Rosemary Tonks - Novels

Novels

Writing novels in a highly personal style that at times approached the tone of Evelyn Waugh in its cynical observations of urban living, Tonks as a novelist had a mixed critical reception at best, although her critics admit that her grasp of the English language and her sense of London are sharp at times. Her novels are a kind of fictional autobiography in which is she not only plays the leading role but one or two supporting roles as well. She includes incidents and experiences directly from her past, often with only a thin fictional veil to disguise them. Some critics felt that this is a fault and labelled the autobiographical dimension of her writing “feminine” in a negative sense; others decided that her directness was invigorating and shows the uniqueness of her voice, making for a lively, distinct fictional world. Whatever the verdict, Tonks’ novels deal with aspects of her life up to 1972, when her last work was published. Her fiction in particular moved from a dissatisfaction with urban living found in both her collections of poetry and in satiric novels such as The Bloater and Businessmen as Lovers to a pronounced loathing of middle to upper-middle class materialism in her later work. Her distaste for materialism meant that Tonks also developed an interest in the movement of symbolism that eventually led her to a conception of spirituality as the only alternative to materialism. This embrace of what she called “the invisible world” may have ultimately led her to distrust the act of writing itself, and caused her to abandon writing as a career.