This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Like “democratic” and “liberal”, “provincial” is one of those adjectives that long ago said goodbye to its original moorings and soared off into a linguistic free-for-all so contested that it can sometimes seem to have undergone a 180-degree turn.
In the world of light literature these ambiguities are sometimes baffling in their scope. When William Cooper, for example, published Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), a novel that, in some ways, set the tone for the whole Amis-Wain-Larkin “Movement” era, he was making a deliberate attempt to distance himself from some of the metropolitan sophisticates who had ruled the fictional roost in the previous twenty years.
When, on the other hand, Anthony Powell in his late-1980s Journals refers to Philip Larkin as a “provincial” he doesn’t mean it as a compliment. Larkin, according to the Powell scale of values, lacks something, and his falling short in cultural terms is somehow symbolised by his sequestration in East Yorkshire running the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull.
The Secret Author was reminded of the varying uses to which “provincial” can be put in the second quarter of the twenty-first century by a profile he read in a recent issue of the New Statesman written by its indefatigable culture editor Tanjil Rashid about Dominic Sandbrook and his newly-founded book club.
Critic readers will probably be familiar with young Dr Sandbrook’s works of British social history, not to mention the highly-rated podcast he conducts with his fellow historian Tom Holland.
What did the profile make of him? The general tone was approving, but the Secret Author was amused to notice that the sensibility Sandbrook was thought to bring to his interpretative tasks was — here we are again — “provincial”. A close reading suggested that this was a compliment since other critics to whom Sandbrook was compared included John Carey and Richard Hoggart.
A provincial critic, in this reading, was one who campaigns for fiction’s historical role and the help it offers in understanding the social arrangements of its time.
And here we were back with William Cooper, a convinced anti-modernist, fed up with the high-minded introspection of the literary 1930s, who declared in a polemical piece written some years after Scenes from Provincial Life hit the racks, that he had had enough of novelists who burned to write about “man alone” and had more time for people who wanted to address “man in society”.
John Carey would have said the same. In his analysis, as outlined in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), Arnold Bennett is a better novelist than Virginia Woolf because Bennett is interested in ordinary people and the lives they lead, whereas Woolf is only interested in herself.
Woolf, it should be pointed out, on several occasions in her diaries more or less concedes this stricture, and admits that writing is mostly subjective. Her essays, too, as many a critic has pointed out, are circular flights in which a great deal of incidental observation leads the reader back to, well, the spectacle of the essayist at work.
But bracing as these deductions are, they are not, in the end, a validation of the provincial critic. After all, the novelist’s primary task is not to provide footnotes for social historians. In some ways, the mark of a writer’s obsolescence is their appearance in works of history rather than literature primers.
Sandbrook’s work on post-war Britain, for example, is stuffed with references to the novels of Angus Wilson — a writer whom nobody these days reads.
Similarly, there are writers who manage to convey the psychological flavour of the age they inhabit (Kafka, Camus, Tabucchi) whilst producing novels that have no basis at all in conventionally framed “realism”. Meanwhile, it is tempting to treat the “provincial” debate in straightforwardly geographical terms.
One of the first volumes of collected book reviews — a now defunct genre — that the Secret Author ever set eyes on was Clive James’ The Metropolitan Critic (1974).
It was a seductive work — switched-on, modish, knowing — and its general effect was to suggest that nearly all of what made up the entity known as British Literature was written, produced and appraised within the confines of the Circle Line.
Fifty years later, not much has changed. Naturally modern technology allows a writer to practise his, or her, art wherever they like, whereas the bygone writer had to live in London merely to keep in touch with his sponsors.
But the contemporary literary bourse is still hopelessly biased in favour of the metropolis — a place which, it might be argued, bears almost no relation to the Britain that exists beyond it and is hopelessly unrepresentative of national life as a whole.
Publishers sometimes attempt to buck this trend — see HarperCollins North, which operates out of Manchester — but you could jog past most of the great UK publishing hubs in the space of an hour. As well as more provincial critics we also need more provincial publishers. London be hanged: most of what happens in Britain is a matter of scenes from provincial life.
