Discuss “The Quiet House”, by Tessa Hadley

[We meet every Sunday after a new New Yorker magazine is published.]

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, February 1, 2025 at 4 pm CST/5 pm EST/3 pm MST/2 pm PST, on Zoom, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from the issue dated February 2, 2026: “The Quiet House”, by Tessa Hadley. Hadley is one of the most prolific of 21st century New Yorker Fiction writers.

1. Read “The Quiet House” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker's paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (38 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (40:05 with intro and ads).
3. The author interview, “Tessa Hadley on the Power of Memory”, is at this link.

[quoting]
Tessa Jane Hadley FRSL (born 28 February 1956; née Nichols) is a British author, who writes novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her writing is realistic and often focuses on family relationships. Her novels have twice reached the longlists of the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and in 2016 she won the Hawthornden Prize, as well as one of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes for fiction. The Windham-Campbell judges describe her as "one of English's finest contemporary writers" and state that her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful." As of 2016, she is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Biography
Tessa Hadley was born in Bristol in 1956. Her father Geoff Nichols was a teacher and amateur jazz trumpeter, and her mother Mary an amateur artist. Her father's brother is the playwright Peter Nichols. She gained a BA in English (1978) followed by a PGCE at Clare College, Cambridge, and briefly taught at a comprehensive school before starting a family. In 1982 she married Eric Hadley, a teacher, lecturer and playwright, and they moved to Cardiff, where Eric Hadley taught at Cardiff University and the University of Wales Institute. The couple have three sons together, as well as three stepsons. During this period, Hadley completed several novels but failed to find a publisher, and also co-authored two collections of short stories for children with her husband.

In 1993, when she was in her late thirties, Hadley studied for an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University College, which she was awarded in 1994, and gained a PhD at the University of the West of England in 1998; her PhD thesis is entitled "Pleasure and propriety in Henry James." She started to teach creative writing at Bath Spa University in 1997; as of 2016, she is professor of creative writing at the university. Her first published novel, Accidents in the Home, written while bringing up her family, appeared in 2002 when she was 46. Her continued study of the author Henry James has resulted in a book, as well as several research and conference papers. She researches and teaches on James and Jane Austen, as well as early 20th century novelists and short-story writers, especially women, including Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and is also a Fellow of The Welsh Academy. She is the chair of the New Welsh Review's editorial board. She has served as a judge for the International Dublin Literary Award (2011), BBC National Short Story Award (2011), O. Henry Prize for short stories (2015) and the Wellcome Book Prize (2016).

Fiction
As of 2022, Hadley has published eight novels, as well as three short-story collections for adults and (with Eric Hadley) two for children. Her novels are realistic, set in Britain between 1950 and the present day, often in cities outside London, and feature comfortably middle-class characters, with a focus on women. They often concentrate on family relationships, "the intricate tangle of marriage, divorce, lovers, close friends, children and stepchildren – the web people create for themselves." They are frequently praised for their prose style as well as their psychological insight; the judges of the Windham–Campbell Prize, which she won in 2016, state that her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful." Hadley has described plot or story as "part of the miracle of people and lives ... the abrupt swerves and changes that life produces," and some reviewers have criticised her novels for a lack of plot. The author Anne Enright compares Hadley's short stories to those of Alice Munro, calling them "two writers who would rather be wise than nice. They both write long, realistic short stories that are disrupted by sex and interested in time; both are fascinated by the road not taken. Each draws from a personal store, writing and rewriting variations of the same recurrent themes."
[end of quote]

• from Wikipedia English's Tessa_Hadley page , footnote marks and links removed.