Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley: review Lives which are unsophisticated yet experienced intensely, and gorgeously erudite prose are the distinguishing features of Tessa Hadley's writing. In this, her fourth novel, she uses the first-person narrative to cover 40 years in the life of Stella, the "clever girl" of the title, that reflect the turbulent last decades of the 20th century. We first encounter her in 1966, aged 10, a lonely, inquisitive only child, living with her mother in rented rooms in a ramshackle Bristol house, hoarding treasures from old bomb-sites, tiptoeing around the grown-ups. Her father is dead, apparently, although from her mother's evasiveness Stella suspects he simply absconded. An indiscriminate reader, she gulps information ravenously; her most intimate moments are those spent wordlessly, grooming and riding horses at a local stables. As the uptight control of the Sixties is relinquished to the new freedoms and polarised political stances of the Seventies, Stella, now tussling with a micromanaging stepfather and relocation to a new estate, wins a scholarship to a prestigious school. She appears set for university until a relationship with the sexually ambiguous, dope-smoking Valentine leads to teenage pregnancy. By her early twenties she has another son, by a different father, who dies in traumatic circumstances just before the child's birth. Diffident, easily distracted, she is always on the periphery of tumultuous events. She hangs around with art students, and tries communal living. Sometime in the mid-Seventies she takes driving lessons from a man who is possibly her unknown father. An obligatory-seeming affair in the Eighties with a married businessman, when Stella is employed by an art gallery selling works of dubious quality with overinflated prices - a comment on that period's boom and bust - leads eventually to personal stability and prosperity. Even the postponed university is achieved, devoured, then cast aside. It's a jumble, but the framework is there: Hadley's lament for the homogenising of natural resources and pleasures, her insistence on what Virginia Woolf described as "moments of being," and her unshowy recourse to literature as a signifier that "we're wedged tight to the accident of our moment in history."