Simpson, Helen 1957- (Helen Vanessa Simpson)

PERSONAL:

Born March 2, 1957, in Bristol, England; married; children: one daughter. Education: Oxford University, M.Litt.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England. Agent—PFD, Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London WC2B 5HA, England.

CAREER:

Staff writer for British edition of Vogue; freelance writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of British Vogue Talent contest; Somerset Maugham award, and Young Writer of the Year award, Sunday Times, both 1990, for Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories; named one of Granta magazine's 20 Best of Young British Novelists, 1993; Hawthornden Prize, for Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, 2001; E.M. Forster Award, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2002.

WRITINGS:

The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea: The Art and Pleasures of Taking Tea, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1986, Ebury (London, England), 2006.

The London Ritz Book of English Breakfasts, Arbor House (New York, NY), 1988, published as The Ritz Book of Breakfasts, Ebury Press (London, England), 1988.

Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, Heinemann (London, England), 1990, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1992.

Flesh and Grass (suspense novella; bound with The Strawberry Tree by Ruth Rendell), Pandora (London, England), 1990.

Dear George and Other Stories, Heinemann (London, England), 1995.

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (stories), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2000, published as Getting a Life, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

Constitutional (short stories), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2005.

In the Driver's Seat: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

Work also represented in anthologies. Contributor of articles and stories to magazines and newspapers. Author of the libretto for Good Friday, 1663, an opera for television, as well as plays for stage and radio.

SIDELIGHTS:

Helen Simpson is a British short story writer whose works are acknowledged for their humor and jaundiced view of men, women, work, and relationships. "Simpson's special province is a certain female-seeming moodiness and temper," observed Anna Vaux in Times Literary Supplement, and these ill-tempered women are the targets of her satire as much as the mean-spirited or ineffectual men who fail them. Though her books are based in realism, critics noted that Simpson achieves her comic effects by the extreme actions of her characters, which push some of her later stories into the realm of fantasy. According to Rita Ciresi in Library Journal, such works are not as successful with the critics as those in which the female protagonists are "tough and true to life," but Simpson is still considered an accomplished short story writer.

The female characters in Simpson's first collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, are largely dissatisfied with themselves, their lives, and their relationships, but appear to exist in a world devoid of alternatives. "Ms. Simpson's dark vision deals directly enough with the battle of the sexes, but ultimately its most telling revelations are about the human soul and its tragic limitations," observed Richard Burgin in New York Times Book Review. In "A Shining Example," a wealthy older neighbor invites young Jane for lunch in order to instruct her about the necessity of selling herself in marriage only to the richest man she can find. In "What Are Neighbors For," a doctor surreptitiously interviews the women she has invited to tea as prospective babysitters for the child she plans to have, by the lover she intends to get rid of. In "Christmas Jezebels," a man attempts to convince his daughters to support him by prostituting themselves. In these stories and others, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, the author "adroitly monitors [her] characters' minds and relationships, skirting the edges of empathetic realism and strident satire at the same time."

Dear George and Other Stories, Simpson's second collection of stories, features young women at odds with themselves, their mates, and often the world at large. This collection "is wonderfully caustic and sensual," according to a reviewer for Books, "displaying a boldness that only [Simpson] can get away with." And as in the earlier work, critics noted that the issue of children appears more than once. In "To Her Unready Boyfriend," a woman pressed for time by the ticking of her biological clock confronts her boyfriend in what Vaux called "a Marvellian exercise in persuasion." In the title story the reader is privy to a school girl's insights into Shakespeare, the topic of an assigned essay she is writing, and to her letters to George, a boy she has a crush on. The stories inspired Vaux to write, "There is a lot that is wayward and unpredictable about the stories here…. Simpson's ear and eye are gleefully alert, and there is something exuberant and charged in the detail." Spectator contributor Charlotte Raven complained that Simpson's forays into the realm of fantasy lacked the imaginative humor of her more realistic pieces, and found Dear George and Other Stories to be less successful than Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, but a reviewer for Books magazine concluded: "As she populates her stories with characters who often spend their time philosophizing about everyday insecurities in an extremely likeable and believable way, it's impossible to read [Simpson] without feeling uniquely satisfied."

Simpson is a writer whose main subject has been described as the plight of the generation of women charged with achieving the goals won by the feminist revolution, such as success in their careers and in their relationships. The resulting scenarios are enlivened by what Ciresi called "Simpson's slick and funny prose," and have won awards and praise for the wicked humor and psychological acuity of the author's new versions of "age-old problems." While Simpson is sometimes accused of wandering too far into the realm of farcical fantasy, her most critically successful stories achieve effects both comic and horrific in their depiction of the lives of modern working-class women.

Simpson continued in the same vein with her third collection, known in England as Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and in the United States as Getting a Life. This book focuses on suburban mothers taking care of their children. Various characters, settings, and events appear and reappear among the stories. In "Café Society" two mothers confide while trying to keep under control a hyperactive youngster, and in "Hurrah for the Hols" a mother on the beach has had enough of demanding children and snaps at them sarcastically. In "Wurstigkeit" two women elude their family lives by shopping at a store so exclusive that it requires a secret password to enter. As in her other works, Simpson blends humor with emotional honesty, creating a "wise, gentle collection," to quote Lisa Allardice of New Statesman and Society. "All these stories are funny, even when their comedy is grotesque, grim or straight from the gallows," remarked a Guardian critic, who added, "Simpson also prevents her unfaltering lament from turning into the dirge of self-pity by her exceptionally perceptive writing and her gift for the arresting image." The stories, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, are "sharped-tongued and merciless." In the words of Newsweek contributor Jeff Giles: "It's exciting to see a fiction writer reclaim territory often left to sociologists—especially a fiction writer who can be both acidic and tender, who can, at her best, deliver some pretty serious shocks of recognition."

Jay McInerney stated in New York Times Book Review that Getting a Life is both comic and "frighteningly unsentimental about middle-class … family life." McInerney added that "Burns and the Bankers," in which a corporate banker and mother attends a hilariously dreadful mandatory celebration of the life of poet Robert Burns, "is a tour de force, one of the funniest and most ambitious stories I've read in years." Citing Simpson's "playful stylistic facility and her acute powers of observation and characterization," McInerney ventured that Getting a Life would cement Simpson's reputation in the United States. The book was equally admired in Britain, where Trev Broughton wrote in Times Literary Supplement that "Simpson's depiction of the maternal psyche in extremis is almost clinically discerning," adding that the stories impress "precisely because they allow the reader to share with their protagonists the tenderness that underpins the resentment, to see beyond the chronic fatigue and the bad-tempered coping, and to ‘savour the deep romance and boredom’ of childcare. Simpson's faithfulness to that daunting equation is a rare and beautiful feat."

Simpson's next offering, Constitutional, is a collection of nine short stories depicting everyday English life across a variety of walks of life, including well-off mothers with au pairs to help in the care of their children; women talking about their lives with their friends, confessing their fears and hopes; and women in need of reminders regarding how to help care for the environment. Jane Gardam, in a review for Spectator, dubbed the work's title story its best, calling it "a first-rate portrait and the only story in the collection to cut as deep as Helen Simpson can." Amanda Craig, reviewing for New Statesman, remarked that the collection is an "unfailingly sympathetic meditation on how we confront the fixed laws of nature. As such, it is both bracing and essential."

In the Driver's Seat: Stories is a collection that addresses the various issues commonly faced in middle-class British families as they go about their lives, rais- ing children, going to work, and getting older. A few stories are repeats from her earlier book, including the title story, "Constitutional." In a review for the New York Times Book Review, Maile Meloy observed that, in comparison to Simpson's earlier stories, "child-rearing is still a marathon of compromise and exhaustion—and now illness, as her characters get older." She concludes of the volume that "if it seems rushed and uneven … the good moments, sometimes achingly perfect, make up for the rest."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books, summer, 1995, review of Dear George and Other Stories, p. 14.

Guardian, October 7, 2000, review of Hey Yeah Right Get a Life.

Library Journal, January, 1992, Rita Ciresi, review of Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, p. 181.

New Statesman, December 12, 2005, Amanda Craig, "Winter's Tales," p. 51.

New Statesman and Society, June 25, 2001, Lisa Allardice, review of Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, p. 56.

Newsweek, June 25, 2001, Jeff Giles, review of Getting a Life, p. 91.

New York Times, June 12, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "Women Stretched Thin in the ‘Vanity-Free Zone,’" p. E7.

New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1992, Richard Burgin, review of Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, p. 23; June 17, 2001, Jay McInerney, review of Getting a Life, p. 8; May 20, 2007, Maile Meloy, "Domestic Disturbances," p. 11.

Publishers Weekly, November 22, 1991, review of Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, p. 38; May 28, 2001, review of Getting a Life, p. 46.

Spectator, August 12, 1995, review of Dear George and Other Stories, pp. 31-32; January 7, 2006, Jane Gardam, "A Painful, Wonderful World," p. 30.

Times Literary Supplement, July 13, 1990, review of Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, p. 746; June 9, 1995, Anna Vaux, review of Dear George and Other Stories, p. 27; October 13, 2000, Trev Broughton, review of Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, p. 23.

Women's Review of Books, September, 2001, Rebecca Steinitz, review of Getting a Life, p. 19.