Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift’s 10th novel, is a jewel of a book, a subtle, erotically charged novella suspended between past and future. It is set on one day in 1924 in the life of a young housemaid, a foundling brought up in an orphanage and put into service at 14, who is in love with the upper-class son of a neighbouring family. Their long, secret day together, one he was supposed to be spending with his fiancee, is told like a spellbound dream. There’s an erotic precision and intensity that is new in Swift’s work. The long, leisurely scene in which the naked girl walks alone round the house, observing herself in this unlikely setting and taking possession of it, is an entrancing set-piece.
Swift always writes strongly about English class, war losses, local detail. One of his inspirations, Conrad’s Youth, begins: “This could have occurred nowhere but in England.” Similarly, Swift makes you understand, in this small, magically eloquent book, a hundred years of English life. Jane’s long life’s progression from orphan to author is beautifully tracked. The day we are reading about ends in tragedy, but is the moment that will turn her into a writer. As for Conrad’s narrator, what was “only a moment: a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth” will transform her. The book came out early in 2016 to very good reviews and rather little subsequent attention. Now it is this year’s winner of the Hawthornden prize (which chooses its winner from the last year’s publications). It’s apt that Swift should win this prize, as it was founded in 1919, in the same post-war period as his novel – and, like him, it’s a quietly distinctive prize that doesn’t show off.
When Alice Warrender, the daughter of a Scottish baronet, born at Hawthornden, set up the award for “a work of imaginative literature by an author under 41”, with a prize of £100 – now £15,000 – and a silver medal, she might not have foreseen that it would still be going strong. And in its 98 years it has honoured some excellent writers. These were mostly men, earlier on, among them David Garnett (Lady into Fox), Robert Graves (I, Claudius), David Jones (In Parenthesis), Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory), Ted Hughes (Lupercal), William Trevor (The Old Boys), Geoffrey Hill (King Log), Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia), Oliver Sacks (Awakenings) and Colin Thubron (Behind the Wall). But that changed from the 1980s onwards, since when winners have included Claire Tomalin, Hilary Mantel, Helen Simpson, MJ Hyland, Nicola Barker, Alice Oswald, Candia McWilliam, Ali Smith, Helen Simpson and Tessa Hadley.
Alice Warrender, and the silver medal, and the rule about the author being under 41, have long gone. But a prize that doesn’t invite entries, and has no shortlist, and looks for the best in “imaginative literature” across a range of genres - fiction, poetry, short stories, novels, biography, memoir, history - has kept its character. Now it is sponsored by the redoubtable Drue Heinz, a great patron of literature and the arts. Because she eschews publicity, her patronage – of the writers’ retreat at Hawthornden Castle, the Paris Review, a US prize for short fiction, American literature at Oxford University and of this prize - is not as celebrated as it might be. But she deserves to have her trumpet blown. As one of the five Hawthornden judges (since 2008), I wish the prize did have a shortlist, and attracted more attention. In 2019, it will be 100 years old: perhaps more trumpets can be blown then. Meanwhile, Mothering Sunday keeps its standard high.
