1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner.
A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different reasons, moves through a forest in Germany, experiencing everything from dusk to dawn, with a tempest in between.
The chapter is satirised in Forster's Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast, visiting the Schlegel sisters, expresses his admiration for Meredith's novel and describes his own emulation of Richard Feverel's night walk. The Schlegels are less enamoured. They know the novel, but find it laughable. They mock, for example, the glimmeringly drooping forest. Such different reactions to a nineteenth-century masterpiece place the characters socially. The sisters, arty and upper middle class, show a proto-Modernist disdain for the high Victorianism of Meredith. Poor Bast reads innocently. We might remember Virginia Woolf's essay on Arnold Bennett and suppose Leonard Bast also a reader of Bennett.
The connection between Frances's night walk in Look at Me and Richard's in Ordeal is that the latter novel is directly referenced in Brookner's. Throughout her oeuvre Brookner makes occasional allusions to particular novels, often European, but also Victorian - Trollope, say, or, here, George Meredith. I can imagine Brookner reading or rereading The Ordeal of Richard Feverel while she was working on Look at Me, the notion of a concluding night trek seeping consciously or unconsciously into her own writing.
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