1‘Creating a moment, a scene, a living world, that lets the reader experience and understand. That is what and all I do’ (Hall 2022, 1). Sarah Hall explains in the foreword of Alexander Beaumont and Elke D’hoker’s edited volume entitled Sarah Hall: Critical Essays published in 2022. This quotation encapsulates the author’s ethos and poetics. In Sarah Hall’s writings, the reader is made to experience what the protagonists are going through and the matter lands and bodies are made of. Such topics are discussed at length in this volume, which is the result of a conference that took place at the University of Leuven in Belgium in May 2018, which was—and still is, to this date—the only event of that kind solely dedicated to Sarah Hall. She attended the conference, rewarded the attendees with a reading of her short story ‘Sudden Traveller’ and contributed to the volume by writing the foreword. This is the first monographic volume dedicated to Sarah Hall’s oeuvre and as such, it is a fundamental body of work for anyone interested in her writing and contemporary British literature as a whole. As Alexander Beaumont and Elke D’hoker explain in their introduction, scholarly engagement with her work has taken some time to develop, an issue they link to the waywardness of her work and its refusal to abide by the trends of later twentieth-century literature (7). Though it borrows elements from postmodernist, modernist, realist or feminist writing, her work does not easily fit into one or several of these categories. This book focuses on the author’s complete works, bearing in mind that the conference predates the publication of her latest novel, Burntcoat. The volume is divided into eight essays, constituting eight chapters. This work is structured so as to start by tackling the representation of animals and their relation to the human subject. Starting with the biological dimension of Hall’s work then allows the volume to continue its foray into her work by exploring the political dimension of such representations. Finally, the volume continues by dealing with issues of spatialization and the socio-political aspect of land representation, before ending on a study of Hall’s material imagination, echoing the first essay and rounding up the whole body of work.

2According to Melanie Ebdon, whose essay ‘Real Nature’ introduces this collection and spans Sarah Hall’s work in its entirety, her short and long fiction asks the following question: ‘what, exactly, are we and how do we fit in this world around us?’ (Ebdon 31). More specifically, she focuses her argument on the representation of a biological continuum between human being and the human animal. Such a continuum stems from Hall’s recalibration of the distinction between nature and culture as the symptom of a move from postmodernism to ecocentrism. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s redefinition of nature and Michel Serres’s conceptualisation of ‘genotypic memory’, Melanie Ebdon explains that Hall pushes against the myth of human individualism to recast human identity as plural and interconnected. Such a redefinition of human identity raises the question of the kinds of interconnections woven between human and non-human animals. Similary, drawing on Haraway’s ‘being-in-relation-to-one-another’, Elke D’hoker’s essay on ‘Vital Animals in Nietzsche, Garnett and Hall’ argues that Hall advocates for a form of co-relationality in her short fiction, which produces fable-like narratives (D’hoker 56). By comparing the metamorphosis in ‘Mrs Fox’ and David Garnett’s ‘Lady into Fox’ (1922), the short story that inspired Hall’s, Elke D’hoker reminds us that proximity and affinity with animals is located in the body. This allows Hall to explore the dark side of our animal natures and to establish a human-animal continuum. However, drawing on Nietzsche’s philosophy of ‘animal forgetfulness’ and gift-giving, D’hoker argues that Hall’s representation of non-human animals is not all-encompassing, and highlights what distinguishes us from other animals. Hall’s interest in the biology of human life precisely constitutes the main topic of the third essay by Natalie Riley, ‘Homo Sapiens: Being Human in How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border’, which analyses still life realism in How to Paint a Dead Man and evolutionary erotics in The Wolf Border. Natalie Riley focuses on the thematics of death and reproduction, thereby echoing Hall’s edited short story collection, entitled Sex and Death. Firstly, still life, both as a symbolic depiction and as a creative process embodied in artist characters, acts as a discomforting reminder of the eventual corruption of the human body and as a means of understanding ‘bodily agency rooted in an appreciation of the complex biological processes of the body’ (84). Secondly, Riley argues that The Wolf Border showcases unsentimental, biological materialism through which reproduction is shown as ‘a fundamental organising principle of life’ (Riley 78) complicated by its actual embodied experience.

3In addition to its biological and material conception, reproduction is also part of social and political debates regarding welfare. In his essay ‘Rewilding Welfare. Sarah Hall and the State of Nature’, Pieter Vermeulen goes through Hall’s depictions of the welfare policies. He also attends to her shift from hesitant appreciation of the role of institutions to her more positive appraisal of state intervention. Vermeulen argues that The Electric Michelangelo and The Carhullan Army showcase violent systems of care, from hospitals in the first to the humiliation birth control inflicts in the latter, while Haweswater and How to Paint a Dead Man highlight that real life is lived outside supervisory organizations, in the wild (Vermeulen 101). However, an analogy is drawn between natural and human life management, between Hobbe’s state of nature and capitalism to demonstrate how The Wolf Border displays a novel appreciation of the welfare state. The integrity of the nation itself is the main topic of Chloe Ashbridge’s essay, ‘Post-British Politics and Sarah Hall’s North’, in which she reads Hall’s novels Haweswater, The Carhullan Army and The Wolf Border in light of the ‘state-of-the-nation’ novelistic tradition. She demonstrates how Hall has moved from a politically inoperative North in Haweswater to recognising the devolutionary potential of a regional voice in The Wolf Border (Ashbridge 123). Drawing on Gifford’s theorisation of post-pastoralism, Ashbridge outlines the link between the pastoral idyll and representations of Englishness. The political tone of Hall’s prose can be read as a disruption of the pastoral mode and reflects deeply entrenched social and political barriers to a post-British England and a political urgency for change. Space and more precisely spatialisation is central to Emilie Walezak’s essay, ‘Borderlands: Spatializing Feminist Struggle in Sarah Hall’s Fiction.’ Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s nomenclature of ‘conceived space’, ‘lived space’ and ‘perceived space’, Walezak details each type of space through the literary analysis of Haweswater, The Carhullan Army and The Wolf Border. According to her, Hall draws a parallel between regional and family planning, thereby displaying a feminist environmental understanding of state policies. Walezak argues that Hall’s fiction is ecofeminist in paralleling land issues and female bodily issues thereby developing a pragmatic model of female empowerment (Walezak 163).

4Though Sarah Hall’s oeuvre usually takes place in the North of England, where she originates from, How to Paint a Dead Man sets Italy as a counterpart to the Lake District. In her essay, ‘La Fiaba Oscura: Narrating Italy in How to Paint a Dead Man’, Francesca Pierini explores the representation of Italy in the novel as the traditional locus of a pre-modern romanticised lifestyle. Using Jean Piaget’s terminology of ‘cognitive development’, she analyses the four narrative threads of the novel to explain how they display the development of human consciousness towards an acquired simplicity of perspective, with Annette as a starting point and Giorgio as an endpoint, which allows Hall to make a creative use of an inherited taxonomy of cultural values about the divide between the North and the South of Europe (Pierini 174). This interest in location and situatedness is further explained in material terms in the concluding essay of this volume, ‘Sarah Hall’s Material Imagination’, Alexander Beaumont traces an overall interest in Hall’s poetics with the disobedience of matter, that Jane Bennetts terms the ‘recalcitrance of things’ (Bennett 1). Such recalcitrance Beaumont argues, allows Hall to use language as a means of depiction that resists the deadening tendency of representation to capture, clarify and categorise (Beaumont 217). It is a fitting conclusion to summarize Hall’s oeuvre as disobedience is at the core of most of her novels and short stories and is distributed along a far-reaching scale of animate and inanimate matter.

5Beaumont and D’hoker’s edited volume offers an invaluable in-depth analysis of Hall’s poetics. One extremely commendable aspect of this volume lies in its interest in less widely known fiction by the author. Apart from ‘Mrs Fox’, many of her short stories have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. This collection of essays rectifies this shortcoming by offering an in-depth analysis of some of Hall’s other short stories, such as ‘She Murdered Mortal He’ (D’hoker), ‘Later, His Ghost’ (Ebdon), or ‘The Agency’ (D’hoker). What is more, this volume explores a rich variety of themes and poetics that not only characterize Hall’s writing but also contribute to contemporary scholarship on British literature. In the foreword of this volume, Sarah Hall explains that ‘she cannot register all that passes through [her] in fiction’ (Hall 2022, 1). This volume certainly unravels parts of that mystery while leaving room for further explorations.