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style
Simpson
considers the form of her work to be important - for example
her short story To Her Unready Boyfriend took its form
from a seventeenth century English poem by Andrew Marvell,
To His Coy Mistress
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"Form
has such a big effect on content, Marvell's, To His
Coy Mistress, it's arranged in three chunks, you start
with If, But, Therefore. At the beginning he's saying
to his girlfriend, if we had all the time in world I'd
adore you as you deserve, give hundreds of years to each
eye, every part of you, but that's not the way things
are, time's winged chariot's hurrying near, therefore
- and it's a very bullying poem - come to bed now because
if you don't, you'll be old and horrible and I won't want
to sleep with you and you won't ever have children."
Helen Simpson |
 Marvell's To His Coy Mistress
In her short story, To Her Unready Boyfriend, Simpson
mimics the form of Marvell's poem but inverts the content so
that in her story the woman is trying to persuade the man to
do something... Like the man in the poem, the woman in Simpson's
story says that she wishes they did have all the time in the
world, and if they did, they could continue as they are, but
they've been in the relationship ten years and she thinks things
need to move on, they can't afford to wait until they've travelled
everywhere and done everything...
To Her Unready Boyfriend
The female character is referring here to a biological clock - she suggests that men can father children into their old age, but women can have difficulties conceiving once they reach their late thirties, their fertility declines, they can't afford to wait. Many women are now accustomed to controlling their fertility so they delay having a family, but there is a risk they might leave it too late...
Helen Simpson's work is often very funny, with excellent dialogue, but she concentrates more on mood and feelings than action, looking at what may be very ordinary situations in a fresh and honest light.
Isobel Armstrong, Professor of Literature at Birkbeck College, London University describes Simpson's style, using the example of 'To Her Unready Boyfriend'.
| "She's a very playful writer, adventurously playful, you feel there's a kind of laughter in the way she writes. She likes to have a very clear and elegant plan to her story. You know that the joke of the reversal of the male/female situation is going to accumulate more and more ideas and possibilities as the story goes on. So she lets the elegant structure of the story do a lot of work for her."
Isobel Armstrong |
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