SOURCE: “Awfully Small Adventures,” in Times Literary Supplement, January 6, 1995, p. 20.

In the following review, Clark offers tempered evaluation of Bainbridge's Collected Stories.

Beryl Bainbridge is a prolific and highly accomplished writer, not simply in terms of the volume of her output—she has fourteen novels and five television plays to her credit—but also because of the range of ideas it displays. She seems capable of pressing her distinctive style into the service of the most inspired of plot structures, but is not entirely keen on the short story as a vehicle for her ingenuity. We know this because in a piece in this collection, entitled “How I Began,” she reflects on how she embarked, at the age of thirteen, on her novella Filthy Lucre: “It seemed to me, even then, that a short story was a waste of a good idea.” She remains unconvinced, explaining that this...