An Abduction

Tessa Jane Nichols was born in Bristol in 1956 and studied English at Clare College, Cambridge. She taught school briefly before marrying Eric Hadley, a professor and playwright, and starting a family. She wrote several novels and children’s books during this period without finding a publisher. In 1994 she received an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and in 1998 she completed a PhD at the University of the West of England with a thesis on Henry James. Her first novel, Accidents in the Home, was published in 2002. Since then she has published seven more novels, four short story collections for adults, and, with her husband, two short story collections for children, as well as a critical study of Henry James. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Welsh Academy. In 2016 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

“An Abduction” takes place in Surrey, England, in the 1960s, in an upper-middle-class social milieu. The “Swinging Sixties,” as the decade became known, were a transformative time in England. The British economy had recovered after years of post-war austerity, the British empire was crumbling as more and more colonies sought independence, and postcolonial immigration into England was beginning to accelerate. London was a center of music, art, fashion, and a hedonistic youth culture; the birth control pill had just become available. This broader social context is relevant to the story mostly because of how distant it feels. The Allsop family holds conservative social values and, living outside of London, has little connection to the cultural explosion happening in the city. Jane’s prim and proper belief system is challenged by the older boys—Oxford students—who have a casual approach to sex and drugs, like many rebellious young people in the 1960s. Her conservatism strikes them as amusing and quaint because of how much it contrasts with the “swinging” energy of the cultural moment.

Tessa Hadley is known for her psychologically acute fiction about ordinary, middle class British women. She has written many short stories, often dealing with the same main themes as “An Abduction”: relationships, family, memory, coming-of-age, and sex. “An Abduction” was published in Bad Dreams and Other Stories, one of four collections Hadley has written. Her first novel, Accidents in the Home, focuses on a woman in her 30s who is reminded of a teenaged sexual encounter when the boy resurfaces as her friend’s new partner, much as Jane Allsop never forgets her encounter with Daniel. Hadley has been compared to the Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro by Anne Enright, an Irish novelist who won the 2007 Booker Prize. In an essay for The Guardian in 2007, Enright wrote that Hadley and Munro “both write long, realistic short stories that are disrupted by sex and interested in time; both are fascinated by the road not taken.” Munro’s collections Boys and Girls and Lives of Girls and Women are natural comparisons. Hadley has also been compared to the British novelist Barbara Trapido, author of Brother of the More Famous Jack. There are also structural similarities between “An Abduction” and Joyce Carol Oates’s darker short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, which also focuses on a teenage girl approached by strangers.