Novelists’ careers take different paths, and sometimes don’t look much like careers at all. It’s true that some start publishing between 25 and 35, and write a novel respectably every two or three years until they die, like Kingsley Amis. Others don’t start until they are 60, like Penelope Fitzgerald, or stop abruptly without warning, like Henry Green, or write one novel and no more, like Harper Lee. Inspiration, or interest, comes and goes, and both the audience and the industry will have their wilful way with creativity. The ultimate aim of a novel, to be read with pleasure decades after its creator’s death, is reached in tortuous ways. Who in the 1960s would have thought that by the 21st century one of the most admired American novelists would be John Edward Williams, the author of Stoner — or put money on Barbara Pym having any claim on posterity? A cup of tea is poured; a character wonders ‘why Father Ransome couldn’t live at the clergy house’; a spinster chooses a rather too daring shade of lipstick for herself (‘Thank you, but I think I will have Hawaiian Fire’); love is shyly offered, and not returned.