridge had already adopted the sceptical outlook she maintained for the rest of her life, and thought little of her schoolmates and teachers. She did, however, take to her fencing master (‘His bottom is so energetic’).

An eye for an attractive man was another trait that Bainbridge never lost. Beginning with the German prisoner of war she met among the sand dunes of Formby aged fourteen (an affair that formed the basis for A Quiet Life), she soon added to the variety of her romantic experiences. She kept notes on her boyfriends (age, nationality, length of relationship), accumulating a list that stretched to seventeen names before she stopped counting. Love affairs are central to many of her books. But recklessness made her vulnerable. When, around three years after that first affair, she got a job at the Liverpool Playhouse, she must have looked like prey to some of her colleagues.

The Playhouse was changing in character in the years after the Second World War. Old traditions were starting to look outdated, and different ambitions were making themselves felt. Gerald Cross, the new director, wanted to introduce European theatre to his somewhat staid audiences and began to stage plays in translation without worrying about the theatre’s commercial fortunes. Bainbridge liked this atmosphere of risky ideas. But what she chiefly noticed was the intensity of theatrical life, along with the men who were running the theatre. Paul Mayo, the set designer, reduced her to jelly: ‘The very mention of [his] name caused me to break into a fit of trembling, and if I actually came face to face with him, which I did four or five times a day, I had the curious feeling that my feet and my teeth and my nose had enlarged out of all proportion.’

The cultural revolution of the postwar years (slower to take hold in the provinces) was at odds with much more intransigent assumptions about a woman’s place in the world. Her mother’s discontent had left its mark, and Bainbridge didn’t aim for a prudently managed marriage. And yet she took it for granted that she needed to attract a lover, and then keep hold of him. Rebellion was accompanied by anxious deference, as she tried to convince herself that she was wanted and would continue to be wanted. She was both demanding and submissive as a procession of men made their advances: ‘I could never say “No”. First, I sort of felt they were doing me a favour; and second, it was impolite to refuse.’ Raped by a casual pick-up at the age of nineteen (she lost a tooth in the struggle), it took her years to recover her confidence. Sexual freedom had not worked in her favour.

Bainbridge married Austin Davies, a painter, when she was 21. She was looking for stability, but Davies was a thorough-going bohemian – and bohemianism has never been good news for women. He expected that his wife would help to sustain the household income while his own career took precedence. Bainbridge’s theatrical work tailed off before drying up altogether when she became pregnant. Nevertheless, these were productive years. She developed a serious interest in painting, which she pursued throughout her life, but she needed materials and space in order to paint, and writing presented itself as a more manageable pursuit for a woman at home. She began to produce fiction, at first without finding a publisher (that came later, with Duckworth, Anna and Colin Haycraft’s company). A second child appeared, amid many infidelities, quarrels and reconciliations (all recorded in Brendan King’s meticulous 2016 biography). The end of the marriage was inevitable, and hurtful, but Davies did recognise his responsibilities as a father. In 1967 he installed Bainbridge in the house in Camden Town that became her permanent base.

The chaos of Bainbridge’s life gave rise to a good deal of suffering, but it provided the material that made her a writer. The stage couldn’t compete with what she had seen for herself. She had little faith in the power of invention: ‘You write the way you are … I don’t really believe in the imagination; I think it’s all a compound of everything’s that happened to you right from birth.’ The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) has now been reissued by Daunt Books. Together with An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), it represents the initial tranche of twelve Bainbridge novels and a collection of short stories, due to appear at the rate of two a year. The Bottle Factory Outing was the second of her books to be shortlisted for the Booker, after The Dressmaker, and it caused a stir. Readers didn’t know what to make of the novel’s incongruities – its biting social observation and irreverent farce, beginning and ending in death. Half a century later, its jolts of strangeness make a different kind of impact. What seems striking now isn’t the offbeat horror but a narrative voice that passes no judgment on grotesque characters and events. Novels, for those who read them (always a minority), often provide a form of ethical companionship. Bainbridge never signed up to this agenda. The Bottle Factory Outing would be less disturbing if there was the filter of authorial judgment. Instead, there’s just the spiky dissonance of the story.

Brenda and Freda are penniless young women working in a wine-bottling factory in London. Brenda has left a dismal marriage and is holding out against an equally dismal return to her overbearing parents. Freda, whose efforts to find work as an actor have come to nothing, is looking for a partner. The women share a bedsit and sleep in the same bed separated by a bolster of books. Brenda is miserable about the prospect of a factory outing. Her boss is predatory but ‘she couldn’t think how to discourage him – she didn’t want to lose her job and she hated giving offence.’ Freda sees the outing as an opportunity to win the affection of a supposedly well-connected Italian whose glamour sets him apart from the browbeaten labourers at the factory. Nothing goes as planned. The women lurch from misfortune to disaster, and the novel culminates in a killing that seems random rather than tragic. No kind of moral resolution is forthcoming. Aspirations are defeated, misdeeds unpunished.

Why has the novel been praised (in Graham Greene’s words) as ‘outrageously funny’? It doesn’t conform to any formal definition of comedy. There’s no happy ending; characters come to harm; and no one gets married. The humour – if humour is the right word – arises from the combination of banality and threat. Mrs Haddon, Brenda’s mother-in-law, turns up at the bedsit and tries to shoot Brenda with an air pistol she has acquired after saving up her pension for three weeks:

‘We ought to make a cup of tea,’ said Brenda, looking at Stanley’s mother. ‘She’s had a shock.’

Mrs Haddon stared back without pity. ‘I was only aiming at your vocal cords. You always talked too much.’

It’s sometimes claimed that such juxtapositions reflect the comical remarks people make in the North. They are to be found in Alan Bennett’s memories of conversations overheard in Yorkshire (‘I see that fool of a tortoise is out again’) and sketches by Victoria Wood. Northern or not – and I’ve never been convinced – they were a mainstay of Bainbridge’s early fiction, and a reason for her readers’ enjoyment of her bleak narratives. That, and the startled pleasure provoked by her disregard for settled expectations.

The events of The Bottle Factory Outing are so outlandish that it comes as a surprise to learn they’re largely autobiographical. Freda is based on Pauline Mani, a boisterous friend Bainbridge met after moving to London (the novel is dedicated to her). They worked together in a factory resembling the one in the novel and Bainbridge’s mother-in-law really did try to shoot her with an air pistol (later embellishments to the story include blazing revolvers and loaded shotguns). Taking incidents more or less as they occurred, and ordering them into tight plots, was Bainbridge’s preferred method during her early years as a writer.

Bainbridge continued to use her own life as the starting point for her novels, but this wasn’t an early version of autofiction. She chose memories selectively and the story took precedence. As her writing developed, the perspective expanded. Young Adolf (1978) plays with the legend that Hitler visited Liverpool before the First World War, while Watson’s Apology (1984) tells the true-crime story of a Victorian marriage that ended in murder. In both books, Bainbridge’s experiences (of the streets of Liverpool or her parents’ marriage) are woven into the historical narrative. An Awfully Big Adventure, which recalls Bainbridge’s years at the Liverpool Playhouse, might seem more straightforwardly autobiographical; but here too memory and history are blended.

The novel​ is set in the early 1950s as Liverpool emerges from the Second World War. The city is grimy and battered; bomb damage is everywhere. Money is in short supply, as are good food and stylish dress (‘Who needed style in a backstreet in Liverpool?’). Stella Bradshaw, a wilful 16-year-old who was abandoned by her single mother as a baby, is living with an aunt and uncle who run a down-at-heel boarding house. Uncle Vernon hopes that Stella might take up a theatrical career. Despite her aunt’s doubts (‘People like us don’t go to plays, let alone act in them’), Stella gets work as an unpaid backstage dogsbody and promptly falls for Meredith Potter, the theatre’s gay director. Frustrated by his indifference, which she can’t fathom (she has never come across homosexuality), she turns instead to O’Hara, an ageing actor brought in to play Captain Hook in the forthcoming production of Peter Pan. The affair begins with a lukewarm seduction:

‘Did you enjoy it?’ he asked, not looking at her.

‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘I expect there’s a knack to it. It’s very intimate, isn’t it?’

Despite her lack of enthusiasm, Stella accepts the situation and takes advantage of the opportunity to learn more about sex. ‘She said she thought she was beginning to get the hang of it. It was no different from learning the piano or ukulele; it just needed practice.’ The novel ends, as Bainbridge’s novels often do, with catastrophe and an unexpected death.

The title comes from Peter Pan: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ Bainbridge’s novels aren’t tragic, but they are punctuated by death. Lethal accidents, suicides and murders are frequent and often graphically depicted. There’s a high incidence of corpses, and they sometimes linger as cumbersome presences in the lives of surviving characters. Two of her novels take on events whose death toll shook the complacencies of Edwardian England – The Birthday Boys, which tells the story of Scott’s final expedition to the Antarctic, and Every Man for Himself, which is set on board the Titanic. Bainbridge’s brother had become a county coroner, and after he died in 1987 she noted his profession as a point of contact between them. ‘We were alike after all, in that we both had an interest in death.’ It might be argued that the omnipresence of mortality in Bainbridge’s writing puts life’s indignities into perspective. But the deaths that frame her plots are as arbitrary, and usually as undeserved, as the mishaps that precede them. Though she was – nominally, at least – a Catholic convert, the demise of her characters is never attended by solemnity. Like sex, death is something that happens to people. Unlike sex, it offers no opportunity for learning.

Not that anyone seems to learn much from their sexual adventures in Bainbridge’s novels. Her plots are structured by the same spasms of passion that punctuated her life, but any sense of urgency is temporary, or shallow, or both. This is a feature of her work that now seems peculiar, or even problematic. Readers have come to expect sex to matter more than Bainbridge is willing to allow. It’s shocking when Brenda puts up no resistance to her boss’s lechery; and O’Hara isn’t directly condemned for sleeping with a naive teenager. A reporter forces Stella into a grubby sexual encounter, and she is puzzled rather than furious. Is she responsible? ‘She examined her conscience to discover if she was in any way to blame for her companion’s curious behaviour.’ Her unruffled conclusion is that she is not at fault – and yet she is not particularly upset by what has taken place, and the incident is soon passed over. A cast member is in the habit of putting her over his knee and smacking her. No one, including Stella, thinks the routine humiliation is of any real consequence. ‘It’s not that I either like or dislike it,’ she says. ‘I just don’t see what good it does.’

Bainbridge’s own stance on sexual assault was, to say the least, disconcerting:

I am not a feminist in the slightest. I was brought up to believe that women were much superior to men, only you kept it very quiet … My theory is that as long as there is no violence – no holding a knife to you – it can’t be classified as rape. A husband can’t rape a wife; I don’t think it is possible. As long as you’re not a virgin I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. When I was younger you just didn’t mention abuse, whether it was by strangers or your husband. You just got on with it and it didn’t half help you to deal with men.

In her introduction to The Bottle Factory Outing, the novelist A.K. Blakemore calls statements such as this ‘absolutely jaw-dropping’, which was sometimes the point. Bainbridge took any opportunity to offend the sensibilities of her peers (repeating her rejection of Winnie’s gentility). Her attitude to abuse might also be seen as a way of coping with the aftermath of the attack she endured as a teenager. Succeeding generations have made sense of sex in different ways. I suspect that many of the older female members of my family would have agreed with Bainbridge – though I can’t be sure, as it was understood that such topics were never to be discussed. Discreet reticence was a form of compliance, and it was widespread.

Bainbridge’s novels brought the abuse visited on women by men into the open, and it was in this rejection of narrative reserve that she resisted embedded cultural attitudes. There was no need for explicit declarations about social injustice; the books make her point. Brenda and Freda do not have access to the resources that would allow them to escape their shabby fate. Stella has no knowledge of the sophisticated world she is trying to join, and little sense of its hazards. In Bainbridge’s fiction, people are betrayed by what is best in them – Freda’s impulse to find freedom, Brenda’s wish not to hurt those around her, Stella’s innocent courage. Pathos, rather than comedy, is what makes these novels memorable.