Helen Simpson, born in 1959, and Ali Smith, born three years later, were beneficiaries of the Education Act 1962, which funded undergraduate tuition fees and living costs. Neither writer’s parents had gone to university; both followed English BAs with doctoral study at Oxbridge. “I think there was a window at that time for people from my background,” Simpson has said; shutting that window, Smith recently told this magazine, is the act of an “idiot generation”.
In both writers’ work there is dismay at the loss of the postwar consensus that nurtured their aspirations. Smith’s most recent book, Public library and other stories, intercuts 16 typically freewheeling short fictions with statements from writer friends and the greater public on why England’s libraries should remain open despite council cuts. In “Kentish Town” – a story in Simpson’s latest collection, Cockfosters – four women put the world to rights at their book group, arguing for a living wage and proper taxation; they are reading Dickens, who wanted us (as one of the women puts it) to “start minding”.
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