Playing the Seraphine 
Frank Kermode
This is a collection of eight stories, the oldest first published in 1975, the most recent in 1999; so they punctuate the entire, brief career of a writer who never yielded to the temptation to go on until there seemed to be nothing more to say. Her novels are exactly long enough. They accommodate her unique ability to imagine and record all the necessary authenticating detail of her settings: Cambridge before the Great War, Germany in the time of Goethe and Novalis, Pre-Revolutionary Moscow. The achievements of the novelist betoken a wonderfully economical habit, but perhaps the trick is more difficult to bring off in the even more limited space of the short story; and it is true that not all of the tales in this collection have the fineness and fullness of the novels, though some of them have a touch of the same quiet power to astonish.
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Frank Kermode’s most recent book is The Age of Shakespeare. He lives in Cambridge.
Other articles by this contributor:
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
First Pitch · Marianne Moore
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
At Tate Britain · William Blake
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