This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The best place to see Izzy Hardcastle in action, as it were, is a publishers’ party or the memorial service for some grand literary eminence. She can be identified by her striking costume — something in bright green for the former; faultless black weeds for the latter — the celebrity of the people around her (the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, say, or a high-powered literary agent) and, above all, the relentless flow of her gossip.

On a good day, the latter, tantalising in the extreme and almost impossibly au fait, will go rather like this:

“ … Did you read Miranda’s last one? I thought it was a bit too unequivocally equivocal, if you know what I mean. They say Chatto only offered £10k to start with, but Bunty told them over her dead body … No, the reason it wasn’t shortlisted for the Booker was that Graham’s hated her since they were at Oxford … Well, that’s what Maggie told me when I saw her at Charleston the other week with … Salman? Well, he’s a great deal better, although it’ll be a long while before he … Actually, they had to pulp Alan’s Collected Poems in the end. I mean, I told him Sarah would sue if he put the one in about her having an affair with Ted Hughes …”

Several mysteries continue to hang over Izzy’s sleek, expensively dressed and corn-haired figure. The first is her age. However much of a girlish ingenue she may sometimes appear in conversation, it is a fact that she has been turning up at these kinds of gatherings for upwards of 20 years.

The second is: what ravens feed her? One or two old stagers precariously at large in the world of books since the end of the last century will sometimes maintain that she worked in the Weidenfeld marketing department, but no trace of these affiliations remains in her conversation, and she is known to make amusing remarks about “the dreadful publicity girls they employ these days”.

There has never been any sign of a Mr Hardcastle to underwrite what looks to be an extravagant lifestyle

To be sure, an occasional review can sometimes be found beneath her signature in the Spectator or The Times. The notices are invariably up-beat (“a wonderful novel, which I simply devoured”), oddly discursive and curiously reluctant to say very much about plot or resolution. There may once have been a work of fiction — indeed, the London Library catalogue contains an item entitled “The Torturous Travails of Titania Toogood” by an Isabel Hardcastle — but no one seems to have read it, and there has never been any sign of a successor, just as there has never been any sign of a Mr Hardcastle to underwrite what, on the surface, looks to be a fairly extravagant lifestyle.

Every now and again a gossip column-ist or a satirist will try to have a little fun at her expense, but it is never any good: Izzy is a popular girl, and editors invariably strike out the offending passages.

What will happen to her? Naturally, the world of publishing is an ever-moving stream, but there seems every chance that 20 years hence Izzy will still be found at the Sunday Times Christmas party, telling her vis-à-vis how the new Sally Rooney is coming along.