A Misalliance: Do not look to me to be Millie [sic] Theale

'I plan to become dangerous and subversive,' says Blanche in chapter 5 of A Misalliance, before (as she puts it) 'raving on about Henry James'.

'A silly girl,' says Blanche of Milly* Theale in The Wings of the Dove. 'She should have bought that rotter outright. What else is money for?'

And so Blanche continues to purchase the company of her own new acquaintances, Sally and her daughter. Quantities of ten-pound notes are placed under the lid of a chipped teapot in Sally's ruinous kitchen.

It is not the only time in Brookner that protagonists buy the time of others. One thinks of Elizabeth in 'At the Hairdresser's' or George Bland in A Private View. Each time the donation of funds is effected in clandestine ways, bringing analogous transactions into the mind of Brookner's knowing and fallen ideal reader.

Not that Blanche's wealth is really quite in the same ballpark as Milly Theale's. But Sally's former mythic existence is evoked in truly Gatsbyish terms: 'Morocco for breakfast, dinner in Venice': or, this being Brookner, in terms of the fêtes galantes of Watteau.

The Embarkation for Cythera, Louvre

* Brookner misspells the name. A rare slip.