Stan Barstow (1928–2011)
Author of A Kind of Loving
About the Author
Series
Works by Stan Barstow
In My Own Good Time: The Autobiography of the Author of "A Kind of Loving" (2001) 2 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
The Amateur: and Other Modern Stories (English Language Learning: Reading Scheme) (1979) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Barstow, Stan
- Legal name
- Barstow, Stanley
- Birthdate
- 1928-06-28
- Date of death
- 2011-08-01
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- writer
drafts person - Awards and honors
- honorary Master of Arts, Open University
Fellow of Academi, Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency - Relationships
- Griffiths, Diana
- Short biography
- Stan Barstow was born in 1928 in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father was a coal miner, and he was the only son.
He attended Ossett Grammar School, and left at sixteen to join a local engineering firm, working in the drawing office. Seven years later, he moved to a similar position in another firm, and from there moved into the sales department.
He started writing in the fifties, and had some short stories broadcast by the BBC. His first published work (as Stanley Barstow) was the short story The Search for Tommy Flynn in number 8 of the Putnam series of books Pick of Today's Short Stories in 1957. (This story was reprinted in The Desperadoes in 1962.)
An unpublished novel in 1956 was followed by A Kind of Loving in 1960. This was a major success, and was made into a film starring Alan Bates and June Ritchie. Since then he has been a full time writer, and has written eleven novels and three books of short stories. He has also written TV scripts and for the radio and theatre.
His books have been translated into several languages, and are widely read in schools.
He is an honorary Master of Arts of the Open University, and also a Fellow of Academi (the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency).
He was married for thirty-nine years, and has two children. He has lived for most of his life in his native Yorkshire, but has recently moved to South Wales. His latest book is his autobiography, In My Own Good Time, which was published in October 2001. - Nationality
- England
UK - Birthplace
- Horbury, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Ossett, West Yorkshire, England, UK
Pontardawe, Wales, UK - Place of death
- Baglan, Neath Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, Wales
- Associated Place (for map)
- UK
Members
Reviews
Vic Brown, the son of a coal miner in Yorkshire, is slowly inching his way up from his working-class roots through a white-collar job as a draughtsman in a local engineering company. Vic begins to date Ingrid, a typist at the same engineering company, but when Ingrid falls pregnant on the only occasion that they go 'all the way', Vic finds himself trapped into marrying her and moving in with his controlling mother-in-law, a woman who takes an instant dislike to him.
Many readers will show more undoubtedly regard Vic as a sort of anti-hero but I think that this is being simplistic. Vic is generally sincere, decent and moralistic despite his obvious natural flaws – age, inexperience, lust. Vic makes mistakes; huge mistakes but they aren't malicious or premeditated. Here is a young man with his whole life ahead of him who manages to impregnate his girlfriend at their first tumble. This novel is of course, very much of its time, and Vic, has to do the right thing morally, despite knowing that he doesn’t love Ingrid.
Ultimately I felt frustrated, but couldn’t help but like him. Ingrid naturally inspired sympathy, but her refusal to stand up to her appalling mother also infuriated me. In contrast Ingrid's dad seemed such a thoroughly reasonable, sensitive and decent chap that it seems little surprise that he preferred to work away.
This is a novel that defines a whole generation in a very specific part of England, but the plot is also universal, a tale of unforeseen outcomes to certain actions. We realise that the Vic Browns and the Ingrid Rothwells of the world live all around us. The dialogue is real and gritty but despite not liking to set the norms of today against the standards of yesterday I found the constant referrals to women as 'bints', 'birds' and 'lasses' very uncomfortable reading and marked it down accordingly. show less
Many readers will show more undoubtedly regard Vic as a sort of anti-hero but I think that this is being simplistic. Vic is generally sincere, decent and moralistic despite his obvious natural flaws – age, inexperience, lust. Vic makes mistakes; huge mistakes but they aren't malicious or premeditated. Here is a young man with his whole life ahead of him who manages to impregnate his girlfriend at their first tumble. This novel is of course, very much of its time, and Vic, has to do the right thing morally, despite knowing that he doesn’t love Ingrid.
Ultimately I felt frustrated, but couldn’t help but like him. Ingrid naturally inspired sympathy, but her refusal to stand up to her appalling mother also infuriated me. In contrast Ingrid's dad seemed such a thoroughly reasonable, sensitive and decent chap that it seems little surprise that he preferred to work away.
This is a novel that defines a whole generation in a very specific part of England, but the plot is also universal, a tale of unforeseen outcomes to certain actions. We realise that the Vic Browns and the Ingrid Rothwells of the world live all around us. The dialogue is real and gritty but despite not liking to set the norms of today against the standards of yesterday I found the constant referrals to women as 'bints', 'birds' and 'lasses' very uncomfortable reading and marked it down accordingly. show less
There is a positive way of reviewing this iconic sixties novel - which has been used as a set text in schools! - and a negative, the latter summed up in two words: Vic Brown. Seriously, I love the sixties, and I am not one for whitewashing history ('Oh, that's so sexist/racist/generally inappropriate to my delicate modern sensibilities'), but Stan Barstow's narrator is a vowel-displaced twit. Is the reader supposed to care about him, or - God forbid - sympathise with his plight? 'O woe is show more me, I got my girlfriend pregnant because I was only using her for sex, and now I have to marry her and my life is over!' He is just thoroughly obnoxious, calling women 'bints' and spouting ignorant views left, right and centre ('It gives you kind of a shock to see people like him [a homeless man] about these days and you can only think it's their fault'). I know Vic is only twenty and raised in a northern town in the 1950s, but I seriously wanted to smack him and his thick wavy hair and good suits into next week.
Which is also the positive aspect of this novel - unflinching honesty. Vic is not a hero, he's a git, and his unpleasantness is not fiction but reality. Poor trusting Ingrid and strong matriarchs like Mrs Brown and Mrs Rothwell are equally identifiable if unlikeable. And even Vic is 'not a bad lad', as his sister Chris insists - he respects his working class father while aiming to better himself, first with an engineering firm and then looking to take over the reins of a popular record shop, enjoys reading and hopes to find a loving relationship like his newly married sister. He just spouts a load of tripe and adopts a truly condescending attitude to women - when he finally gets what he wants from typist Ingrid, he treats her like trash. Ugh, men!
A Kind of Loving is actually the first of a trilogy, which might explain why we never find out about Mr Hassop's home life - but I really, really don't want to spend any more time with Vic. show less
Which is also the positive aspect of this novel - unflinching honesty. Vic is not a hero, he's a git, and his unpleasantness is not fiction but reality. Poor trusting Ingrid and strong matriarchs like Mrs Brown and Mrs Rothwell are equally identifiable if unlikeable. And even Vic is 'not a bad lad', as his sister Chris insists - he respects his working class father while aiming to better himself, first with an engineering firm and then looking to take over the reins of a popular record shop, enjoys reading and hopes to find a loving relationship like his newly married sister. He just spouts a load of tripe and adopts a truly condescending attitude to women - when he finally gets what he wants from typist Ingrid, he treats her like trash. Ugh, men!
A Kind of Loving is actually the first of a trilogy, which might explain why we never find out about Mr Hassop's home life - but I really, really don't want to spend any more time with Vic. show less
Stan Barstow's A KIND OF LOVING (1960) has never been out of print, so that's 62 years now, and that's saying something. I ordered it after seeing a note in the TV listings last month about the 1962 film adaptation that starred Alan Bates. It sounded vaguely familiar, and I may have seen the movie at an army theater in northern Turkey all those years ago.
It's a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A kind of "hardboiled," one-sided love story, narrated by 20 year-old Vic Brown, a mechanical show more draftsman with a small engineering firm in northern England in the 1950s, still living at home with his parents and a younger brother. (His older sister is newly married.) His dad is a miner, now a foreman, who has spent some forty years 'down the pit.' Vic falls for Ingrid, A pretty typist at his company, and they begin dating, and engage in casual sex over several months, always stopping short of "going all the way." Until finally they do, and guess what? Yup. And Vic has to marry her, even though he's long known he doesn't love her, because it was the fifties, and that's what you did when got a girl pregnant. And, since there wasn't much money, they moved into her parents' house. Ingrid's dad is a salesman, on the road most of the time, but he and Vic get along well. Her mother, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.
So it's this domestic drama, I guess you'd call it, all about the sexual mores of the times, and how the upwardly mobile lower middle class of England lived, how they struggled towards a better life. Vic is not the most admirable character in the way he uses Ingrid, who really does love him, but he has this dream of finding a girl who would have interests that would more closely match his own. I liked Vic's father, Arthur, and Ingrid's old man too. The mother-in-law, however, is a horror. But I'm not gonna tell you the whole story, okay? You'll just have to read it yourself.
Other readers - and critics too - have compared Vic Brown to John Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, but I don't see that. True, they both feel trapped, but Vic doesn't run. He stays, if unhappily. And Barstow's style is nothing like Updike's. But there are two sequels to the Vic Brown story, just as there were sequels (three) to Updike's RABBIT, RUN. Maybe I'll follow up. Because I really did love this book. There is indeed, "a kind of loving" in it. Very very highly recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
It's a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A kind of "hardboiled," one-sided love story, narrated by 20 year-old Vic Brown, a mechanical show more draftsman with a small engineering firm in northern England in the 1950s, still living at home with his parents and a younger brother. (His older sister is newly married.) His dad is a miner, now a foreman, who has spent some forty years 'down the pit.' Vic falls for Ingrid, A pretty typist at his company, and they begin dating, and engage in casual sex over several months, always stopping short of "going all the way." Until finally they do, and guess what? Yup. And Vic has to marry her, even though he's long known he doesn't love her, because it was the fifties, and that's what you did when got a girl pregnant. And, since there wasn't much money, they moved into her parents' house. Ingrid's dad is a salesman, on the road most of the time, but he and Vic get along well. Her mother, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.
So it's this domestic drama, I guess you'd call it, all about the sexual mores of the times, and how the upwardly mobile lower middle class of England lived, how they struggled towards a better life. Vic is not the most admirable character in the way he uses Ingrid, who really does love him, but he has this dream of finding a girl who would have interests that would more closely match his own. I liked Vic's father, Arthur, and Ingrid's old man too. The mother-in-law, however, is a horror. But I'm not gonna tell you the whole story, okay? You'll just have to read it yourself.
Other readers - and critics too - have compared Vic Brown to John Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, but I don't see that. True, they both feel trapped, but Vic doesn't run. He stays, if unhappily. And Barstow's style is nothing like Updike's. But there are two sequels to the Vic Brown story, just as there were sequels (three) to Updike's RABBIT, RUN. Maybe I'll follow up. Because I really did love this book. There is indeed, "a kind of loving" in it. Very very highly recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
This is one of the first books of modern literary fiction I read and it resonates strongly with me for that reason. I was concerned that I would discover on re-reading that it is actually not that good and its place in my affections would be diminished. This didn't happen because it is a good book, if not a great book. It paints a very convincing picture of northern working class society in the late fifties, not yet much affected by the changes starting to sweep across the western world. It show more is a society rigidly adhering to its own conventions, almost reveling in the toughness of life. And it also explores a young man struggling to articulate what he wants out of life, discovering the difference between love, infatuation and desire, having to live with the consequences of his actions and, just maybe, learning that loving is as much about the will as the emotions. 20 January 2017 show less
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