A Talent for Living: Yiyun Li on Beryl Bainbridge’s ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’
Beryl Bainbridge; illustration by Gaby Wood. AFP/Getty Images.
By Yiyun Li
In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.
Originally published in The New York Review of Books in the Jan 15, 2026 issue.
“I play-act,” says Stella, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure (1989).
I always have. I mourn people in my head. I go to funerals and chuck earth. Sometimes I have to choose who I’m going to bury. I like to rehearse the bad things so that I’ll know how to behave when they really happen.
Stella makes this confession toward the end of the novel to P.L. O’Hara, an actor a generation her senior who has come to town to perform at the local repertory theater. She’s only recently lost her virginity to him, with “more than a touch of the martyr,” in the spirit of getting it over with, because another man has not returned her affection. There is no love in the lovemaking between the older man and the girl, nor predatory violence in the conventional sense. The horror lies in O’Hara’s tenderness and Stella’s bravado. They take each other as beings without a past or a future: two people trapped in the loneliness of the moment. The reader, just about to piece together the true extent of their doom, may feel the urge to gasp or cry.
Children are often encouraged to playact for developmental purposes, though adults mostly expect them to settle on a simple, wholesome script, whether they are pretending to be a firefighter, a doctor, a mermaid, or a superhero. Yet playacting can be dangerous, which no one captures better than the Brothers Grimm. In their collection is a tale called “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering.” A group of children, all five or six years old, gather for a game, with one child playing the butcher, another the cook, and a third the cook’s assistant. Together they slit the throat of the pig, played by a little boy, who dies. Is this a senseless murder or a game gone senselessly wrong? The town councilmen are baffled by the killing, and unsure whether the children deserve any sort of punishment.
“Senseless” is one of those words often used by people who prefer not to dwell on difficult topics and unanswerable questions. One of those questions, a recurrent subject for Bainbridge in her novels, is how much more fully and intensely children live in the world they create in their own minds than in the world outside. Stella, like the children in the Grimm tale, is innocent and yet equipped for transgression.
An Awfully Big Adventure is set in Liverpool around 1950, when the city was still under the long shadow cast by World War II: men and women walk around with visible and invisible scars; material comforts are scarce. Memory is the only possession many characters can claim. And claim it they do, bittersweet or purely bitter, inconvenient at times, often untrustworthy.
An ingenue and a siren in one, Stella has just left school and become an assistant stage manager at the theater, where the season’s highlight will be a production of Peter Pan. O’Hara is there to play Captain Hook. The book’s title—a case in which a quote from one work fits perfectly as the title of a new creation—comes from Peter Pan’s claim that “to die will be an awfully big adventure.”
After having sex with Stella, O’Hara philosophizes: “Life is full of conflagrations. We can never be sure when we’ll be consumed by the past.” That statement, prophetic, applies to nearly all the characters, many of whom have lived in the world of the theater and have been disappointed, injured, betrayed, or forgotten. But not Stella. Parentage unknown and raised by the diligently loving Uncle Vernon and his wife, Lily, Stella has only scraps of past and fragments of memory—not enough for even the smallest fire to warm up her cold hands. But children are among the most resourceful of species—how else could they survive childhood? Stella, “left to herself, might have conjured a blasted heath out of the darkness, an aircraft hangar, an operatic, book-furnished study in which Faustus could sell his soul to the Devil.” She is not a rememberer but a conjurer, grasping what she can get from a meager life and transforming the handful of trifles into an extravagant spectacle. Her talent for playacting is, in fact, a prodigious talent for living.
Two traits make Stella a remarkable and unforgettable character: her perception and her ability to articulate it. On being a recipient of many men’s pompous narratives, she ponders:
Every man she had ever met told tales of escape and heroism and immersion. They had gone down in submarines, stolen through frontiers disguised as postmen, limped home across the Channel on a wing and a prayer…. It was astonishing to Stella how fondly men remembered their darkest hours.
Commenting on a play featuring domestic strife, she observes, “It’s about nobody ever going away but always being just round the corner, waiting to be caught up with.” Parsing the difference between the outfits of a man and a woman, and what that difference might have to do with sexuality, she comes to an ingenious epiphany:
Trousers, she now realised, were so designed not because their wearers had funny legs but because men were constantly worried that an essential part of themselves might have gone missing.
Humor in Bainbridge’s work often walks hand in hand with horror. The observation about men’s concern for that “essential part of themselves” turns dark in the next line:
They wanted instant access, just to make sure things were in place. What was more puzzling was why they needed everyone else to check as well.
Several men in the novel have taken advantage of Stella in ways that suit them. Her dilemma is not that she doesn’t see why they do this to her, or that they have no right to do so, or that she should put up resistance or protest. She understands, but if betrayal and violence and abandonment happen to Shakespeare’s heroines, how can Stella stop them from happening to herself? The children who butchered the little boy might as well be among the most dedicated actors of a tragicomedy.
To die is an awfully big adventure, and so is to live. What sustains Stella’s spirit in this adventure is her faith in herself, not only as a great actor, but more importantly as an omniscient narrator. “None of us is that different from one another. We all have the same feelings,” she says to an older actress whose heart has been broken by a lover. And when a young man asks Stella if she ever has doubts, she states with confidence, “I never doubt myself. Only other people.” When O’Hara asks her if she enjoyed her first sexual experience, she admits, “Not really. I expect there is a knack to it. It’s very intimate, isn’t it?”
That last question must be one of the most devastating moments in literature. Stella’s perception is microscopically astute, her ability to articulate beyond her age. And yet her perception is bound to appear distorted to the world, her articulation full of nonsense. Children with great talents for living share this fate of injustice, which confronts children in Bainbridge’s other novels as well, along with the young characters of Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, Henry Green, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. They are not angelic children, and their innocence is the kind that does not comfort but disturbs and unsettles. Graham Greene’s observation that “innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it; innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm” is an apt summary of Stella’s existence. By the end of the novel, someone will break a leg (literally, just as he goes onstage); someone, botching a (half-hearted) suicide, will be expelled from the production of Neverland; and someone will die (always trust that a death happens at the end of a Bainbridge novel, and sometimes at the beginning, too). None of these adults knows enough to protect themselves from Stella. None of them, of course, ever protects her.
But I should revise that last statement. There is Uncle Vernon, a rare character of care and understanding, who has truly loved Stella. Recently, I watched the 1995 film adaptation of the novel, which features Hugh Grant as a comic villain and Alan Rickman as a tragic villain, and comes with a befittingly tantalizing scandal surrounding the actress playing Stella—Georgina Cates—who changed her name and hair color and pretended that she was younger than her actual age to audition for the part a second time, after she failed the first. A week later, I was walking down a street in Bloomsbury in London when someone familiar crossed paths with me. I nearly called out, “Uncle Vernon!” It was the actor Alun Armstrong, who played Uncle Vernon in the film thirty years ago. But what does time matter in this case? Peter Pan exists in a world outside of time, so does Stella, so does Uncle Vernon. (Even my urge to call out to him felt as though it had come not from me but rather from Stella.)
Beryl Bainbridge was born in 1934 and grew up in Liverpool—the Liverpool before the Beatles—and died in 2010. She published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and was short-listed for the Booker Prize five times. She never won, which earned her the epithet the Booker Bridesmaid. She lived a life full of emotional turmoil and conflict. Many of her personal stories became foundations for her novels: her experience of a claustrophobic family life (A Quiet Life, 1976), her adolescent relationship with a German POW (Harriet Said…, 1972), her experience of working as a child actor on the radio and onstage (An Awfully Big Adventure), her catastrophic romance with the Scottish writer Alan Sharp (Sweet William, 1975). No doubt other traumatic experiences—being raped as a young woman, being betrayed by those close to her in romantic affairs, a suicide attempt—also found their way into her novels. Those interested in her life can read a detailed and fully documented biography by Brendan King, who has corrected many of the stories Bainbridge told about herself in her interviews and nonfiction. It’s safe to say that Bainbridge’s facts were only precariously factual. Like many of her characters, she specialized in mythmaking and was a superb illusionist.
A dedicated reader of Bainbridge’s work may not feel the need to know whether she fabricated some of her life stories or whether she was a writer of autofiction before that genre became popular. A great novel exists on its own terms and deserves reading and rereading on its own terms. The terms, for me, for this novel, are expressed by Elizabeth Bowen in The Death of the Heart (1938). In that novel, Portia, an orphan with less flair than Stella but with an equal talent for living, may as well be her lost twin. They are the children whose minds are mirrors—loyal or distorting, who can tell—of the shabbiness of the grown-up world. But perhaps this applies to all those whose talent for living and feeling leads to a deeper pain—a timeless situation that renders the characters ageless. As Bowen puts it, “Everybody who suffers is the same age.”
This essay is adapted from the Foreword to a new edition of Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure, to be published by McNally Editions in March.
Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, Things in Nature Merely Grow. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton. (January 2026)