I knew that, in comparison with Edmund, I had few assets of my own. This was one factor that seriously divided us. Sometimes I felt poor when I was with him, and this was a genuine shadow on my happiness.
The Rules of Engagement, ch. 4
She wonders, further, whether this aspect of the affair is apparent to him. Brookner, as author, might have similar concerns. It's easy to see all Brookner characters as well-heeled, comfortable, beyond money concerns. But there are subtleties, gradations, and Brookner is careful to trace them, urging the sympathetic reader to view the likes of Edmund as safely bourgeois and the narrator as faintly but certainly déclassée. In more than a few novels Brookner gives her protagonists real financial and property worries. Not that some critics would ever be persuaded her ostensible privilege, and that of her heroines and heroes, didn't disqualify her from their serious consideration.
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