Pat Barker - Early Work

Early Work

In her mid-twenties, Barker began to write fiction. Her first three novels were never published and, she told The Guardian in 2003, "didn't deserve to be: I was being a sensitive lady novelist, which is not what I am. There's an earthiness and bawdiness in my voice.”

Her first published novel was Union Street, which consisted of seven interlinked stories about English working class women whose lives are circumscribed by poverty and violence. For ten years, the manuscript was rejected by publishers as too “bleak and depressing.” Barker then met novelist Angela Carter at a writers' workshop. Carter liked the book, telling Barker “if they can't sympathise with the women you're creating, then sod their fucking luck,” and suggested she send the manuscript to feminist publisher Virago, who accepted it. Union Street was later made into a Hollywood film called Stanley and Iris, starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda, but Barker says the film bears little relationship to her book. The New Statesman hailed the novel as a "long overdue working class masterpiece," and the New York Times Book Review called it “first-rate, punchy and raunchy.” As of 2003, it remained one of Virago's top sellers.

Barker's first three novels — Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and Liza's England (1986; originally published as The Century's Daughter) - depicted the lives of working class women in Yorkshire, and are described by BookForum magazine as “full of feeling, violent and sordid, but never exploitative or sensationalistic and rarely sentimental." Blow Your House Down portrays prostitutes living in a North of England city, who are being stalked by a serial killer. Liza's England, described by the Sunday Times as a "modern-day masterpiece," tracks the life of a working-class woman born at the dawn of the 20th century.